Easily the busiest time in the market, the holiday rush soon swooping in brings rewards for your business – if you can successfully leverage the gains posed by the season. One sure way to do this is to equip your business with the latest IT through outsourced tech support and managed IT services. This way you can stay on top of the latest trends in your industry, while keeping your customers happy with fast and efficient delivery of gift-worthy products and service subscriptions over the holiday season.
With the holidays coming up, it’s time to consider the benefits of outsourced tech support that managed IT services provide. See why you need a monthly IT plan in place before your business picks up for the season:
Cyber Attacks
Malicious software or “malware” attacks have become an inevitable fact of technology. Whether you’re using a Mac, PC, or even a mobile device, your software is at risk of damage, such as system crashes, brought on by all-too common security breaches. Getting hit with a virus over the holidays is a nightmare for system productivity – staying on track with customers’ orders, communications among your team, and relying on the tech you use to deliver products and services can quickly shut down.
The good thing is, all these scenarios that could potentially kill business can be prevented with a managed IT services plan in place. With a monthly service plan, it’s easy to keep the software you rely on, as well as your stored data protected from breaches, without shelling out and maintaining an in-house cost. Additionally, in the unfortunate event of a cyber attack, virus and spyware can be removed, with a complete health check-up done to ensure full system recovery.
Disruptive Downtimes
It’s bad enough that your older computers may be slowing down and causing disruptions at work, but if the problem extends to your entire office network, these disruptions can cause days of downtime – time no business can afford to lose, especially over the busy holiday season. Being offline for a day over the holidays can be equivalent to 3 to 4 off-peak, so before the rush begins it’s important to sign up for managed IT services, which includes routine inspection and upgrade of your business’ tech, so you can be certain it stays up, running, and easily able to handle increased volumes of orders and in-office communications.
Inaccessible Data Centre and Ineffective Recovery Solutions
With much of business conducted online these days, it’s essential to keep all your information secure from possible breaches, while still accessible among your team so you can keep track of finances and efficiency trends. For instance, a point-of-sale (POS) system is ideally connected to your business’ data storage unit or cloud, which makes it easily to analyze and leverage trends in performance. Suffering a breach of either which renders them inaccessible can have devastating effects on high-volume holiday transaction data.
These risks can be mitigated with industry-grade security solutions, such as email, spam, and malware protection. In addition, your managed IT services plan can be tailored to include data backup and recovery, essentially keeping your business’ sales data and customer information safe and secure among your team. With a routine, monthly checked, a tech support provider can monitor the health of your data backup and recovery solutions, and fit the systems you use with the latest protection or upgrades for optimal performance and security.
These scenarios seem like stressful instances you would not dare imagine happen to your business. In reality, though, all these tech nightmares are issues commonly occur, and when you least expect them to. Investing in the proactive services of a reliable tech support company in Toronto makes the holidays a lot less risky for your business, and prepares you for the unexpected.