An IT Support Blog from London

There is one area on which everyone concentrates when it comes to getting the most out of an IT budget: squeezing the supplier. Though getting commodity items at the best prices and achieving the most value out of the services and IT support costs you pay for is important, there are many other areas where careful consideration can result in far more optimal IT spending.

Deloitte’s 2016-2017 CIO survey found that, on average across all industries, expenditure on IT packages, staff, and services accounts for 3.28% of a company’s turnover, with businesses in professional services industries commonly managing annual IT budgets of 6% of overall turnover. The importance of optimal spending is clearly very high. Here we outline a few of the top areas we think your business should focus on.

Most businesses intensively use electronic, text-based platforms such as e-mail and team chat for communications, but under many circumstances, a voice call still carries more weight than words on a screen. For this reason, telephony remains an important part of organisational communications, and picking the right infrastructure is equally important.

Your choice of telephone system will depend on many factors: is your company upgrading, or are you procuring a new system? The quality of your internet connection and the distribution of staff are also key influencing factors. Each choice of system has unique benefits and drawbacks, there really is no one size fits all solution but some options may be a better fit for your business.

Let’s say you’ve already invested a fortune on network security. How do you determine that investment’s effectiveness in preventing a data leak or withstanding a deliberate cyber attack? Your best option would be to conduct a penetration test or pen test.

The reliability of the IT organisation plays a critical role in every enterprise, given how the use of technology has deeply entrenched itself into every business organisation. From being more of back office tools a few decades ago, IT systems are now front and center in many enterprises’ business activities.

With IT contributing significantly to customer-facing applications, analytics services, and even creating new revenue streams for the enterprise, it’s important for the IT group to maintains its operational and cost efficiency. One way to ensure that the IT network competently responds to business needs while keeping within budgets is to implement IT infrastructure standardisation.

Do we keep our IT services in-house, or do we outsource IT responsibilities? That is the question many management teams ask themselves when they look at the benefits of managed IT services. Outsourcing IT services save costs, introduces new knowledge and helps businesses focus. However fully outsourcing IT functions is not the best route for every organisation, and there are pros and cons to each approach. But how about opting for a mixed model?

Leading IT Support Company, HTL Support, has acquired Serviced Cloud – the long-established private Cloud Company.

HTL’s recent expansion has played a key role in the Serviced Cloud merger. The two companies have worked closely together for many years in what has been described as a natural partnership, providing a bespoke service for large and small business.  The merger represents a formalizing of the business arrangements, yet will be seamless for the special relationship with customers. There has been no disclosure relating to the costs to HTL in taking Serviced Cloud under its umbrella.   

It’s a back-and-forth sentiment that’s not uncommon in many organisations: business executives believe that IT is not doing enough to support business goals while IT leaders are of the opinion that management is holding out on IT investments, preventing them from doing more. In today’s ever-evolving business landscape where the right use of IT can give organisations a competitive edge, the need for aligning technology with business objectives has never been more important.

Both sides–management and the IT organisation – may assert that they are working towards the achievement of the company’s goals. But unless their efforts are aligned, i.e. IT contribution is clearly manifested in efficiency, productivity, and profitability, top management will be hard-pressed to see technology as an enabler of core business strategies and IT people will continue to feel underappreciated.

Settling the finances around your company’s IT requirements can be a fraught process, with information technology often at the bottom of the list of priorities when fixing budgets. Cloud computing has the potential to make budgeting for IT requirements far easier, but there are pitfalls along the way.

Creating and maintaining your own blog is very hard work. It entails hours of work thinking of creative titles, working on themes, and producing quality content. Plus, you need to keep your site relevant by updating it with new content regularly, performing SEO, and promoting to new and existing clients through social media. All this takes time and effort.

So imagine then, when someone simply copies the whole of your post and puts it up on their own website. Imitation, as they say, is the greatest form of flattery, and it does feel good to know that another company thinks highly enough of your unique content to use it for their own websites without permission. But clearly, this immoral and unprofessional behaviour is tantamount to theft and can leave the original content creators feeling hard done by. All that work and someone else copy-pastes your articles just like that.

Because your main objective is to grow your business, it can be burdensome when you also need to allocate time to manage your IT assets - even if that can also translate into business benefits. The good news is that there’s a way to grow your business and manage your IT assets without spending much time on the latter. It’s called managed services.

This isn’t an article for explaining what managed services is. We’re assuming you already know what managed services is but are still looking for a good reason to hire one. This post should take care of that. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the major benefits of working with a managed services provider.