As more and more businesses rely on technology solutions to accomplish their everyday tasks, there is a natural expectation for there to be a bit of a learning curve as these advanced solutions are prioritized and accounted for. However, a few industry research firms have compiled their expectations for how this learning curve tendency will influence the needs and challenges businesses will face during the rest of the year.
The results these firms found differ slightly, but also share common trends that can tell us a few important things about how many small and medium-sized businesses will prioritize their growth in the next few months.
While placing in different orders within each of these studies, both firms found their top three challenges to relate to budgetary and cost restrictions, maintaining the operations of their existing solutions, and securing their workforce against threats (although one of the data sets indicated that this concern was more focused on mobile security measures). If we take the liberty of drawing a few inferences from this apparent focus on these concerns, we can see that SMBs have a pretty universal set of priorities that will require somewhat similar solutions.
First, many business owners who have had to review their company finances and prioritize their expenses to reflect their goals will probably be able to confirm that it can be a considerable task. The challenges that an SMB faces are therefore largely focused on getting the most return for their investments while attempting to reduce the total amount of capital spent.
These financial challenges, however, can be faced much more easily with the help of a managed service provider. Without an MSP in their corner, companies had a tendency to provide a minimum budget for their IT solutions in the hopes that nothing unexpected would pop up, only to have to sacrifice what little budget they had when some issue did pop up. Alternatively, an MSP offers its services as a consistent, budgetable expense. This allows a company to predict their probable IT spending and plan a budget around a more consistent balance.
An MSP’s services can also apply quite easily to the other major concerns that the aforementioned studies identified as considerable. Through their proactive services, managed service providers can more effectively ensure that the solutions that a company has in place remain operational and enhance their productivity. This is accomplished by monitoring their solutions in order to catch looming issues as quickly as possible, often before they have an effect on the company’s systems. The same can be said of the security a company has put in place, part of the MSP’s responsibilities are to ensure that security solutions are maintained to be as effective as possible.
Remember, these are just the three top anticipated challenges. Many of the other technology challenges that are anticipated to influence companies during 2017 can also be mitigated through an MSP’s services. To learn a few more ways that an MSP can ensure that your IT is more of a benefit to your business than it is a challenge, give us a call at (270) 282-4926.
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