A Near Miss

/ Author Jared Knisley, Client Retention, Cloud Support, Communication, Computer Repair, Customer Service, Data Backups, IT Services, IT Support, Leadership, Managed IT, Mobile Device Management, Productivity, Project Management, Teaching Others, Team Building, Virtual CIO, Working Remotely / By

A Near Miss

Has your team been experiencing “near misses” in managing your IT Services?  We “almost” had a storm this past weekend in Tampa Bay.  Last week as we watched, some prepared while others waited to see what would unfold.  Is your business approaching your IT Systems in the same way you prepare for a storm?

Near Misses in IT Services

Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

~ Abraham Lincoln

The Full Scoop

Living in Florida during hurricane season is always a game of; hurry up and wait!  Ideally, we would always be preparing well ahead of the storm.  Water, food, fuel – and don’t forget to clean out those gutters!   In a matter of days, a storm can form and put your community on edge; in hours consumers can quickly buy out local supplies of food and water.  Why do so many of us wait until the eleventh hour to prepare?  How does this compare to those near misses when it comes to your IT Services?

"We have a brain that is selected for preferring 
immediate reward. Procrastination is the present 
self saying I would rather feel good now. 
So we delay engagement even though it's 
going to bite us on the butt."

Dr Tim Pychyl, Author & Psychologist

I like to think of it as pain management.  Preparing is time consuming, costly and in a sense painful; besides, we always assume a storm “probably” will not hit us.  As technologists, we discuss regularly the reasons behind why a business choses to prioritize their technology versus a laissez faire strategy.  We have worked with business owners over the years, that despite having a heavy reliance on technology; use computers and networks that have frankly been outdated for decades.  It can be a hard sell to explain to a business owner, why an investment is needed – when the system keeps working, and has been working, for years.

Managing IT Needs

A few things you can ask yourself, to gauge where you are at within your business when it comes to managing the IT needs of your organization,

  • Do you have backups of your critical data and do you know if they are working?  How do you know they are working?
  • Are you running Enterprise grade anti-virus, anti-malware and monitoring software?  Are critical security patches being deployed regularly to your network endpoints?
  • Has it been more than three years since your network was updated?  Threats are constantly evolving, even at three years old, many new technologies are available to protect you from current cyber security threats.
  • Are you using two-factor authentication (2FA) everywhere possible, when logging into important systems?  Banking, servers, vendor websites, etc.  Have you been putting off implementing it, on your corporate email server, because it will be a pain?  No pain, no gain.
  • Is your corporate website, often hosted with a third-party provider for small business owners, being backed up regularly?  Are patches being pushed to it, to update any underlying platform software (e.g. plugins) it is using?

This is not to say most business owners don’t care about IT, many do, but managing technology and keeping IT Systems updated can be costly and time consuming.  Given IT Service and Delivery is not the core focus of many businesses, it can be easy to feel like it is not a part of your core strategy – strong IT Governance can be a hard discipline to properly put into place, especially when your day is full of meeting the needs of your existing customer base.

Fizen™

Make sure you have some entity, whether it be internal or external, who is focused on your technology.  You don’t want to experience near misses in your IT services.  Many of these solutions are not expensive to implement.  Imagine being without your computer or network for a day, how disruptive would that be?  Run the numbers and consider what an outage would cost.  Put a strategy into place that reduces the likelihood of system downtime occurring.  Partnering with a team who is capable of preventing and responding to technology needs, will help make sure your business is meeting the demands of an ever competitive and technologically driven marketplace.

Contact us with your IT questions.

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