How do you address multiple small business pain points?

   As a business leader, it’s a constant battle to service your customers, keeping your employees happy and ensuring your business is as efficient / productive and profitable as possible. When our hands are full we look for something to help us, so we buy something to make us do more (an adapter that allows our hands to hold more plate spinning sticks?). Not long after that, we look for something a bit more specific as our customer’s requirements change. Our arms won’t cope, so we look for a plate spinning technology. Does this start to sound rather familiar? What if, however, the answer was a dishwasher? Where would you begin trying to find the answer? The answer may surprise you!  Below is one of my favorite cartoons from when I started in IT almost 30yrs ago.Yes, it was on paper and yes, I did have it folded up in my Filofax!  

How do we help find the answer?We start by understanding your business strategy and then delving under the hood of your IT to get an idea of its current status and how far you can go with it. Working closely with you at a high level, we will attempt to identify and bridge the gap between your business and your IT strategies. Think of the gap as a very heavy dead weight (your pain points). The less you have to carry, the more you can do over a longer period.  There are a number of components that go into making a fully efficient and productive business, which are listed in numerous management handbooks. Our approach, however, attempts to cut to the chase for small businesses and deliver this value as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. These considerations could include:

• What does and doesn’t work for your employees (i.e. make sure your employees can access IT)
• What does and doesn’t work for your business (i.e. that IT can cost-effectively adapt to market changes)
• What does and doesn’t work for your IT (i.e. appropriate, backup, disaster recovery & business continuity)
• What does and doesn’t work for you (Is your IT an enabler or inhibitor?)

 Some approaches you can consider to close the gap may also include: People

• Appropriate user training covering both digital and physical data security and IT best practice

Products

• Proactive system, security & backup monitoring which will help address system and security alerts before they escalate into major problems. For example, a hard drive that is about to fail all the way through to blocking a data breach
• The correct combination of on-premise and cloud-based technologies to help with scalability, reliability and performance
• Cloud-based backup and recovery so you can recover from the worst
• Defense or protection in depth covering email filtering, website filtering, antivirus and antiransomware  

Processes

• Set up a cyber attack response plan (ie speak to your IT provider)
• Quaterly reviews with senior ledership 

Why is it worth doing?This approach allows you to get a combination of the following:

• Get the most out of your IT spend
• Significantly increasing multi-department productivity
• Help you manage and control Cyber Essentials, Cyber Security and GDPR
• Help you get home in time for dinner with your family

We don’t pretend to have all the answers, but we will listen carefully, work diligently and use a healthy dose of common sense with our deep understanding of technology, networks, cybersecurity and proactive monitoring to help you get the best combinations of technologies for you, your teams and your business.If you’re interested, give me a call on 023 92 482556 and I’d be more than happy to arrange a coffee to discuss this further. Warm regardsMatthew