Charles Comenos | Mar 21, 2022
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Network technology has become an area of great strategic importance, shaping the way companies work, interact with customers, and innovate new products. But today’s dynamic network environments, where mobile devices, laptops, IoT devices, and servers interact and share valuable data, can also be fragile and prone to disruption. Your business needs the right computer network support.
Like any complex technological system, network technology must be supported to ensure your business derives both maximum competitive advantage and return on your IT investment. But what exactly should effective network support achieve? Let’s look at why IT support is so important and what a strong support program should do for your team.
Even a few minutes of network downtime can cost a business thousands of dollars in lost productivity, customer dissatisfaction, and recovery costs. Those costs can quickly become crippling if that downtime extends into hours or days, so ensuring maximum network uptime should be the top priority of any IT support team.
How do you do that? There’s a long list of computer network support management tasks that a business will have to address to stabilize a network. Some of the most common include the following:
When your network or technology isn’t working properly, the morale of your staff will suffer. Repeated or prolonged network downtime can wreak havoc on how your staff feels about their work while damaging your company’s reputation with customers.
To ensure that your team stays energized and productive, any high-quality IT and computer network support program should include friendly and reliable IT help desk service. An IT help desk refers to a team of technicians — armed with specialized technology support tools — who are trained to respond to the needs of your staff. The support of a quality help desk team eliminates obstacles to workplace efficiency while ensuring your team feels supported and engaged throughout the workday. But building a quality help desk isn’t an easy task. What makes an IT help desk effective? Here are just some of the most important elements.
Building a help desk team is difficult for small and midsized businesses with more urgent priorities than hiring and training technicians, which is why many choose to partner with a managed IT service provider who can provide a help desk solution that embodies all the above qualities for a flat monthly fee.
The goal of IT support is to keep your technology operational and efficient. In today’s challenging cybersecurity landscape, this requires around-the-clock vigilance.
New strains of ransomware, low-cost threats emanating from the dark web, and an uptick in state-sponsored hacking threaten sensitive data and can cause catastrophic downtime if they’re not addressed. Those threats have only continued to increase in frequency and severity since the COVID-19 pandemic forced businesses to adapt to work-from-home situations, an arrangement that many weren’t fully prepared to offer.
Many elements comprise a robust cybersecurity program, including security audits, perimeter defense, network firewall management, anti-virus software management, cybersecurity awareness training, and network security monitoring. Each of those requires a unique set of specialist skills.
The Complete Network team has written extensively on each of those topics in the past, based on our belief that all strong IT support programs must fully address the topic of cybersecurity to be effective.
>> Learn more about how our team defines excellent cybersecurity service
A well-supported network should also be resilient to catastrophe, whether natural disaster, major hardware failure, or serious cyber infiltration. Any IT support program must include either disaster recovery or a business continuity plan to provide that assurance.
While the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably, backup and disaster recovery focus on strategically identifying key data assets and ensuring that those datasets are stored securely in a secondary location. So, your team can restore those assets quickly if a disaster ever strikes. Business continuity is a larger concept that includes protecting data, designating redundant workspaces lines of communication, and ensuring that business processes are just like your data.
Whether your business decides to implement one or the other will depend on what types of risk your business faces, your calculated cost of downtime, and what forms of legal or regulatory compliance penalties would result from business disruption. What’s indisputable is that every business must design, deploy, and regularly test either a DR or BC solution as part of an effective IT support program.
Is your business looking to work with a veteran IT support firm that’s been helping businesses in Charlotte, North Carolina, Albany, NY, Bluffton, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia for decades? Reach out any time to the Complete Network team; our friendly experts would love to answer your questions!
Contact us any time at (844) 426-7844.
In an ideal world, technology would be a consistent source of competitive advantage and benefit for small and midsized businesses. The reality is that many fail to realize that confidence.
Without the right resources and support, even a highly skilled technology team can become overwhelmed by the growing list of technology management duties. When important tasks get neglected, it creates ripple effects throughout an organization that damage productivity and efficiency.
The co-managed IT services model solves these problems by providing your existing IT team with all the support and resources they need to successfully plan, manage, and defend your network technology.
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