We’re all about growing rapidly here at Lead Grow Develop. This is always tough to do, especially when you’re not ready to scale up into a large office with scores of employees including the IT department. It creates a bit of a quandary as to how to scale but still manage key technology tasks when in this situation.
One solution is to look to outsource tasks to third parties. This can be done individually for specific services or as a group to an IT consultancy or managed services provider. Let’s now look at how it will assist a business that’s growing fast.
Got an IT Emergency? Do You Have Anyone to Call?
As a small business, when there’s an IT problem, who do you call? Is it the thankless IT manager who seems to cover many different areas and always looks exhausted from late nights at the office? Depending on how many individual problems crop up at the same time, that emergency may not get managed right away.
Using a service provider that’s set up to respond to urgent support requests in under an hour, like INFINIT Consulting does as part of their service guarantee is a great relief. It will help the IT manager stay on top of their responsibilities while still letting them get a good night’s sleep.
Who Handles Your Backups Now?
If the answer is still that the IT team does it, then what time do they run them? Usually, it’s after the main office staff has gone home. It may even be set for an extremely late evening where they’ll have to log in remotely if they get alerted because the backup didn’t start properly. In a worst-case scenario, they may need to return to the office, making them someone who’s “on-call” which is likely to lead to burn out.
A backup solution that’s handled remotely and off-site removes the burden from staff who need the break. Typically, the IT department is the team that burns the midnight oil most often. However, this takes a toll on the team. Outsourcing this task to a separate team reduces the late nights and the possibility of callouts.
Fast Employee Growth Leads to Network Difficulties
As the headcount in the office grows, so does the number of terminals and users on the network. The service will need to be upgraded to increase its capabilities, otherwise it will get slower over time. This situation is one that tends to creep up on IT staff who fail to notice it until someone complains.
Also, with growth comes increasing concerns over security on the network. Security requires people focused solely on this area due to the ever-changing nature of it. Expecting a small team to deal with security internally is often a mistake.
Updates Also Increase with Growth
With the employee numbers increasing, there are more systems and PCs to update. Software updates seem to happen quicker every week now because of the new vulnerabilities being found in software necessitating a security update to patch the security hole.
While IT staff can perform the updates internally; the rising headcount makes that a task that grows in duration along with it. For hurried staff, it’s a good task to outsource to let them focus on more current activities to support the employees better in real-time.
For fast-growing companies, they do better to let their IT department stick to their core responsibilities and outsource others to avoid them getting bogged down.