Deciding on a proactive approach to your business’s IT should be a no-brainer. Your technology is one of your most powerful and relied upon tools- its maintenance shouldn’t be an afterthought.
Why take a proactive approach?
Proactive IT solutions give you control over the future direction of your IT as well as keep your systems running smoothly and efficiently, prepared for potential disaster, and fortified against cyberattacks. With proactive solutions, it takes minimum effort to keep your ducks in a row, allowing you to focus on larger ideas and projects that can help propel your business forward.
With reactive IT, you choose to deal with an issue as it arises instead of preemptively solving it. With a reactive approach, you aren’t taking the time to see problems coming and only identify them when they majorly affect your system. This does not allow for a lot of time to make good strategic decisions in fixing the issue and costs you both money and downtime.
The proactive approach empowers your IT partner to make better decisions for your IT system, catch problems before they grow into serious threats, keep your team working efficiently, and allow you to focus on ideas that can have a more profound effect on your business. When done correctly, proactive, IT should reduce any need for reactive helpdesk services.
If you’d like to read more on the difference between proactive and reactive IT, check out our post, Proactive Vs. Reactive Support: Which One Is Right For You?
5 steps to becoming more proactive with your IT
1. Look to the past
To understand where to start, it is important to understand the issues you have experienced in the past. By analyzing past issues, you can better understand the overall health of your system and begin to identify and solve the root problems that cause issues. Just like when a doctor uses your medical history to generate a diagnosis and treatment plan, your system’s history can be the key to understanding what you need to do for its future.
2. Align IT priorities with business priorities
When being proactive, you have the time to make informed decisions about the maintenance and improvement of your IT systems. It is important to have identified your business priorities so you have direction in making these decisions. For example, suppose your main priority is driving innovation and business growth. In that case, you’ll need to quickly and securely onboard new employees while upgrading your systems as needed to support the increased number of users. Knowing this, you and your IT provider can prepare your system for growth and create effective employee onboarding processes.
3. Leverage monitoring tools
A huge part of proactive IT is knowing how your system is doing. You want to identify any symptoms of a potential issue before they wreak havoc while also performing regular maintenance to keep things in good working order. The easiest way to keep an eye on your system is to leverage monitoring tools. As your IT partner, we give you access to our tool stack so we can remotely monitor and respond to activity on your network, receive alerts about potential security threats, remind your employees about updating their devices (or do it for them), and remotely access your system to provide support if needed. We know that IT services are never “done”; it is a continuous cycle of maintaining and improving.
4. Identify and plan for the worst outcomes
Included in a proactive approach to IT is planning for potentially disastrous situations. With how heavily businesses rely on technology, it is essential to have contingency plans. Whether it’s human error, a natural disaster, a hardware failure, or a cyberattack, you want to be sure a recent backup of your data is safe, secure, and accessible when you need it. Investing in reliable backup and disaster recovery services is like having an IT insurance policy.
5. Tighten Security
One of the biggest threats to your IT system is gaps in your cybersecurity. Tightening security proactively protects you from a host of potential threats that could destroy your system and take you offline or out of business. Performing regular security checks, leveraging security tools and software, and providing cybersecurity training to your employees is necessary.
Save your money with proactive IT support
By taking the steps we have outlined above, you ensure that your systems stay in good health, keep operating at the highest efficiency levels possible, and are prepared to support you wherever your business is going.
Choosing to neglect your IT often creates a slippery slope. While trying to find a solution to a problem, you recognize that it has grown out of a deeper issue that will be costly to identify and fix, you experience significant downtime, this impact both your customer’s and employee’s experiences, and your whole business comes to a halt while you search for a solution. This process repeats over and over, eating up all your time and money until you decide to look for and solve issues within your system proactively.
We can help free you from this reactive cycle and guide you through the steps to becoming more proactive with your IT. Our services are set up to be aligned with your best interest. We don’t profit from your IT breaking; we find success by keeping our client’s systems in tip-top shape. If you are ready to give your IT a complete workup and work towards a clean bill of health, You can book a call with us here to get started.
