Why is IT Support Needed?

If you've ever why IT support is needed for businesses, we've got you covered. Continue reading for a full break down of reasons why getting IT support will advance, protect, and drive success in your business.

Would you buy a car and expect it to drive itself and never break down? Would you open a call center without hiring anyone to answer the phone? Of course not. That’s why it is unreasonable to invest in business technology (computer hardware or software) without hiring an information technology (IT) support team to take care of it and be there to address tech-related problems as they arise.

Every business relies on technology because technology improves communication and efficiency, supplies knowledge, protects against attacks, increases the capacity for businesses, and is necessary for business expansion. These are important benefits that lead us to understand how IT support is an essential element of any organization. Managed Solution is here to discuss what having experienced tech support means for a company.

Effective Solutions to Tech Problems

We have to expect technology to fail or malfunction, so we need a team of people with the right skill sets to address the problems and prevent them from happening. Your staff might know how to work with the company’s systems, but they wouldn’t know what to do if something goes wrong. How long can you afford to have your systems down before it begins to affect your business? With the IT support team in place, disaster recovery is more achievable because they can analyze most technical issues and solve issues quickly by delivering highly-skilled solutions.

Cyberattack Protection

According to Bitdefender’s 2019 Hacked Off report, 57% of companies reported that they’d experienced a network security breach in the past three years, while the rest said it’s likely they experienced one unknowingly. Small and medium-sized businesses are the target of cybercriminals who mostly rely on using phishing attacks to infiltrate their IT system. Having anti-virus software installed is not enough because you need someone knowledgeable and experienced to help you detect and avoid the full spectrum of viruses and malware. This is where an IT support team can help you defend your IT infrastructure.

Setting Up your IT Infrastructure

This is one of the primary reasons why your company needs IT support. For easier communication and more efficient business operations, IT systems combine up-to-date tech with appropriate business data. Setting up these systems is not easy – it is a complex and delicate task that needs to be performed by professionals. If you don’t already have an IT strategy in place, you should consider teaming up with an IT support team to make sure you can compete in the market. Also, your IT infrastructure needs to be managed and monitored so you are sure that everything always runs efficiently and smoothly for the benefit of your company. Without tech-savvy personnel, regular network and system maintenance can be a challenge.

Diagnosing and Resolving Issues

System and network crashes are a common occurrence, especially when they’re overloaded, so diagnosing and resolving issues becomes a challenge. Failures can be crippling for a business that has become dependent on its IT system. An IT support team is there to help identify and fix problems quickly so the business can go back to its normal routines (without experiencing any significant losses).

Data Storage, Security, and Management

The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) came into effect in May 2018, and it tightened the regulations around data protection. The GDPR is the strongest set of data protection rules and regulations created to enhance how people access the information about consumers that companies collect. Also, it places limits on what companies and organizations can do with their personal data. If organizations don’t comply with the legislation, regulators can find them (and the fines have increased significantly).

As for organizations based in California and those nationwide doing business in California, they should comply with the CCPA (California’s Consumer Privacy Act), which came into effect on January 1, 2020. The act is the most comprehensive consumer-focused data privacy set of regulations enacted in the U.S. (so far). CCPA mandates requirements that apply to a multitude of industries, and determining if your company is required to comply with it is the first step.

This means that it’s time for organizations to start taking data protection very seriously. An IT support team is there to make sure the data is easily accessible (only to those that they want to view it) and stored in a secure environment. Without the help of an experienced IT team, you could compromise your data by storing it in a vulnerable location, accessing your computer systems with public internet connections, or giving access to company data to unauthorized people who intend to take advantage of weak cybersecurity.

Updating Old Systems

Technology constantly changes and evolves, so what works today might not work tomorrow. Businesses need to keep up with the latest inventions in technology, and that’s where IT support can help by ensuring that all company systems are up-to-date. That way, organizations won’t be left behind because they’re using outdated and obsolete equipment while their competitors move ahead.

Is IT Support Needed for Every Company?

The answer: YES. Every company needs either an IT specialist or a professional IT support team. For some, that means creating a segmented in-house IT department, while others might need to outsource their technical support process. IT technicians don’t need to be on-site in order to service your IT infrastructure or keep your data secure because most of the work can be performed remotely with cloud computing. Startups and SMBs usually find IT support to be the most preferable and cost-effective option. Large corporations typically go for in-house IT teams, which is a more expensive option, but it comes with its own set of advantages.

Effective IT support needs to be accessible around-the-clock because tech problems can occur at any time. What you need is a fast response time, and most MSP (Managed Service Provider) remote IT support teams are ready to address any issues as soon as they come up - with some engaging their clients via video conferencing. One of the advantages of MSP IT support teams over in-house teams is that the provider always has enough personnel to take care of your IT infrastructure. If your primary IT support contact goes on vacation, gets sick, or quits their job, you can be sure that another person is there and ready to take his or her place.

Conclusion

Outsourcing a tech support team may reduce the control you have over your IT processes, but if you lack in-house expertise, your company will definitely benefit from the expertise provided by a Managed Service Provider. Typically, small and medium-sized businesses have 1-5 people in-house (if any). If the loss of control doesn’t interfere with your business processes and operations, the advantages will outweigh all the disadvantages it may cause. After all, without proper IT support, your organization’s advanced technologies become useless.

Healthcare infrastructure will help cure healthcare

By Emmi Kendall as written on techcrunch.com

Donald Trump’s election has left many wary of how he’ll respond to a campaign promise to dismantle Obamacare. It seems that select aspects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka Obamacare, will remain intact. Likely to remain are provisions that make it illegal for insurers to deny a patient’s pre-existing medical conditions and enable children to stay on their parents’ insurance plans through age 26.

While not part of the ACA, structural innovations designed to control cost, such as the shift to value-based care (VBC), a new way of paying doctors and hospitals, will likely continue (more on this later). The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) may cancel their timeline for this shift, slowing momentum. However, private insurance plans and doctors have already changed the way they contract together, making very unlikely a retreat to the old payment model.

Even without a crystal ball of the exact specs of a post-Trump healthcare world, the fundamentals of the healthcare market and the massive forces acting upon it continue to render it an excellent investment opportunity. Specifically, the most near-term and pervasive value-creation area is in infrastructure software, the “glue” that serves as middleware for healthcare.

The persistent truths are that the healthcare market represents $3 trillion, almost 20 percent, of the U.S. economy. This market also is plagued by a level of gross inefficiency and under-performance largely unseen in any other industries in our post-internet world.

Why has healthcare lagged behind so much?

Largely, it’s because despite complaints about skyrocketing costs, there was no needto change. The lack of technology progress wasn’t because of a lack of available solutions, but rather because of a lack of economic incentive. Incumbents maximized profit by continuing along proprietary business processes and technology paths, because doctors and hospitals got paid by insurance companies for every single transaction of care. Nobody stood to gain by re-engineering for common workflows or common infrastructure. Siloed operations were sufficient under a payment model based on transaction volume.

The paradigm, however, is shifting dramatically.

Consumers and new payment rules are inverting healthcare

The new role of “patient as consumer” is key in making healthcare behave like a more normal market. High-deductible health plans are the driving engine. In 2006, only 6.2 million members in the U.S. were on high-deductible plans. By 2015, this number grew to 58 million, a growth rate of 28 percent per year. Because almost 90 percent don’t exceed $2,000 per year in healthcare spending, 50 million people are effectively paying 100 percent of their healthcare out-of-pocket!

Unsurprisingly, this will start to change consumer behavior. Previously, patients had a significantly higher threshold for bad experiences because they largely weren’t paying. Increasingly, payments are made by patients themselves and/or insurance companies based on outcome and experience. Healthcare providers that had optimized only around transaction volume are finding themselves in sore need of new CRM-like tools for a consumer-centric business: to segment/acquire/retain the right patients, control costs, message/coordinate care effectively and streamline processes.

There is an emerging crop of healthtech entrepreneurs who see the more stage-appropriate opportunity actually lies within the infrastructural layers.

The second catalyst for change is CMS. This department spends almost $1.1 trillion on healthcare each year, making it the largest payer in the country. They’re also changing how they pay. With the Medicare Access & CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA), Medicare has said it will pay for healthcare in a value-based way. Value-based payments invert the traditional healthcare business model: Instead of paying for healthcare transactions, doctors and institutions are to be paid for healthcare outcomes. Previously, the volume maximization recipe was “more patients, more revenues.” Now, the goal is to try to keep patients from needing the healthcare system at all.

The impact is amplified as private insurance companies are quickly following suit. Importantly, because these changes are being driven by Medicare, they are not impacted by the potential repeal of the ACA. As noted above, the repeal of the ACA may temporarily slow incorporation of new programs, but the industry transition to value-based care will continue. Under this model, standardization and integration are imperative, because value-based payments cover an entire “episode of care” (typically 90 days). Now needed are technical capabilities that enable longitudinally tracking of patients’ care histories and outcomes, auditing activity-based cost of services provided and determining return on investment for each episode of care.

Infrastructure as the missing glue

The new world order has spurred a deluge of healthtech applications. Startup Health notes that the first half of 2016 was the strongest ever start to the year, with $3.9 billion of venture capital invested. However, most entrepreneurs reflexively focus on the seemingly lower-hanging fruit of consumer apps (lose weight, track steps, send photos straight to your dermatologist) or enterprise point-solutions, such as appointment scheduling, patient intake, patient risk stratification, etc. All legitimate problem areas.

However, without any horizontal infrastructure, each of these solutions takes forever to develop and subsequently function only in specific walled-data silos. So, following an unduly protracted dev cycle, a product further leads to duplication of work every time it extends outside the original data pool — which happens a lot. Instead of these abundant headline-grabbing consumer apps or siloed enterprise point-solutions, the best investment opportunities actually are found elsewhere: in infrastructural software providing best-in-class functional solutions pervasively needed across the broader universe of healthtech apps.

What do the best healthtech investments look like? Best-in-class infrastructure. What exactly does this mean? It means horizontal infrastructure that allows application-layer CTOs to outsource discrete functionalities and compress their own dev cycles.

It’s taking a page from the playbook of current-day pure-play tech CTOs who now can choose from a plethora of application program interfaces (APIs), software development kits (SDKs), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) partners. This enables them to focus solely upon their core product and outsource much of their tech stack (e.g. AWS for hosting, Twilio for messaging, Mixpanel for analytics, Salesforce for CRM). This is in stark contrast to the dev protocol in the late 1990s, when startups were capital-intensive and vertically integrated because they lacked a robust infrastructural ecosystem of developer tools and third-party cloud solutions.

Today, the pure-play tech app CTO has evolved to “borrow instead of build whenever possible,” in the words of Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, in order to “focus on actually building out your product.” In healthtech, however, we still see too many app developers try to build everything natively, thus delaying focus on their core product. Invariably they burn through much of their early-stage financing runway before working on their core product enough to secure the proof points necessary for follow-on investment rounds.

About The State of Arizona

The State of Arizona consists of more than 130 federated government agencies and 32,000 employees, which serve more than 6 million residents. The organization decided to begin migrating its IT infrastructure to AWS after recognizing that more than half of its 2,600 servers were aging and needed to be replaced. During its first phase, the State of Arizona migrated its DNS solution to the AWS Cloud. By using AWS, the State now saves 75% in annual operating costs on its DNS solution when compared to its previous on-premises IT infrastructure.

The State of Arizona Runs its DNS Solution on AWS and Saves 75% Annually (3:31)

Read more customer success stories or search by industry to learn how Managed Solution helps businesses implement technology productivity solutions.

Source: http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/state-of-arizona/

City IT Department Upgrades Infrastructure and Builds Successful Technology Roadmap

Industry: City/Municipality/Government

Business Needs:

A city in San Diego County with more than 1200 employees finally received the budget to improve their IT infrastructure. The city needed to upgrade over 600 Windows XP desktops that were no longer supported because they presented a security risk. They wanted to migrate to a cloud-based solution for email and were evaluating Microsoft Office 365 to improve employees productivity and increase collaboration. The organization also needed to migrate over 60 servers that were running on Windows server 2003 which Microsoft ended support in July, 2015. The city needed to focus on implementing new and innovative ideas to move the business forward, not worry about if their infrastructure was running properly or presented a security risk.

Solution:

Managed Solution partnered with the city's IT department to assess their overall network and provide a detailed IT roadmap. Managed Solution provided a GAP analysis for the IT department with the results showing how the city stacks up against contemporary IT services given their size and complexity of operations. Managed Solution addressed security concerns by making sure the environment was up to date, effective and not obtrusive into productivity. We also analyzed the city's network infrastructure ensuring they had the appropriate bandwidth to run cloud-based applications. Managed Solution recommended to virtualize more of their servers and move beyond virtualization to a private and public cloud environment. The hybrid cloud environment provided a solution for some applications to run on-premises in a Microsoft-based private cloud environment and others to run in Windows Azure. Delivering IT as a Service provided the city with a solution that was able to upgrade their IT infrastructure with reliable services. Managed Solution implemented this strategy by performing a thorough network assessment of their existing infrastructure and understanding the city’s business objectives.

Success:

Assessing the city’s network allowed Managed Solution to provide a detailed and comprehensive IT roadmap. The city was able to identify a migration strategy to reduce security risks, retire old infrastructure, and improve employees productivity and end-user experience. The roadmap better supports business growth and provides strategies to standardize, virtualize, and cloud-enabled its IT assets. The technology roadmap is allowing the city to focus on using technology for better operational inefficiencies while improving productivity and reducing IT troubleshooting.