Whether you’re a start-up or a large, established organisation, outsourcing your IT needs to a managed service provider is always a smart move. You’ll enjoy convenient access to a multi-skilled team and have more time to focus on your core competencies: running your business.
However, in the competitive IT service marketplace, it’s important to discern ‘the best’ from ‘the rest’ to ensure your business receives value for money and return on investment from the relationship. The trouble is, businesses often struggle to gauge the quality of the IT support services they are receiving, particularly if they are new to outsourcing or haven’t been with their current provider for very long.
Truly Secure – Technology Services that Help Dubai Businesses Grow and Evolve
As a leading provider of managed IT services and support to some of Dubai’s most technical and heavily regulated sectors, we understand the technology that dynamic companies need to productive and relevant in our digital age. Our clients range from small business to large corporates, and including many forward-thinking organisations based in the DIFC, the Dubai Biotech Research Park and Dubai Media City, giving us the breadth and depth of experience to help any business thrive through technology.
We want all businesses to enjoy the same standard to tech support we strive to deliver for our clients, but we know from experience that many IT provider fail to live up to the early expectations of their clients. To help you assess the quality of support you’re receiving, here are 5 things your IT support provider should be doing to help your business.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Services
Business continuity and disaster recover (BCDR) relates to procedures, policies and systems designed to help your business recover quickly from disruptive events and minimise their impact on operations. Such events might include cyber-attacks, natural disasters, hardware failure or device loss or theft.
Your IT support provider should be instrumental in helping you establish a plan that protects your critical data and systems. Their experience should be fully leveraged, ensuring sensitive data is backed up in line with best practice and staff know how to implement recovery procedures. Through partnerships with leading vendors, your provider should be offering a cost-effective backup service and ensure its reliability by means of ongoing testing and monitoring.
End User IT Support and Training
You likely outsource your IT to benefit from the technical knowledge and expertise possessed by your provider. However, if your provider is reluctant to share their wisdom with you and your team, then it may be hard for you to take full advantage of new technology and systems. Make sure your provider is taking the time to familiarise your team with new technology and system alterations by means of end user support sessions conducted when major changes take place.
Your provider should also be providing (or be capable of providing) cyber security awareness training. This will provide your team with the knowledge they need to obstruct the most commonly encountered online threats, including Phishing, a harmful practice thought to account for over 80% of data breaches.
Support that’s Proactive by Default
Support that only springs into action after an issue has disrupted your operations (often known as ‘reactive’ or break/fix support) no longer cuts it in today’s fast-paced digital economy. An IT outage could leave you unable to serve and stay in touch with customer, prevent you generating new business and could see your reputation irredeemably harmed: all of which could severely impact your bottom line.
To help prevent damaging IT downtime, your IT support provider should be undertaking a programme of proactive monitoring and maintenance that covers all your digital assets, including hardware, software, networking equipment and could environments. This should include patch management to ensure security vulnerabilities in software are quickly addressed, as well as network performance monitoring with techniques like load balancing and traffic shaping used to maximise operating efficiency.
Ultimately, you want your IT support provider to be taking all reasonable steps within their remit to ensure issues are rectified at an early stage, before they’re allowed to impact your operations.
Providing a Plan for the Future of Your Tech
As businesses grow and develop it’s common for IT solutions to fall out of alignment with organisational goals. Solutions that were once cutting-edge eventually become sluggish and obsolete, and infrastructure that once served you well often becomes insufficient and growth-inhibiting as your business scales up.
To prevent your technology acting as a barrier to business growth, it’s important to establish a future tech strategy. This is something that your IT support provider should be central to helping you develop, giving close consideration to your growth plans and the operational challenges you’re likely to face as you move forward. Solutions proposed should be accommodating of your workflows and be cost efficient and scalable to ensure capacity is able to keep pace with changing demand.
Helping Your Meet Your Compliance Objectives
Data protection compliance has become a significant burden for business across many sectors, with the like of GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA and other frameworks carrying serious penalties for non-compliance. Other data protection standards like ISO 27001, the NIST Framework and SOC 2, while not necessarily a legal requirement, will help prove your cyber security credentials to existing and prospective customer, engendering confidence and helping you to win new business.
Your IT support provider should be willing to help you meet your compliance objectives, and be capable of offering a range of managed to security services to ensure you meet the requirement of the most demanding schemes.
Conclusion
Choosing an IT support provide is decision of great strategic significance, one that could have a profound impact on the future direction and success of your business. If your current provider is failing to deliver on their promises or struggling to help you move your technology forward, then it may be time to switch and find one who’ll deliver for your business.
Truly Secure – A Trusted Partner that Enables Your Business to Scale
Truly Secure provides IT management, support and strategy to technical, professional and regulated businesses in Dubai and across the UAE. We help businesses big and small overcome commercial challenges, surmount regulatory hurdles and scale new heights of efficiency using expertly managed, tailored technology.
Get in touch today to find out how Truly Secure could help your business reach its potential through technology.
