The COVID-19 pandemic forced New York businesses to adopt new ways to operate. Many companies allowed employees to work remotely as a way to maintain productivity despite lockdowns. Some are keeping this work arrangement forever, while others are going for a hybrid work setup.
The past two years also saw an increase in both the number and ambition of cyberattacks. COVID-themed phishing emails proliferated at the onset of the pandemic, then attacks on vital infrastructures, such as a water treatment plant and a gas pipeline, made the news months later.
All of these changes made businesses lean more heavily on IT solutions that enhanced productivity while protecting company data and systems at the same time. However, implementing such solutions is easier said than done because doing so requires careful planning and significant IT expertise. Here are three IT problems that companies like yours commonly face — and how a managed IT services provider (MSP) such as Healthy IT can solve them for you.
1. Too many IT solutions is a problem
To enable remote or hybrid work setups, companies migrated their data and workloads to the cloud. They also adopted project management and communication tools to coordinate efforts and get things done. And to protect company data, companies implemented many other IT solutions, such as mobile device management, virtual private networks, and anti-malware programs, to name a few.
The system you built to keep your data safe may lead to data loss and costly downtime.
Inevitably, IT environments grew bigger and more complex. Often, environments are patchworks that are difficult to monitor, manage, and keep safe from cyberthreats, especially if there are incompatibility issues between them. That is, some solutions don’t interface effectively with others, while those that do work well together at the beginning may become wonky once you update them. Ironically, the system you built to keep your data safe may lead to data loss and costly downtime.
Other problems are capacity and cost: having too many applications running at the same time can overload your systems and make you overspend on cloud services.
What you need is an MSP that can assess your business requirements and streamline your IT environment so that operations run smoothly and data is protected. And instead of needing to look at different portals to watch out for cyberthreats, an MSP can build you a single cybersecurity portal from which you can see and safeguard everything.
2. More businesses may be backing up their data, but they’re doing it wrong
Imagine selling tens of thousands of items online. To compete on price, you scrape competitors’ prices to determine how much you would sell the same or similar items. But then imagine losing access to your scraped data as well as all of the past prices of your products. You won’t be able to sell your wares on your eCommerce site until you get your data back or determine new prices for your SKUs and post those prices on your site.
Since ransomware and other causes of data loss are now ever-present threats, more companies are backing up their data. However, not all are implementing the 3-2-1 backup strategy. This strategy includes keeping three copies of data, two of which must be stored on premises but on different media, and the third kept off site. This way, you are able to increase your odds of having at least one backup that's usable, especially with the rise of many types of malware that are programmed to search for and destroy backups.
Other mistakes businesses make include not backing up data often enough. Some types of data, such as delivery coordinates, tend to change quickly. On the other hand, others, such as customer information, don't change as often. The faster data changes, the more frequent its backup process ought to be. Otherwise, the data in the backup may become too stale to be usable.
To have reliable backups, you need to turn to an MSP. Our IT specialists can help you classify your data and build a cost-effective backup system for you.
3. Companies are dropping the ball on data regulations compliance
With so many things that business owners and office managers must pay attention to in the new normal, data regulations compliance is an easy thing to miss. You yourself might be uncertain whether or not you are subject to data privacy laws, so you may be breaking them already and not know it. In other cases, you may be fully aware of your compliance obligations but not know how to abide by the data regulations. Both of these scenarios put you at risk of being fined, getting sued, and damaging your reputation.
Your best bet is to rely on an MSP like Healthy IT for all of your data regulations compliance requirements. Our IT experts are knowledgeable about rules and regulations that apply to New York businesses.
For every IT problem your business may face in the new normal, you can trust Healthy IT to solve it for you. Send us a message today to learn more.