The folks over at Yahoo Small Business Advisor have just published an article on cloud computing and managed IT that addresses many of the reasons why, in 2014, it’s finally become not only smart for productivity, but also smart budgeting, to take your small business IT department from one over-worked employee and a closet full of servers and wires, to a stable service that is available to employees anywhere.
A few of their points:
Managed IT Services & Disaster Down-Time Recovery
It’s no secret that hurricanes, high winds, and flooding are a threat not only to Houston businesses, but also those businesses IT infrastructure. By removing the expensive servers from the office, businesses have one less expensive piece of equipment to fret over in the event of storms.
Even more, consider how much time and money is spent putting out smaller IT fires, backing up the server, helping non-technical employees figure out confusing technology, etc…
With Managed IT and cloud computing, the job of maintaining and backing up servers, putting out small fires is no longer the concern of the “office IT guy”, who, in reality, probably wasn’t hired with such a huge work-load in mind anyway. Managed IT allows him to get back to bigger picture items, like using technology to boost productivity and profitability.
Cloud Computing, Employee Mobility & Remote Access
If your business was around during hurricane Ike, you know the value of mobility for your employees. Cloud computing allows employees to access their work desktop from any computer, tablet, or smartphone with an internet connection. Companies took a big hit in 2008, when Ike shut down most of Houston for weeks as buildings and roads were repaired. Imagine the boost your business could receive by having been one of the few to have active operations, even if your office wasn’t yet back online.
Even in a non-disaster environment, the ability to access work applications, files, email – anything – from virtually any device has huge implications for productivity.
Managed IT and Ever-Moving Goal Posts
Any manager or business owner who’s overseen an IT project knows that things are almost never as simple as they appear. IT projects have a tendency to balloon in price rapidly, as small businesses often-times don’t have the personnel to plan and execute what can be extremely complex networks, server configurations, and user-management. Throw in firewalls, communications technology, and IP configurations, and many want to pull their hair out as costs rise.
Not so with a Managed IT solution. Hiring a company like Genesis BCS to manage and move your IT to the cloud is as sure a bet as you’ll find in today’s world, where technologies almost never work together as smoothly as promised. Genesis, together with our partners behind Freedom Cloud, manage the transition for you, while you focus on your business. Together we’ve got the experience of hundreds upon hundreds of other IT management customers. In short: we know what we’re doing, we do it well, and we stay within budget.
You can read the Yahoo Small Business article in full here. And if you’re interested in Managed IT from Genesis BCS, give us a call or shoot us an email any time. We’ll get back to you quickly, and will walk you through the process!