The business world moves fast, faster than croissants out the door at Lune Croissanterie on Collins Street – it’s a dynamic space that is increasingly becoming dominated by technology. For many business owners, the fast pace of technology in business can be overwhelming. Despite the huge benefits of using technology to manage business operations, it can be challenging for business owners to know how to best integrate technologies. Ultimately, this can lead to technology becoming a new pain point for business owners rather than a tool for optimization.
Things have been challenging enough in Melbourne these past few years with Covid lockdowns, not to mention the polar blasts we’re currently facing this winter – we want to make life easier for Melbourne business owners and the best way we know how is to share our IT expertise.
Today we’re giving an overview of five key technology challenges and highlighting why they’re important to address to help business owners prioritise areas for improvement when it comes to technology in their business.
Managing IT costs
First and foremost, all businesses need to effectively manage their cash flow. IT costs can often creep over time and become unsustainable for businesses to manage. Considering IT management requires support services, alongside hardware and software services, costs can add up quickly. However, modern businesses also need to acknowledge the need for these services to ensure security and data protection. The high costs associated with the integration and maintenance of new technologies are also often a significantly higher proportion of spend for business owners versus large corporations. As Melbourne-based IT Support specialists, we advise businesses to explore options involving outsourcing their IT support rather than hiring a full-time IT support employee – this can provide tailored and on-demand support when you need it and maximise the value of your IT spend.
Ensuring security
No one is immune to the risk of a cyber-attack and hackers are constantly evolving and developing new ways to target businesses. Small businesses, in particular, can leave themselves exposed to an attack by using outdated software that lacks the features designed to protect against the sophisticated strategies used by hackers these days. Managing security is vital – it can mean the difference between a business succeeding or having to close its doors. Regardless of size or industry, your business needs up-to-date security systems in place to ensure it’s ready for possible security breaches.
Keeping up to date with new technologies
We are constantly being introduced to new technologies and as business owners, we’re not usually IT experts. It can be a real nightmare trying to keep up to date with emerging technologies but failing to do so can mean you miss out on important IT trends and opportunities to optimise your business. A great example is cloud computing technology – many Businesses are not utilising it despite its capacity to prevent data breaches.
Overcoming poor IT planning
When you’re running a business and managing many different aspects of its day-to-day operations, devoting time to strategic IT planning is likely at the bottom of the to-do list. This can lead to poor decision-making, or even a complete lack of decision-making when it comes to choosing appropriate IT hardware, software, and security services. It can also mean that business owners don’t know what they’re looking for when hiring IT staff or partners to support them with their IT planning and implementation.
Disaster recovery and backup systems
Things go wrong (Melbourne knows this all too well) and when they do it’s much less disruptive to your business operations if you have already systems in place to manage them. The loss of valuable data can have a huge impact on Businesses – it’s not worth the risk or the stress. You’ll thank yourself for taking a proactive approach to developing a disaster recovery plan and maintaining backup systems when the worst hits.
Every business will face technology challenges over time. Businesses can be overexposed to these challenges due to a lack of resources and IT planning expertise. We’ve shared some key challenges to help you prioritise the areas of your business that could benefit from improvement – no doubt you’ve got Sydney competitors to outperform!
Like most things, IT challenges are best managed through planning and preparedness – and of course, there are IT specialists that can support your business to effectively utilise technology for process improvement as well as risk management. We know Melbourne business and we’re ready to help with your IT needs so you can sit back with a coffee and focus on better things!
