Advanced Automation Blog

Every organization depends on its information systems to be up and available when needed. Some businesses simply can’t function at all without them. When a business inevitably needs to patch its software or perform other maintenance, it can cause problems when employees need these systems to be available. This month, we’ll talk about the strategy behind proactive IT maintenance and how it helps businesses avoid downtime in multiple ways. 

The entire premise of managed IT services is that they can save your business money, but in what specific ways does working with us make your budget more predictable? It’s really quite simple, and it encompasses three primary pillars: an established level of service, proactive maintenance and management, and the reliability and access to expertise that might otherwise put a stopper on your business’ potential.

Today’s businesses are heavily reliant on technology to streamline operations and do more to enhance workforce productivity. With the multitude of technology options available, however, finding the right solutions for your business can be more difficult than it seems at first glimpse. Let’s take a look at how technology professionals can help you navigate the technology landscape and find solutions that align with your business needs.

With organizations running on technology, it is important that it is reliably managed. It’s also important that your organization has the technology in place that will help your team be the most productive and that will keep your data secure. The best way to accomplish this is with help from certified and knowledgeable IT technicians. 

Technology is complex, and it’s definitely not everyone’s cup of tea. This is more the case for business technology than consumer technology. Even those who consider themselves tech-savvy might be lost when it comes to managing business-grade technology solutions. How can you make sure that your business technology is receiving the service it needs to stay operational long-term?

Innovation is something that you want the people working with your technology to have a highly-developed sense of. Creativity isn’t often associated with business IT, but it is something that should be considered a true benefit if it can be brought into your operations.

Let’s explore exactly why creativity is an asset (even with your in-house IT team) and how you can nurture it in your employees.

For modern organizations that depend highly on their technology, nothing is quite so scary as an event that can completely marginalize its ability to operate. This doesn’t need to be a fire, flood, or some other major cataclysm; it could be something as simple as some of your old IT fails and you’re not ready for it. This week, we thought we’d briefly go through what a catastrophic failure looks like and some steps you can take to keep your business from experiencing one.

Most businesses set out to do an IT project when their technology needs an upgrade. Whether your business is looking to add new hardware, refresh the systems you already have, migrate to the cloud, or add new applications to your playbook, it can get pretty intimidating as cost and time overruns threaten your profitability. This week, we thought we would discuss an approach that can help any business—large or small— get their IT projects completed and integrated effectively: co-managed IT. 

There are countless issues that could arise when it comes to managing and maintaining your technology, but the people who are in charge of the process should not be one of them. If you don’t have a dedicated IT team to take care of your business technology, you might not be properly maintaining your technology. Thankfully, there are ways to get around limited resources, and it might not be what you think.

Each year we try to come up with a creative Christmas article that ties IT into one of the many holiday fables, but this year we thought we would just forgo the pageantry and talk a little bit about how important our clients are and what we do that can help take them where they want to go.

We believe that at the end of the day, employees want to do the right thing and accomplish their daily tasks without incident. However, technology can often break these plans with unexpected issues that prevent them from doing so. If you don’t take the time to provide the proper IT support when it is needed, you force your employees to either be unproductive or find unconventional (and often unsecure) solutions.

All businesses have different goals when it comes to developing their IT infrastructure. While some might struggle just making ends meet with important maintenance, others might decide that it’s time to branch out and try innovative new solutions to take their infrastructures to the next level. We want to make one thing clear; both situations are perfectly fine, so long as you are willing to accept that you could always be doing things better, and today is the perfect time to take the next steps.

Managed IT services are well known for being an incredibly useful service for a business as it helps offset the cost of keeping their technology up and running. What they aren’t as well known for are all the other services that they do to add value for their customers. 

There is no question that a small business can benefit from technology, as has been proven time and time again. However, an issue can arise if a business bites off more than it can chew, so to speak, and ultimately creates a spike in costs. A responsible business owner will resist this temptation and prioritize the solutions they need over the ones they want - building profitability and generating capital needed to make other improvements.

In this blog, we’ll examine some of the implementations that can deliver a good return on investment to a small business.

Let me ask you a quick question: when was your critical business technology last updated? When do your software licenses expire? When did your printer last have any maintenance performed on it?

Managed services have quickly become the most reasonable option for businesses of any size to use, and based on what we’ve seen recently, will soon be the only real option for most operations. However, when considering the managed service option, you need to make sure you find a provider with the following capabilities and service offerings:

Typically, when a business decides to upgrade their technology it is out of necessity. Either the business grows fast and starts to outpace the existing tech or it is burning through capital and has to find a solution to help optimize its operational efficiency. Of course, a business could very well think that some new technology will improve their profitability, or it could be mandated to change by regulation. 

Managed services offer businesses an improved means of obtaining and managing the technology they rely on. With data being so important to the modern business, much of this technology is devoted to storing, securing, and leveraging this data. Working with a managed service provider can help a business get the most value out of their data management practices. Let’s go over how.

It’s difficult to put a value on your organization’s technology solutions. While you might be tempted to assign a monetary value based on how much it all saves you, you also need to examine how much it costs you in the long term. Can you optimize your network even more than it currently is? Can you even keep track of the countless moving parts of your IT infrastructure? Managed IT might be able to help.

Businesses have a lot of technology to manage. While some organizations have an in-house IT department to manage it, many small businesses are limited due to location factors, budget concerns, and countless other variables. In the past, organizations would turn to break-fix IT management for all of their technology issues, but trends in IT maintenance have given rise to a more popular and more sustainable way for small businesses to get the technology maintenance and management they need.