How Small Businesses Can Get on Top of Their IT

26Q3-2Technology

Jun 17

One issue many businesses have time and time again is their IT services. It's how to manage it effectively and how to keep everything secure and safe. There are a few common issues people come up against when in regards to their IT, including cybersecurity, having an outdated infrastructure, the rise of hybrid working and the challenges it poses, alongside a lack of in-house IT knowledge as well as integration woes.

If any of these sound familiar and have you nodding your head, this article is going to look at how small businesses can keep on top of their IT so things don't go wrong.

Start with a Full Audit

You cannot fix anything if you don't know what is wrong or the current state of affairs with regard to your IT. A full IT audit gives you a clear picture of what you're working with across every single device, piece of software subscription, and system your business relies on.

Honestly, the results will likely be an eye-opening experience, and these audits tend to throw up things like outdated software or licences, being paid for that no one uses, etc., and it's the perfect base point to start from moving forward.

Once you have your report, you need to go through everything methodically. Make a list of every device and who uses it. The same for software: what department or person uses it and why, check all your subscriptions to make sure they are still needed and offer value to the company. Check for the latest updates for your systems or software, and make a point of knowing if it's still supported by the manufacturer.

Then find where your data lives, who has access to it, and make a note of this too.

This audit will then guide all of your future decisions, not to mention show you where all your risks lie, what money is being wasted, and how, so you can deal with them appropriately. If you skip this step, you're simply setting yourself up for failure and a lot of wasted items and pennies.

Automate Your Backups and Updates

These are two of the most common and easily preventable IT problems that small businesses come across. Both of these problems can cause data loss and security vulnerabilities. However, they can be easily managed or eliminated by having them carried out via automation.

You need to set up automated backups that individually store copies of your data in at least two different locations. This needs to be one on-site and one off-site. The off-site option could be the cloud; that's entirely up to you.

From here, you need to test your backups periodically to make sure they're actually working and that you can restore files as and when required.

If you don't test a backup, you can't rely on it, and you may as well have never even bothered.

You also need to automate any software and device updates too. Updates are essential to patch security vulnerabilities, and if they're not being carried out, then you're exposing your company to unnecessary security threats. Even software that's out of date by a day can cleave you with a vulnerability.

A good tip is to schedule your updates to run outside of business hours so they're not disrupting your team as they're trying to work.

Set Clear Tech Rules for Your Team

It's not just the technology that poses IT risks and concerns. It's the people using it. Most security breaches don't happen becasue sophisticated attacks, far from it. They have because people click links they have no business clicking, or they used a weak password, or accessed company data on unsecured networks.

You can avoid this by having clear written security rules for your team. You need to remove all ambiguity and give yourself something you can lock down.

At a minimum, here you need to ensure strong unique passwords for all of your business accounts and require the use of a password manager so these are kept secure.

Enable multi-factor authentication on every system that supports it and set rules about devices that can be used to access company data. Reinforce this by making sure anyone working remotely is doing so over a secure connection.

You need to offer basic security training to all your employees so they know what to look out for, such as phishing attacks, and ensure they know what to do if they suspect something is wrong. This training costs very little to carry out compared to the cost of exposure due to not protecting the company and an employee making a mistake.

Work With Experts

There's no shame in admitting you cannot handle all of your IT needs in-house. This is where outsourcing comes into the picture. Whether you use one-off services to help you with certain areas or you bring a company such as Eberly Systems on board to take over the day-to-day management of your IT, it's important to know the type of help out there and what you need specifically to improve operations and your setup.

One of the many benefits of outsourcing your IT, providers in this space already know what needs doing, their team is expertly trained in the work they provide, meaning you get to rely on their knowledge and expertise to support your business without worrying about what might be going wrong.

Use The Cloud

If you're relying heavily on on-site servers, then you need to move to cloud-based systems. Cloud storage and software mean your team can access what they want from anywhere on any device, and they're not tied to a physical location or a single machine.

Making this shift also means that your dependence on hardware that can fail is reduced. Nor do you need to worry about it being stolen or becoming outdated.

The result is cloud providers handling your service updates for you, your storage scaling, and infrastructure maintenance on your behalf. You simply pay for what you use, and you can scale up or down as required as your business changes.