While technology is an important part of your business, it shouldn’t be distracting you from carrying out your company’s mission. Indeed, it can be difficult to stay up-to-date on the latest practices and solutions, and it can feel impossible to keep up. While you could adopt the “good enough” policy that many businesses settle for, we think you should take a different approach—one that will make you impossible to compete with if carried out appropriately.

The Real Costs of Falling Behind

Your outdated IT infrastructure is not doing you any favors. In fact, it could be creating significant costs for your organization over time… costs that eat into your security, productivity, and profits.

Security Issues

Outdated hardware and software will experience more security issues due to lacking vendor support and security updates. Around 60% of data breaches use known, unpatched vulnerabilities, and if you’re not careful, you could become part of that statistic. These types of breaches cost, on average, $3 million—and that’s before you get into the nitty gritty from the damages to your reputation and compliance issues.

Productivity Challenges

You might be shocked by how much productivity you lose out on from slow computers, software crashes, and system failures. Outdated technology can reduce efficiency by nearly 40%, and older PCs alone could lose you 20 hours of productivity every year per employee. In addition to the lost productivity, it just frustrates people and makes them feel like they can’t get anything done, bleeding into their morale.

Innovation Stalls

When your systems grow older and less efficient, they also struggle with modern solutions, cloud services, and even productivity tools. This makes it harder to bring new technologies into the mix, technologies that could make a significant difference in your business’ day-to-day. Since the folks you compete with are using these technologies, you want to do what you can to do the same.

Why Not Hire an Internal IT Department?

While you could invest heavily into hiring IT talent for your business, know that having an internal IT staff comes with its own set of challenges.

It takes a lot of expertise and knowledge to stay up-to-date on the latest developments in business technology, and small teams can struggle to keep up when they already have so much on their plates. The updating process involves researching, testing, scheduling, and deploying updates, all while keeping up with routine maintenance and troubleshooting issues. Considering that hiring, training, and retaining even one skilled IT professional could cost your business anywhere from $88,000-$120,000 annually, you can see why we recommend a different approach for your business’ update needs.

And there really is no room for error here, as downtime could create significant challenges for your business if even one update doesn’t go according to plan.

We’ll Work With You to Update Your IT

With First Column IT on your side, you get a dedicated managed service provider (MSP) who can assist your business with just about any issue related to technology you might need. We do this through a combination of proactive measures, including…

• Managed updates and patch management: We’ll handle every step of the update process, including identification, testing for compatibility, and scheduling deployments, all without disrupting your business’ operations.
• Hardware lifecycle management: Instead of waiting for critical hardware like servers and laptops to fail, we take a proactive stance, assessing your equipment, managing warranties, and keeping tabs on the lifecycles of your devices to ensure they never get to that point. We’ll handle the procurement, configuration, and deployment while you stay on task.
• 24/7 proactive monitoring: We’ll keep an eye on your business’ technology to guarantee its health and performance over time. Our tools can detect and resolve issues before they make a dent in operations, all while limiting risk of downtime.

You get all of the above at a fixed monthly fee… and that’s without mentioning access to the collective knowledge and expertise of our staff. It’s a reasonable price to pay compared to the alternative.

You Can Focus on Running Your Business

With IT handled by our professional staff, you can focus on running your business, a much more fun, interesting, and fulfilling task that your skills are better equipped for. To learn more about our managed IT services, call us today at (571) 470-5594.

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