Over the past couple of decades, technology has grown to become a vital component for every industry. As companies grow and scale, technology continues to be an important enabler in higher sales, better customer service, and cost optimization. Additionally as today's labor market continues to become more and more competitive, employees expect state-of-the-art technology to succeed at their jobs.
While IT continues to be vital for all organizations, it comes with a certain set of challenges and problems. Technology has and continues to change rapidly while also becoming more and more complex. Organizations often find difficult to keep up and manage. While IT problems can be complex and individualized, here are 5 of the most common technology problems companies face with their IT and infrastructure.
Cyber Attacks
Unfortunately cyber attacks are not limited to large-scale billion dollar companies. Instead, there continues to be an increasing risk for small businesses. While large enterprises are big fish and have a lot to offer hackers, they often have large IT budgets and cyber security teams dedicated to fighting off hackers and managing security risks.
Small to medium size businesses often do not have the resources or budget available to defend against cyber-attacks and cyber criminals use this knowledge to exploit smaller businesses. Ultimately ransomware, date theft, and downtime are just as financially painful and disruptive to business as they are to larger businesses.
SMB companies continue to make up a sizable portion of security breaches each year. The latest "Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report" reported that SMBs were 43% and 28% of cyber breach incidents reported in 2019 and 2020, respectively.
Backup and Disaster Recovery
Having reliable back up and disaster recovery technology is vital in the technology heavy world of today. While there are many different solutions on the market, many organizations don't understand the technical complexity and nuances of backup and disaster recovery software and services.
Data loss destroys employee work product as well as intellectual property, harms productivity, effects company reputation and can cause financial strife. A robust backup strategy and disaster recovery plan is vital for organizations.
Technical Support
An often overlooked aspect of growing SMBs is the level of tech support required by an organization. While many aspects of technology continue to improve for end users including high speed internet access, mobile technology, and SaaS software tools, technology conversely continues to become more complex.
As technology gets more complex and cybersecurity countermeasures get added into the mix, many employees may struggle to get through their workday without serious technical interruptions or challenges. Adequate technical support staff is important quickly solve problems and keep employees happy and productive. Businesses who have multiple shifts of employees may also need to think about after hours support so productivity is not slowed down or stopped due to technical issues after working hours of your IT staff.
Slow and Unreliable Networks
A high quality network is foundational to a company's success. As we see more integrated workplaces, companies must adjust by having a robust network able to handle voice, video conferencing, and a multitude of data applications. Voice-over-IP and video-based collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom have grown exponentially during the pandemic. Video-based collaboration is bandwidth-intensive and employees expect high-quality communications.
These networking challenges continue to expand as home offices become the norm for many employees. The large remote work shift due to the pandemic leads to employees at all levels now needing stable and reliable Wi-Fi for their home offices and secure networking to protect company data.
Regular Maintenance
Some of the most important aspects to securing the health and security of a company's technology infrastructure include maintenance and monitoring. Proactive maintenance and patching proves to be vital to prevent the exploitation of software vulnerability by cyber criminals, while regular software updates fix bugs and improve the performance of computing hardware and networking devices. Staying on top of these regular maintenance requires robust tools and automation.
Technology continues to bring a variety of challenges to SMBs. Outsourcing day-to-day technology management to an technology solutions provider, like MapleTronics is a great solution to help solve these issues. By relying on outside expertise, companies can cost-effectively manage their infrastructure while delivering a superior technology experience to their staff.
At MapleTronics we specialize in working with organization to create stable and secure networks through our managed IT and cybersecurity solutions. For more information contact us here.
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