Today’s highly digital world and growing customer demands have placed a heavy time burden on businesses. In their quest to provide their clients the best quality of service possible while ensuring smooth day-to-day business operations, many entrepreneurs find it challenging to keep track of the latest information technology or IT news, computer updates, tips on how to fix IT issues, and security alerts.
As a result, it’s believed that a lot of businesses find themselves making serious technology-related mistakes frequently. Having an outsourced IT support team can provide businesses with the timely help they need to fix these errors that may negatively impact a company.
Below are four common tech mistakes that businesses make and how IT support can fix them:
1. Failing To Develop Proper Data Backup Strategies
It’s believed that many businesses don’t have proper data backup strategies despite having numerous options, methods, and approaches to choose from. This tech mistake makes it difficult for them to recover lost files or data. Losing critical data can affect employee productivity negatively and puts businesses at great risk. If they’re looking for a possible solution though, recovering data from damaged systems can be extremely expensive.
The lack of proper knowledge is also said to lead to some businesses occasionally back up the wrong type of data. On the other hand, there are some instances when they think the data they’ve backed up is properly protected, only to they’ve used an unreliable backup strategy.
To address these problems, businesses can seek the help of IT support professionals. Such professionals will ensure businesses back the right data up and that they do so frequently. Working with IT professionals like Spectrumwise and other companies will also ensure your business tests its backup regularly to confirm that the data can be recovered entirely. These teams help businesses in determining which files, data, and information to back up.
Other decisions that businesses may get help with include the frequency of creating data sets, the location of data backups, and the testing schedule of the stored data groups. IT professionals will also lend support by ensuring that data backup routines are undertaken prior to software migrations and upgrades.
2. Not Retiring Old Software And Hardware
Smart businesses know that their hardware and software have a limited lifespan of three to four years. Beyond this period, equipment efficiency reduces significantly and it becomes costly for the business to continue using them. But still, some company managers may think that retaining hardware and software after their prescribed use will save them money.
This is far from the truth for the cost of support and repair increases as a technology tool surpasses its recommended lifespan. In some instances, this amount exceeds that of acquiring new systems. Besides this, old and outdated hardware has an increased downtime which is said to be frustrating for both customers and staff.
In addition, some businesses don’t standardize their software applications and hardware components. This complicates future repair, troubleshooting, and deployment services. As a result, businesses experience incompatibilities and are forced to support different programs with varying license terms and renewal dates. All of these put a strain on a business’ operations and maintenance.
IT support can help businesses in fixing this problem by helping them standardize their software applications and hardware components across the board. With IT support, businesses will also be able to rescind the use of their old hardware equipment in accordance with their proper lifecycles and build relationships with hardware and software vendors in order to buy new ones at discounted prices.
3. Overlooking Security Issues
Said to be one of the common tech mistakes that businesses make, failing to accommodate security issues can cause irreparable damage to a company. This usually happens when businesses either don’t take security threats seriously or they’re unaware of the risk these threats expose the company’s interests. It’s believed that for any business security attacks are extremely costly. May they be big or small, firms are falling victim to data theft, organized attacks, and system compromises.
It’s said that security threats are present round-the-clock. Hackers are constantly targeting poorly secured servers, computers, systems, and networks with the aim of finding out their security loopholes and exploiting them. If your business fails to secure customer and employee data well, you’re likely to suffer a data breach that could lead to lost sales, low customer trust and bad publicity, and even legal action filed against your company by the aggrieved parties involved.
IT support can help your business to overcome this tech mistake by implementing a strong password policy on all computers, software applications, servers, and network equipment. The support team will also ensure that your operating systems, applications, and software applications are updated with the latest security patches regularly.
Furthermore, IT support can help your business to deploy firewalls in every location, secure your wireless networks, implement email and Internet usage policies, and disable guest accounts and file-sharing programs.
Such a team would also conduct security audits regularly, rectify any deficiencies, and deploy proven and up-to-date anti-spyware, antivirus, and anti-rootkit applications to secure your business’ systems.
4. Using Unlicensed Software
The use of illegal software is the most widespread tech mistake that businesses make. This is because many business owners are believed to be incapable of properly differentiating license types between one another. Software manufacturers, however, are aggressively using product activation technologies to lock down licenses and prosecuting offenders that are guilty of using pirated software.
Using unlicensed software by mistake is considered a costly error because it may end up with companies paying up penalties and suffer from auditing problems. Also, they may experience delays as systems fail due to conflicts in product activations. IT support can lend a hand to businesses overcome this challenge by helping them understand the importance of using properly licensed applications and programs.
They can ensure that businesses buy all software licenses, including accounting programs, operating systems, security tools, and other utilities from reputable tech companies. IT support teams can also help businesses avoid licensing penalties and errors by tracking and documenting the software licenses they purchase and deploy.
This ensures fast data recovery should the software fail. When a business needs to install new applications, IT support teams can help them ensure that they accept the right license agreements.
Final Thoughts
It’s said that businesses tend to make numerous tech mistakes when they don’t get qualified tech support from certified IT professionals. These gaffes can incur great losses to any business in the long run. You can avoid committing the abovementioned errors either by hiring an onsite IT professional or getting a third-party IT consultant to check the security of your system regularly, backup your data, and guide you in acquiring hardware and software applications for your business.
