The capacity for your workforce to be productive lends itself to the profitability of your business. And the array of specialist knowledge provided by business IT support services can help you to leverage cloud technologies to be even more productive and thus even more profitable.
Profitability boosts the morale of your staff and helps to shape a culture of excellence. As a result, the work environment is positive, committed and fun. Which leads to continuous levels of high performance.
Moreover, when a company is profitable, you are better placed to reward them with higher rates of pay, bonuses, and attractive benefits in kind such as medical insurance and company vehicles.
In other words, partnering with a specialist IT support service provider that proactively helps you to boost productivity, is a smart move for businesses of all sizes. And the modern workplace requires specialists that help businesses to navigate an ever-changing landscape.
With the right business IT support partner, companies can be more competitive, agile and efficient. But as IT technologies become more advanced and divergent, companies need access to specialists that are proficient in getting the best from the latest software, hardware and services.
Today’s IT support services for businesses involve more than the out-school style of calling an IT helpdesk and waiting for an engineer to talk you through the fix. These days, outsourced IT professionals are more involved in monitoring and managing business networks together with your providing advice on your overall IT strategy.
Consequently, working with business IT support services is a partnership. From our side, we need to understand your business, your goals, your current IT infrastructure and resources.
Business customers, therefore, have to have faith and trust that the outsourced IT support provider with deliver the level of collaboration, solutions and care you deserve. And the right IT support partner can give you peace of mind.
Enhance Collaboration
Studies produced by leading analytics firms including McKinsey, Deloitte and Accenture underscore the importance of collaboration. The most successful businesses were built by shifting the organisation towards teamwork, open communication, working towards clear goals, brainstorming and engaging in open debates.
The move towards remote working and hybrid models has fragmented teams and made collaboration more difficult. Cloud solutions such as Microsoft Teams, OnePoint and OneDrive, however, bridge the distance between co-workers by enabling them to exchange information, share ideas and work simultaneously on the same document.
The cloud specialists at Micro Pro analyse your unique requirements and implement cloud-based tools that seamlessly connect co-workers located in remote locations.
Our M365 experts can also show you how to leverage tools in Microsoft 365 such as the article we published showcasing the lesser-known tools that enable users to leverage Microsoft Teams.
Optimise Uptime
System failures are inevitable in the workplace. But technical problems on a business network can be avoided using a sample of cloud-based tools, pairing the right software and implementing a disaster recovery program that enables you to resolve downtime quicker.
Downtime clearly puts a dent in productivity. Sometimes the dent can be a serious loss of profits. Business IT support providers help to mitigate, and even prevent downtime, through 24/7 remote monitoring software and various strategies that improve the efficiency of your system architecture.
For example, our IT support providers eliminate single points of failure, assess load balancing, and implement failure detection systems that can capture and prevent potential faults that could lead to downtime.
You should be able to get a feel for how effective a business IT support partner is at optimising the availability of your business network by the promises they make in their service level agreement. Micro Pros High Availability strategies aim to deliver an uptime of 99.999%.
Enhance Productivity Tools
The cloud-based tools significantly contribute to the productivity of your business by helping your employees to perform at optimum levels. Leading business software such as Microsoft 365 enables you to set goals, assign tasks, track progress, create reports, and communicate with employees in real-time.
Productivity suites help your teams to plan, organise, coordinate, and communicate. Team chat apps improve the flow of communication and file sharing whilst time-tracking tools enable end-users to schedule and manage their time efficiently.
Microsoft Teams, for example, enables teams to create separate channels for each project. Chat apps are a more efficient means of communicating than emails which can get lost in your inbox and confuse the thread of the conversation.
Microsoft 365 is also intuitive and offers suggested responses during the course of a conversation together with next-step suggestions that guide you towards a task.
You will also find a host of supporting tools in Microsoft 365 which you can utilise to optimise the featured apps. For example, by integrating the Microsoft Whiteboard app into Teams, you can enhance the creative potential of your employees.
Another good example is to create a virtual desktop to support remote workers and simultaneously protect your business network against the threat of cybercriminals.
Virtual desktops (VD) essentially give you the capacity to replicate your mainframe so that your employees can work seamlessly on remote devices. However, the VD is not directly accessing your business networks which significantly lowers the risk of your employees inadvertently causing a data breach.
You can read more about the features and benefits of Microsoft Virtual Desktop in this article.
Store, Secure, and Recover Data
The introduction of data privacy laws like GDPR has meant data protection is a priority for any type of business that collects and stores third-party data digitally.
Data not only makes your business a potential target for hackers, but a data breach could put you out of business. One study found that 1 in 8 businesses that suffer a data breach fail because of a loss of cash flow. It’s not the GDPR penalty that destroys businesses, it’s the damage to your reputation that puts the proverbial nail in the coffin.
GDPR also penalises companies that lose customer data if a server fails or natural disaster. Server failure and natural disasters are outside your realm of control. However, cloud servers enable you to recover data regardless of accidents or disasters.
Moreover, cloud storage enables you to recover data quickly. In the event of a server failure, your employees can usually continue working offline. The new data will be automatically saved and stored once the server is back up and running.
If you don’t have cloud storage, you could experience extended periods of downtime which will have a negative impact on the productivity of your workforce and, ultimately, a loss of profits.
IT support service providers have effective ways of implementing and maintaining data backup in the cloud. Cloud servers are also less expensive to purchase and maintain, and despite the reservations of decision-makers that don’t have any experience with cloud storage, enhance IT security.
Speaking of which.
Enhanced IT Security
As mentioned above, the majority of businesses fail following a data breach. One study found that 60% of small businesses that are hacked file for bankruptcy within 6 months.
Needless to say that security risks are a priority for businesses. Companies that have a distributed workforce or a high turnover of staff face a higher risk.
Business IT support services help to fortify your computer network using a combination of cybersecurity tools and strategies. But don’t panic. Although that sounds costly, with the right IT support specialists on your side, cybersecurity solutions don’t have to be expensive.
As a matter of fact, cloud tools come with various cybersecurity features that help to protect your business network. Antivirus software is highly effective at detecting threats, access permissions prevent unauthorised logins, multi-factor authentication helps to confirm the identity of people trying to log in and firewalls that leverage artificial intelligence capable of detecting unusual activity on the network.
However, to take full advantage of all the tools provided by software companies, you need to know where the features are located and which settings to update. This requires specialist knowledge which can only be gained from experience.
The business IT support services we offer at Micro Pro include building a zero-tolerance cloud environment that provides resilience, visibility and control. Additional services that we recommend are patch management and cybersecurity training for your staff.
Patch management ensures that software updates are performed in a timely manner. Relying on your staff members to perform these updates by themselves is not a good strategy and can also be disruptive. How many pieces of software do you use? Probably multiple, which means your staff will be prevented from getting on with their work whilst they’re waiting for the update to complete.
Cybersecurity training is advantageous because employees need to be aware of where cyber threats come from. Given that around 90% of data breaches are caused by employees clicking on malicious links and infected downloads, it makes sense to ensure that your staff is aware and alert to the threat of bad actors.
Leverage Automation Software
Automation software helps to make businesses of all sizes more efficient by automating repetitive tasks that would otherwise be performed manually. Not only does this improve productivity but it can also boost staff morale by removing the tedious tasks that cause them to switch off.
There are many types of automation software you can use to improve productivity such as product management, email marketing, enhancing workflow, and customer service assistants to name a few. However, because there are so many different types of automation there is also a lot of software to choose from.
And let’s face it, not all automated software is useful. Artificial intelligence is still in its infant stages and the promises made by companies selling automation tools over promise and underperform.
IT support service providers have experience working with a multitude of companies that have trialled or effectively implemented automation software. We are in a unique position to determine learn about the market and determine which products are effective and which products to avoid.
The ability to tap into our technical knowledge can save you a lot of time, money and frustration trying to find the right automation system that meets your requirements. We also have experience with integrating automated apps into IT systems so can help avoid downtime caused by an incompatible piece of software.
Scalability
Today’s businesses need to be agile and flexible enough to scale – either up or down. Scalability could become critically important for businesses over the next few years as we try to navigate the economic uncertainty that will result from the recession.
UK businesses also need to adapt to Brexit – which could mean expanding manufacturing capabilities on home turf rather than relying on imports from the US, Europe and China. As the business landscape shifts, companies need to IT infrastructure that allows them to go with the flow.
A scalable system is defined as an IT infrastructure that enables businesses to handle higher volumes of traffic – either because you are expanding your staff or because you are receiving more customers. Outsourced IT support services help you to meet these demands by implementing network systems that can seamlessly cope with larger workloads.
For example, the subscription-based licensing of SaaS (software as a service) applications facilitate scalability. Cloud computing enables firms to add human resources to the network quickly and easily without having to concern themselves with the complexities and administration involved with traditional IT infrastructures.
Servers also need to be scalable to ensure that it achieves the required level of performance even when more users are accessing the system. If your server slows down or crashes because of an overload, your productivity suffers.
For example, instead of increasing server capacity, you simply add more servers to the system. We also use a load balancer to distribute increased levels of traffic across a group of backend servers. This increases the overall performance of the system.
Business IT Support Services in London
Micro Pro is an IT support Service provider based in London specialising in cloud solutions, IT strategy, IT security and more. With over 20 years of experience in the IT industry, we have expanded our offices to Kent, Surrey and Glasgow and continue to grow year-on-year. That’s because we learn to understand the business needs of our customers and earn their trust.
If you would like to know more about the IT support services we offer, contact a member of our team to discuss your business objectives. We are here to help your company ramp up productivity and become more profitable.