If you’re starting out in the ultra competitive world of 21st century business, you’ve likely hustled good and hard for every penny of capital that you have to spend. As such you’ll be looking to get your startup off the ground with a minimum of initial expenditure on overheads. While this is business 101 for many, it can also be hugely counterproductive. One of the most common challenges faced by nascent entrepreneurs is finding that elusive balance between investing sufficiently in infrastructure to ensure that your business runs smoothly and making enough savings to ensure that your business has a healthy cash flow in its perilous early years.
If you’re expecting to outsource your IT infrastructure to a third party provider, you could be forgiven for thinking that all suppliers are more or less the same. However, despite your sincere desire to keep costs manageable, choosing a provider arbitrarily or based on cost can be counterproductive or even damaging for your business in the following ways…
They won’t account for growth
Strategy is an important part of running any business. Many nascent entrepreneurs are so busy spinning so many different plates that they spend all of their time with their attention solely on the running and day to day operation of their business that they do not take into account how their business can expand and grow sustainably.
Unless you want your business to stay small, you’ll need to work with an IT company that can plan for growth with you and ensure that your infrastructure is fit for purpose as your business grows and places more demands upon it.
Their solutions may be inadequate
Can you afford your business to be crippled by software or communications issues half way through a working day? Will you be able to withstand the loss of revenue or the impact it may have on your customers?
Cutting costs on your IT services may end up costing you a great deal in the long run. A managed IT service company, look at Red Key Solutions for a good example, should be able to give you assurances that they can meet your business’ needs. They should be able to provide industry specific software solutions while having the experience and expertise to let you operate with peace of mind.
You may face compliance issues
You know that as a new business, your compliance needs to be absolutely beyond reproach, especially when it comes to things like Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards. If you fail to do your due diligence on an outsourced IT management provider, you may run the risk of facing compliance issues.
You may lose data
Security is vitally important in the digital age and more and more businesses are finding that keeping their data secure is not to be taken lightly. Not only should your customer and client data be unimpeachably secure, you also need to be able to recover critical applications in the event of a system failure if you expect to continue running your business smoothly. Make sure that any IT company gives you a detailed account of their data security provision.
As with most things in life, you get what you pay for when it comes to IT support!
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