As a business owner in the trades industry, you're likely to be out of the office much of the time so how can you make your IT work alongside your business needs.
As a business owner in the trades industry – for example a plumber, painter and decorator, or roofer – you are likely to be out of the office for the majority of the time, working from your mobile phone.
With no one in the office how do you know whether your IT systems have gone down, or your PC has a virus or malware which, as you are working with a client, is accessing your client database?
The simple answer is you won’t until you get back to the office to catch up on paperwork at the end of the day. Imagine the havoc a hacker could have with eight hours in your systems until you get back.
What about when your PC or laptop displays the blue screen of death or is not functioning to capacity? How do you fit getting it fixed in around your client work?
Wouldn’t it be great to have someone keeping an eye on your IT systems to ensure you don’t have to worry about this?
This is where Managed IT could be the answer to your prayers.
What is managed IT support?
In its simplest terms managed IT support is outsourcing your IT to a third-party company like SupportWise. However, it is so much more than that. Managed IT support gives you your own IT team at the end of the phone or email.
Whilst you work (and sleep) this team is working to ensure your IT systems are functioning as they should.
In addition to being there when something breaks, they are also:
Monitoring your systems for viruses/malware/ransomware
Scheduling regular software updates
Patch management
Advice on new hardware and software
Installation of new hardware and software
Onboarding of new staff
Regular backups of data
Recovery and incident support
What are the benefits of outsourcing for small businesses?
Perhaps, you’ve never thought about outsourcing because your team is small. But this doesn’t matter. Whether you have 3 or 300 members of staff, you still need similar support in the form of maintenance, updates, backups and malware and ransomware prevention.
All of these things need to be done regularly in order to be effective, and for small business owners this can sometimes be a challenge, meaning it gets done when you can get round to it. This can seriously put your systems, your client and staff data and potentially your business at risk.
It can be quite cost effective to have managed IT support, and with SupportWise you pay per user meaning you are not paying for staff you don’t have, and it is easy to upgrade as your business grows (or downgrade should your business shrink).
This works out a lot cheaper than following the break-fix model or indeed the cost of recovery should your systems be hacked with ransomware, and of course much more cost effective than employing an IT specialist to work in-house. But at the same time, you are essentially gaining a team of IT specialists whose main objective is to keep your systems ticking over, and spot problems before they can occur reducing any down time to your business due to IT issues.
Your managed IT team essentially have got your back leaving you free to go and do the work you want to do.
The main benefit, of course is security. Knowing that all your systems are up to date and protected all the time will give you peace of mind that your client and staff data is protected.
