After Desktops and Servers: 3 More Vital IT Support Services
When considering which San Diego IT support services are important to a small business’ success, the key areas that always come to mind are desktop support and network services. After all, without desktops and servers, what do you have? While these two elements are clearly important, here are three other critical areas that might be overlooked in many small business environments.
Disaster Recovery: Making sure vital information is always backed up and ready to be restored is crucial to both the well-being of any business’ data and to the bottom line. Data loss can occur accidentally or it can be the result of a natural disaster or a man-made malicious attack. Regardless, the ability to get data back quickly and easily should be a chief concern for every small business.
Hardware: What is the state of the small business’ desktop, server and infrastructure hardware? While it’s not critical to be on the cutting edge, small businesses must consider that their hardware could be behind the times and inefficient. A good rule of thumb for hardware age is three years for laptops and five years for desktops. Some companies leverage IT outsourcing firms that offer “hardware as a service” solutions to mitigate the expense of new hardware.
Network Security: Spyware, viruses, denial of service attacks, worms and other malware outbreaks cripple businesses worldwide every day. The freeware antivirus app you downloaded yesterday just isn’t going to do the job in a business environment. IT staff or consultants can build multi-tiered security solutions. A strong and well-maintained firewall, server-based antivirus solutions, anti-spam email scanning at the mail server level and an effective web proxy are just some of the key solutions to consider when analyzing your network security.
Small businesses need to take action to ensure the health of their data and the well-being of their systems. It starts with the desktop and servers but there’s definitely a bigger picture to consider. Hardware health, network security and disaster recovery solutions are three more vital IT services a small business needs in place and working effectively to succeed.