Managing a website is daunting enough without having to worry about all the nuts and bolts that come with maintaining the backend. As a business owner, there’s plenty on your plate: you’re tasked with developing a comprehensive marketing strategy, identifying and reaching your targeting audience, and designing an aesthetically pleasing website that attracts them. You should be able to focus on building your business without putting too much effort on maintaining its foundation.
This is where managed cloud service providers come in. These providers are there every step of the way to help you alleviate the burden of managing complex computer networks in addition to your entrepreneurial duties. Cloud technology makes it possible to run your business from anywhere in the world.
Many people understand that IT teams help protect your website from a growing number of threats, but there’s a lot more to them as well. Here are five things you didn’t know they could do for you:
Scale Your Growth
One of the biggest things small businesses and startups struggle with is scaling. Simply put, when you’re just starting out, the first couple of years can be a rough ride, and you don’t always have the resources to afford your own in-house department. The off-site IT services that managed cloud providers offer can be a great solution to helping your company grow without sacrificing exuberant amounts of money and time. The alternative is certainly time-consuming and costly: you’ll spend time scouting the most experience, culture-fit staff to take the reins, and will need to shell out a full salary for each employee. With managed services, IT is straight from the box.
Create Security Through Accountability
Another great thing about managed services is that they enforce a high level of accountability, and therefore security. This means that an entire team is working diligently behind the scenes to ensure every aspect of your site is going smoothly. Unlike a traditional on-site IT team, if an employee performed less than stellar, you’d be tasking with firing and replacing that employee, not to mention dealing with any repercussions of that team member’s slack. This isn’t so with off-site teams. If you were uncomfortable with someone, in particular, that individual would be dealt with accordingly without you ever having to lift a finger.
Offer Business Consulting Software
In today’s tech landscape, software is changing at a rapid pace. This means keeping up with software trends and changes can be a challenging endeavor. With this in mind, your IT source will continuously run an analysis to ensure every integration goes smoothly. Beyond this, they’ll help you understand how to use it effectively in the workplace, which allows your team to continue day-to-day operations without disruptions.
Thorough Backup Services
You work extremely hard for every bit of virtual real estate you build. As such, it’s important to protect yourself against any unforeseen circumstances. While there are plenty of options available to do so–for example, WordPress users might install a plugin that automatically saves backups of their websites–a true IT team is the gold standard. You wouldn’t want to rely completely on a plugin that may or may not be outdated.
Content marketing specialist Cristina Chipurici described an incident where she lost thousands of emails, 5,000 blog posts, and thousands of comments after a vengeful employee went on a personal mission to destroy her company. While she was eventually able to regain access via laborious process of contacting each company individually (hosting provider, Google, etc), she was unable to retrieve the emails she’d built up in over the years.
It took this occurrence to demonstrate exactly how important those data backups were. “I had been using my Gmail account since September 2004, I had lots of important documents on it, but also emails with emotional value,” she said. “Since I never backed up any of that, they were permanently gone.”
Backups provide insurance against a variety of occurrences; human error, infection or virtual threat, and server crashes among them. They may it possible to retain all data and designs if one of these emergencies were to occur.
Manage Your IT Projects
Project management can be a gruesome, time-consuming task, especially when dealing with IT-related projects. Fortunately, many IT teams can take this off your plate. After all, many business struggle with project management, and often rely on contractors with varying levels of quality. Managed IT teams are able to are able to improve project delivery in accordance with a set number of projects, budgets, and consistently high-quality.