Growth is an exciting and stressful aspect of every business owner’s life. It a sign of success, future prosperity and hard work paying off.
It’s important that you take full advantage of these moments. If you want to grow, every single part of your business must be able to rise to the occasion. This includes your IT support, outsourced or in-house. But what if they just aren’t keeping up with your needs and goals anymore?
If your IT support team can’t keep pace, you may miss lucrative opportunities, like attracting ideal clients and implementing the perfect services, which delays your overall growth. Or worse, if they cannot maintain security, your entire business and your clients could become the victims of malicious cyber-attacks. This is why it is vital that your IT support can scale their service to your business needs.
Unfortunately, not every IT support provider is able to grow with you. This is when you will need to consider switching to one that can scale alongside your ambitions.
Here are four ways to know you’ve outgrown your IT support.
1. They are not proactive
An effective IT support team is a proactive one. They need to know about the latest and greatest tech and whether it will benefit your business. For example, they need to know the best software to protect your business from cybercrime. Without this knowledge, they leave your business, your clients and your suppliers vulnerable.
They also need to be aware of the latest trends in workplace productivity. If you want to grow, you need to make gains in productivity while reducing your costs. You can achieve these goals with the cloud and through remote working. If your current IT support team can’t make that happen, it’s time for them to hit the road.
2. They can’t meet their Service Level Agreement
When you first signed up for IT support, you signed a Service Level Agreement (SLA). This laid out the level of service you could expect from them. If they are not meeting the terms of the SLA it may be that your business has outgrown them. You’re simply too big for them to handle, so you need to find someone your own size.
3. Your technology negatively impacts employee productivity
IT reliability is vital to your overall business continuity and productivity. You need to know that your work tools can keep pace and function as they should. If your technology is consistently slow or you experience downtime regularly then your business is not operating as well as it should.
This costs you time and money, both of which you could be using to grow your business and increase productivity. If your IT support can’t keep everything up and running, you need to cut them loose.
4. You still operate outdated software and hardware
Sometimes, people can have the attitude of ‘if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it’. This is not something you should be hearing from your IT support provider, especially when it comes to upgrading. This doesn’t mean you need to upgrade your hardware every single time a new product comes out, though if you can afford to you should.
What it does mean is you need to consistently update your software. This is a security issue; the latest updates have the best security that can combat the new and surprising ways that cybercriminals are attacking businesses like yours. If your IT support does not update regularly, they are actively putting your business at risk. A risk you could do without.
A little knowledge goes a long way
When it comes to IT support, you need something that works in conjunction with your business and its goals. Something that helps and doesn’t hinder your growth. If you’d like to know more about how IT support can benefit your business, we’ve put together this whitepaper ‘Common IT support questions and their answers’ to teach you how to carry out common quick fixes when you need them.
Or, if you would like to know how we here at Pensar can support your creativity and growth with seamless IT support, get in touch today.
Editor's note: This blog post, originally from 2018, has been updated as of January 2021.
