Some technical advice for small businesses
I’ve helped many different types of businesses and organizations with their computers and technology. From the one-person home-based business to offices with dozens of workers.
Here I offer some tech advice to all those small businesses out there without an IT staff. If you’re the owner, I suggest discussing these with whomever helps with tech support. If you work for a small business, or know one that could use technical help, perhaps share this with the management.
Get professional tech help: Even if you have an employee that helps with tech support in addition to their regular job duty, I strongly recommend getting regular help from an experienced IT professional. Of course, an IT pro can help when there’s problems, but to be pro-active they should be used more often than that. If you aren’t big enough to hire an IT staff, utilize a third-party IT provider. They can perform proactive check-ups and cleanups to help increase performance, reliability and security of your systems plus increase employee productivity. They may also be able to catch issues before they’re noticeable or cause a disaster.
Consider IT managed services: Look into IT managed services, as well, that can provide 24/7 monitoring, maintenance, security, and backup of your systems. These managed services can shift the responsibility of the computer health and security from the users that may ignore alerts and issues that pop-up, to an IT company that can better detect and fix them. The monetary investment can be well worth it from the time and money saved by you or your employees from having to deal with the IT issues and better protecting against major disasters.
Secure and backup your data: In many businesses, customer data and other business files are extremely vital. If files are lost or damaged, there could be severe consequences. Therefore, ensure all data is regularly backed up. It’s well worth the small investment of your time and money. I recommend backing up data locally (to an external hard or flash drive) plus backing up online as well, so your data is also stored off-site in case of a fire or other disaster.