Proactive IT Strategy in Uncertain Times

Author: Steven Burns , President & COO

Read Time: 7mins

Several changes in the IT technology landscape are causing uncertainty for SMBs. The pressure of soaring cybercrime, hybrid work environments, staff shortages, and small IT team capacity constraints make it difficult to prioritize tasks.?

IT teams are finding themselves in a constant state of reacting—to software bugs, hardware failures, issues stemming from user error. This is a strategy that leaves the doors open to a costly disaster such as a breach in data privacy or employees getting locked out of work systems causing a complete productivity standstill and potential service disruption. In organizations where the IT team is a team of one—or no one at all—the risk is all the higher.?

By underinvesting in IT, SMBs should expect to stay in a reactive state. When there is always a fire to be put out, you risk making bad IT decisions that could lead to a company-wide halt in productivity.?

?Your business can make smart decisions about how you tackle modern IT challenges.?

Getting Ahead: Moving Away From a Reactive Strategy

?To escape a constant cycle of reactivity, SMBs must consciously adopt a proactive strategy and take immediate steps to achieve it. Strategic planning is integral to the success of any SMB organization, and IT should not be excluded. To formulate a proactive IT strategy, you must plan for when things go well and when they don’t.?

IT roadmapping is a type of planning designed and ideal for organizations with modern IT structures and teams. This type of planning helps IT teams focus on key milestones to guide their decision-making. Specifically, this type of roadmap determines the timelines, actions, and resources needed to accomplish goals that impact the organization’s internal systems and processes. An IT roadmap includes detailed IT-specific projects such as updating software or migrating data.

Inefficient processes and undeployed or underused software are all realities when a proactive IT strategy is not used. You may think you are preparing for growth by investing in a variety of products when in fact you could be wasting your budget on underused software that may not even be deployed until it is outdated, or that doesn’t serve your IT goals.??

Although the decision is yours to move to a proactive approach, all of the planning does not have to land on the (already full) plate of your IT team. In these times of hybrid work models, SMBs have learned that outsourcing IT support and management can alleviate a lot of pressures placed on small teams, IT planning included.?

Add Certainty to Your Budget

Outsourcing your IT planning will help you manage the transition from a reactive approach to a proactive IT strategy. Additionally, outsourcing will help control your budget by reducing recruitment costs, management resources, and overhead.?

IT teams are not immune to soaring inflation prices—the costs of tech talent, training, equipment, and software have all increased in recent years. By choosing a managed IT service provider to fully manage or augment your current IT capabilities, costs will be predictable and you’ll have access to service desk support, IT infrastructure management and monitoring, and human resources that could cost an exorbitant amount to handle in-house.??

Productivity loss is another potential cost of a reactive approach to IT. Managed IT service providers (MSPs) assist employees with technical challenges and push for a timely resolution, reducing interruptions to their productivity and any impacts to end users.?

A knowledgeable, trusted MSP can even provide expertise and guidance to SMBs when making decisions about scalable software and hardware solutions that best fit their needs and budget at any given time.

Scalable Resources—Ready to Grow When You Are

Planning for the future often means being prepared for change. Growing your team, deploying more features from your software, increasing productivity, and better supporting remote employees are on the to-do list of many SMBs. But when you’re a small business owner or leader just trying to keep up with what’s in front of you, growing and implementing changes such as these are the last things on your mind.?

With a managed IT service provider, you have a full team of experts that are ready and prepared to support your growing business. The reliability of outsourcing to a scalable IT service provider truly allows you to plan and act proactively versus reactively, knowing there are resources you can depend on for scenarios accounted for in your IT roadmap.?

Small IT teams also require software solutions that are scalable, so that the technology being used by employees will enable them to stay connected and productive as the company grows. Microsoft’s technology is designed to grow with you—when you’re ready.

Increasing Productivity with Microsoft

Bring your IT roadmap goals to life with a proactive IT strategy. Using a single Microsoft technology stack, you’ll have the tools to create work process efficiencies and increase productivity. Whether your employees are working on-site, remotely, or both, the level of data protection and productivity will not differ. In fact, Microsoft is designed to add security features without making it harder for employees to do their jobs.?

Bulletproof has helped SMBs on six continents protect their data, devices, and people. As Microsoft 2021 Global Security Partner of the Year winner and 5X Microsoft Canada IMPACT Award winner, Bulletproof has over two decades of experience effectively implementing IT processes, procedures, software, and support, allowing SMB leaders to do what they do best: focus on their business.

Seeing the Full Picture

Having a proactive IT strategy should account for every scenario that could arise so you and your team know exactly what to do in the event something does go wrong.?

For example, if you are migrating your servers from on-premises to the cloud, who is responsible? Will there be any system downtime? How could it impact your employee productivity or your customers? These are the types of questions that need to be considered and planned for so that you can optimize your technology with minimal disruption. Our Managed Services team has decades of experience handling all kinds of system migrations and have the project management expertise to make sure your migration goes off without a hitch.?

Or say your employee switches from working from the office to working from home and can no longer access the materials they need to perform their work. Who should that employee contact for help? How can that employee get their technology back to full function so that productivity doesn’t suffer? Everybody in your organization should understand who to turn to when things go wrong, and you should feel confident that issues will be resolved swiftly, without impacting organizational efficiency.

Change is Certain

Your plan is not going to change from your current reactive approach to a proactive one overnight—organizational buy-in and behavioral changes are required to achieve adoption. There will be a necessary transition time as people and processes adapt. If you are outsourcing your IT services, you have access to top-level expertise to guide you to best-in-class training and change management solutions.?

Additionally, the plan will need to be iterated on as environmental factors influence IT processes. If one thing is certain, it’s change—so how are you going to prepare and adapt for it?

Planning, training, and executing an IT roadmap is a great start to taking a proactive approach to IT strategy. Having the expertise from Bulletproof to help guide your roadmapping to match your goals and the existing capabilities of your team gives you scalable options and peace of mind knowing your IT strategy is strong and secure.

The benefits to SMBs of outsourcing IT services reach beyond the planning and transition stages. It could be the solution your organization needs to relieve many modern issues in these uncertain times.?

Learn more about how to get a winning IT strategy for your small business: https://bit.ly/3O0PkQS