IT (Information Technology) is an essential component for most businesses these days. Thanks to the Internet and computers, it’s far cry from the old days of pens, papers, and floor-to-ceiling filing systems. We can do tons more than we used to, but taking care of this technology brings some challenges.
In broad terms, modern IT management involves managing all the tech stuff at your business. Large corporations will have entire departments to handle this. While IT Horizons does help large businesses set up components for these kinds of setups, the bulk of our business is providing IT support and management for organizations that don’t need a dedicated department.
There are a lot of benefits to IT management, so we’ll try to cover the most important ones.
Create IT Policies and Procedures
Once you have technology as part of your business, you need strategies for how you’ll manage the intersection of employees, technology, and information. What access will employees have? Do you need company email signatures? Will you have remote desktops?
Security is super important, and IT management will work with you to create a secure environment to operate in, minimize the threat of a cyberattack, and make sure your employees are trained to identify and deal with threats.
Another very important area is protecting your customer’s data and information. This requires compliance with government or industry regulations and best-practices, as well as policies that are established for employees.
Keep Everyone Connected
Customers need to access your website, email, or other business systems to be able to connect with you/your employees securely, and share information easily and safely. IT management takes care of this. Do you provide different levels of Internet access on site that you need to manage? Yep, that’s a job for IT management.
But there are also inter-office connections that need to be secure, speedy, and easy to use. This varies quite a bit between industries. A dental office may need to share confidential files between the exam rooms and accounts receivable. A design firm may need to share large sets of information across offices in different countries.
IT management identifies what your unique needs are, provides recommendations for solutions, implements those solutions, and then manages and adjusts them as needed so that your connection capabilities always fit your needs.
Keep Track of the Gear
Very often, businesses provide/have available hardware and software for their teams to use. This also needs some expert involvement! And now that so many companies have at least partial work-from-home policies, employees may be travelling with company equipment, gaining remote access to servers, and needing some IT support along the way.
IT Horizons was quick to respond to the many calls that came in at the beginning of the pandemic for businesses that weren’t ready for remote solutions. We set up teams with laptops, remote access, the right software, appropriate security, and IT support so they could seamlessly shift to working remotely.
While some businesses are back to work on site, many have kept their employees working remotely, or have shifted to a hybrid model with some remote work and some office work. This involves a lot of costly equipment travelling back and forth with employees, as well as new IT demands. We’ve got these businesses covered with IT management that adapts to changing needs.
Keep Track of Your Software
Have you ever struggled to decide what software you need, or whether to purchase outright or use a subscription? The internet is full of companies offering their software solution to any need you might have. Not all solutions are legitimate, and of those that are, not all of them are right for your business.
As needed, we will connect you with the right specialized consultant for software options. Then it’s our job to ensure the technology environment will be healthy, well-configured, and ready to run said applications. We’ll help you set up access for the employees that need it, and track all of your renewals and updates.
Whether you’re investing a few hundred dollars a year on software, or thousands of dollars, we’ll help make sure you’re only getting what you need, and effectively using what you get.
Employee Onboarding and Support
We’ve been very selective in building our team at IT Horizons. You can’t just be really really good at technical stuff to work for us, you also must be really really good at helping regular people with all that technical stuff!
So, a good part of IT management for us is helping you out. That includes everything from helping an employee whose toddler locked them out of all their work accounts to facilitating sharing large amounts of data with a client, to handling all the technical set up and access when onboarding a new employee.
Let’s face it: behind every successful business are real people. So we support businesses by working well with the people at those businesses. It doesn’t matter if it’s a big problem or a little one, if it involves IT, we’re here to help!
If your business relies on servers to conduct business, any service outage is going to start costing money almost immediately. Our support teams are always here to make sure things are built with backups to avoid outages as much as possible, and to quickly step in and fix things if there is an outage.
And then there are those big crises: a flood, a medical emergency with an employee who has essential work partly done on an inaccessible device, a sudden change in regulations for your industry. Again, having access to IT support that’s committed to your long-term success (Yep, we’re talking about us!) can make a crisis a little less… critical. We’ve got your IT back covered!