Proactive IT solutions give you control over the future direction of your IT as well as keep your systems running smoothly and efficiently, prepared for potential disaster, and fortified against cyberattacks. With proactive solutions, it takes minimum effort to keep your ducks in a row, allowing you to focus on larger ideas and projects that can help propel your business forward.
With reactive IT, you choose to deal with an issue as it arises instead of preemptively solving it. With a reactive approach, you aren’t taking the time to see problems coming and only identify them when they majorly affect your system. This does not allow for a lot of time to make good strategic decisions in fixing the issue and costs you both money and downtime.
The proactive approach empowers your IT partner to make better decisions for your IT system, catch problems before they grow into serious threats, keep your team working efficiently, and allow you to focus on ideas that can have a more profound effect on your business. When done correctly, proactive IT should reduce your reliance on reactive helpdesk services.
5 steps to becoming more proactive with your IT
1. Identify Recurring Issues
To understand where to start, it is important to understand the issues you have experienced in the past. By analyzing past issues, you can better understand the overall health of your system and begin to identify and solve the root problems that cause issues. Just like when a doctor uses your medical history to generate a diagnosis and treatment plan, your system’s history can be the key to understanding what you need to do for its future.
2. Match Your IT Goals With Your Business Goals
When being proactive, you have the time to make informed decisions about the maintenance and improvement of your IT systems. It is important to have identified your business priorities so you have direction in making these decisions. For example, suppose your main priority is driving innovation and business growth. In that case, you’ll need to quickly and securely onboard new employees while upgrading your systems as needed to support the increased number of users. Knowing this, you and your IT provider can prepare your system for growth and create effective employee onboarding processes.
3. Keep A Close Eye On Your Systems
A huge part of proactive IT is knowing how your system is doing. You want to identify any symptoms of a potential issue before they wreak havoc while also performing regular maintenance to keep things in good working order. The easiest way to keep an eye on your system is to leverage monitoring tools. As your IT partner, we give you access to our tool stack so we can remotely monitor and respond to activity on your network, receive alerts about potential security threats, remind your employees about updating their devices (or do it for them), and remotely access your system to provide support if needed. We know that IT services are never “done”; it is a continuous cycle of maintaining and improving.
4. Be Prepared For Anything
Included in a proactive approach to IT is planning for potentially disastrous situations. With how heavily businesses rely on technology, it is essential to have contingency plans. Whether it’s human error, a natural disaster, a hardware failure, or a cyberattack, you want to be sure a recent backup of your data is safe, secure, and accessible when you need it. Investing in reliable backup and disaster recovery services is like having an IT insurance policy.
5. Don’t Skimp On Your Security Solutions
One of the biggest threats to your IT system is gaps in your cybersecurity. Tightening security proactively protects you from a host of potential threats that could destroy your system and take you offline or out of business. Performing regular security checks, leveraging security tools and software, and providing cybersecurity training to your employees is necessary.
Being Proactive Can Save You Money
By taking the steps we have outlined above, you ensure that your systems stay in good health, keep operating at the highest efficiency levels possible, and are prepared to support you wherever your business is going. Waiting for issues to warrant a reaction will end up costing you more to fix, stressing you and your team out, and detracting from your customer’s experience.
We can help free you from this reactive cycle and guide you through the steps to becoming more proactive with your IT. If you are ready to get your IT systems in order, you can book a call with us via the button below.
