MSPNetworks Blog

While all a business’ technology solutions are important, some are bound to take priority over the others, especially when certain ones become an industry-wide focus. A recent survey evaluated the top concerns of small-to-medium-sized businesses for the coming year. The results of the survey identified a few telling trends regarding the priorities that SMBs hold now, and for good reason.

Techaisle, a market research and industry analysis organization, collected and consolidated data to identify where SMBs and small businesses specifically saw their biggest business issues and their technology challenges and priorities. Let’s bear down specifically on the answers provided by the small businesses to see if your internal priorities and concerns match up to theirs.

Issues

According to the survey, a small business’ largest concerns are all what one would generally expect of any business. Here they are as the survey identified them:

1. Attracting and retaining new customers
2. Increasing profitability
3. Increasing business growth

These were the highest priorities for the survey’s respondents. The areas of least concern, as the survey identified, were: 

1. Improving workplace productivity
2. Improving effectiveness of sales and marketing
3. Focusing on new markets

Oddly enough, these areas of lower concern could directly benefit the efforts of their top concerns if perhaps prioritized more… but I digress.

Priorities and Challenges

Speaking of the priorities that the surveyed small businesses presented, the trends therein were exceptionally clear. Nearly as clear, is how directly these priorities line up with the IT challenges that these businesses face.

Here are the top four priorities and challenges, respectively:

1. Cloud / Cloud security
2. Mobility solutions / Customer experience
3. Collaboration / Maintaining current IT infrastructure
4. Managed services / Budget constraints

What this tells us is that businesses largely have the right idea of how they can use information technology to help address their biggest concerns. By adopting relatively new approaches to IT services and their delivery of them, like cloud solutions and managed services, businesses can better increase their profitability and scale upwards through bringing in more people to sign on.

The IT challenges that the surveyed businesses specified are also well-managed by implementing precisely what they have prioritized. It makes sense that, with cloud ranking as their number-one priority, cloud security is correspondingly elevated. Similarly, with customer service standards to uphold, the ability to collaborate with the rest of the team needs to be a priority.

Finally, the budgetary limitations and the maintenance requirements play even more deeply into the adoption of managed IT services, which help relieve both concerns for businesses.

There’s a lot more that a managed service provider can deliver to a business, and we’d be happy to discuss it with you further. If you have any more questions or want to learn more about managed services and what they entail, give the professionals at MSPNetworks a call. Reach out to us today at (516) 403-9001.

For a moment, I want you to stop and consider something: Who do you turn to when your business’ toilets suddenly stop working? Who do you call for when the lights stop working? Most likely, an expert… so if you turn to the pros for these needs, why would you do anything different for your IT?

Here, we’ll present the value of turning to the IT experts that we have here at MSPNetworks for your business’ technology needs. These values can effectively be broken down into three essential qualities that our services - known as managed services - are built around.

Predictable Productivity

Regardless of a business’ size, this is a primary concern: are they able to sustain their operations at a rate that means that they can remain open? This is one of the reasons that productivity is such a big buzzword in IT - the influence a given solution can have on a business’ productivity can easily make or break it over time. Try asking your employees how much they can accomplish if their computers don’t work - they’ll probably tell you how important an operational solution is to your business in no uncertain terms.

With a managed service provider (or MSP) like MSPNetworks managing your solutions, you can be sure that your technology is maintained. This way, your employees won’t find themselves stymied by technical issues out of their control.

Protection

Let’s face facts for a moment - business owners today have a lot to worry about. Once upon a time, a business could be protected by storing their documents in a safe and keeping the combination a secret. However, in today’s increasingly collaborative world, the safe has been made impractical. This means that your data needs to be both accessible to those who need it to meet the productivity standards we discussed above, as well as secured against cyberthreats and other risk factors, like data loss.

An MSP like MSPNetworks can implement the various solutions needed to ensure that this balance is achieved, allowing you the security to focus on your business. With the confidence that our services and solutions--including integrated security measures and business continuity with backups--can provide, you can breathe easy, knowing that your data stores are secure.

Professionals Pulling For You

As you may have noticed by now, most of the qualities of an MSP’s services that we’ve discussed thus far revolve around you receiving the managed support that gives providers like MSPNetworks their self-explanatory title. However, that only scratches the service. When your MSP’s team is made up of experts like ours is, you not only have professionals providing your business with support… you have professionals supporting you.

Unlike many other IT service options, the more successful our clients are, the happier we are. After all, that means that our solutions worked for them, only reinforcing the proof that our options are the right ones to leverage. Furthermore, you can be sure that if you do experience a problem with your business technology we’ll come correct to fix it. Again, our success is determined by yours - so if something doesn’t work, that’s a problem for us… and frankly, our professional egos aren’t going to let us overlook a problem like that.

It only makes sense to turn to an expert for issues that you want taken care of correctly, for these reasons, and many more to boot. This is only more apparent when your information technology is involved. The “expert touch” is a real thing, and can make a real difference.

Interested in finding out the difference that an expert touch can make for your IT services? Reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.