Modern businesses are becoming synonymous with data-driven businesses as the adoption of modern IT technologies continues to rise. The increasing adoption, however, is leading to changing customer behaviorisms as they expect more capabilities. Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) aren’t immune to these changing expectations and as a result, most SMEs today are hard-pressed to improve their IT infrastructure to stay competitive.
Unfortunately, maintaining a highly-functional IT infrastructure isn’t straight-forward but due to the sheer value of a secure and capable IT infrastructure, it’s always worth it to navigate through and solve the challenges. And the first step to do that is to identify the issues.
Top 5 Most Common IT Issues by SMEs
Here at Tucu, we’ve been working directly with SMEs to help fix their IT issues and have identified the most common IT issues faced by SMEs – which, once addressed, will significantly improve your business’s IT capabilities and have a direct positive impact on the company’s bottom line. Let’s dive deeper into the top 5 most common IT issues faced by SMEs in 2021.
Passing vender screenings
Due to the increased legal responsibility, companies are more careful at contracting vendors and as a result, vendor screenings have become more prevalent. Even if your business offers excellent value, has a proven track record of success, and experience, failing to pass the vendor assessment can still result in a lost client.
A vendor screening is usually an assessment of the risk involved in contracting a vendor. And one of the biggest reasons SMEs fail vendor screenings is not meeting regulatory or internal compliance requirements and audits.
Other major reasons for failing vendor screenings include poor IT infrastructure and an overall lack of security protocols in place.
Related: Learn more about IT Compliance
Remote Working Staff
Remote working has quickly become a top priority for every business and it’s one of the trends that is here to stay. And although it’s been almost a year since the shift towards remote working began, many SMEs are still struggling to find the optimum IT setup.
The most common problem remote working is posing to SMEs is finding a balance between cost and functionality. With more functionality and capabilities, the costs rise but identifying the unique business requirements is more difficult than it seems. Additionally, SMEs also need to stay on top of security threats that come with remote working, especially the possibility of data loss and theft.
Cloud migration
Using cloud platforms has very obvious benefits in terms of lower overall costs, greater flexibility and scalability, more resilient to failures, and more secure right out of the box. In other words, migrating to the cloud is the right move to stay competitive but cloud migration poses its own set of challenges. For instance, businesses first need to assess their current needs, choose a cloud services vendor, choose the migration strategy, and then begin the actual migration. That said, all of this can be made very easy with the right team and support.
Device Security & BYOD
With stricter compliance policies in place, SMEs must improve security and one of the most common causes of data breaches is improper device security. With potentially hundreds of devices accessing company data every day, the potential for data loss and theft increases significantly.
Additionally, while Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is important for productivity and to facilitate remote working, it can make device security even more complicated. Fortunately, this is one of the less severe problems as SMEs can overcome device security vulnerabilities with device management tools that provide granular access control and automation.
Choosing IT strategies, software, and configurations
With literally dozens, if not, hundreds of choices in almost every aspect of IT management, it’s very easy to get confused on what the best choice is. There are numerous resources that can help non-technical founders make a decision but the truth is, every business operates under unique circumstances and there is no guarantee that a specific software or configuration will work for your business.
To further complicate things, most SMEs do not have the managerial or financial capacity to maintain a full IT workforce that can take care of these things. This is one of the reasons why managed services have become so popular. Even with their limited capacity, SMEs can work with a managed service provider like Tucu to understand and deploy custom solutions to their IT problems.
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