Why Your Business Needs an IT Support Partner.

It's a concerning reality that many businesses in the UK operate without an IT partner or even employees with a solid understanding of IT. These companies are gambling with their operations, relying on luck and good fortune to avoid serious IT issues or data breaches.

As you have found this post and are reading it, you think having an IT partner to support and assist your business and team with their IT is something you should consider, but you have yet to commit fully. This post is here to help you understand the importance of IT in your business and why having professional IT support is necessary.

The word "support" is wrong.

Sadly, most people know IT partners as "IT Support." The word support gives the wrong impression of what a good IT Partner provides to your business. The term misguides people into associating IT Support with a service only used when things go wrong: fixing a broken printer, getting a PDF to load, removing a virus, etc. That's why the term "IT Support" has been expanded at Kimbley IT to "IT Assistance and Support" to show there is more.

Support is about helping when things don't go according to plan, such as when a printer stops printing. Assistance is more about asking if this document needs to be printed and providing a better way to share this information in a more collaborative, secure, and potentially environmentally friendly-way.

Companies without an IT partner miss the assistance element that an IT partner brings. Yes, powering off and on the printer may work this time, but that won't always be successful, and if you have to do that every time you want to print, that is a lot of time wasted. What won't be asked by these IT supportless companies is how we can do this better. Do we need to print and post this document? Is there a better way?

This is where having an IT partner brings in a lot of value.

Firstly, they can fix that printer so that it works when there is a genuine reason to print, such as returning a government form. But now, with the assistance element, Kimbley IT can advise your business on better ways to do things.

For example, suppose you want to collect satisfaction levels for a new service you have recently started offering your clients. To do this, you currently send a Word document by email for them to complete. It is a hassle, though, as not all use Microsoft Word, and the document does not load correctly on their mobile phones. What gets returned is a mess, and it is hard to collate the data into an Excel spreadsheet, requiring someone in your team to spend a lot of time cleaning up the data before manually entering it into the spreadsheet.

When you have a partner like Kimbley IT, you and your team can be assisted and shown how to use Google Forms to create a form and share it for responses that work on any device. Better still, all submitted forms are instantly added to a Google Sheet so you can quickly disseminate the data, saving significant amounts of time for your team.

The non-visible side of IT Assistance and Support.

Now, let's discuss the invisible benefits. The things that are vital for a reliable IT system and the things that happen behind the scenes are things that all those businesses with no IT partner fail to cover.

The biggest technical asset for any business is the data your team has created and the data your clients have trusted you to manage and keep secure. Every day, your team creates new data; this could be a new email they compose, a thoughtful blog post, or a new video for a client's marketing campaign; the list is endless. One common thing to all is the work hours to create this data, all paid for through wages. If your business were to lose this data, imagine how much wages that would have cost you. It is a lot.

In the background, however, when you have an IT partner, provisions are in place to protect this data and the wages you have paid for the work hours involved, systems are kept up to date and secure, ransomware is defended against, and backups are regularly taken and tested.

Many more things occur in the background, such as onboarding and offboarding team members, setting permissions, securing access, preventing data loss, continued compliance with standards such as Cyber Essentials, and more, all things companies without IT support fail to do.

How you can find out more.

You could do your IT yourself, but you won't. You could change a leaking tap, but you won't, as neither are your areas of expertise, and great business owners recognise this. Instead, you're going to hire a plumber.

Managing your IT is time-consuming and complicated. When you lack the knowledge, you should outsource to an IT provider, such as Kimbley IT. If you would like to find out more about how IT Assistance and Support by Kimbley IT can help your business, book a video call below.