IT strategies for guaranteed business Success consist of these 5 strategies:

1. Transitioning to the Cloud

Moving your business over to cloud-based solutions offers many benefits, such as financial savings, saved time, and better flexibility and efficiency. The cloud helps businesses stay agile with new industry trends and demands.

Reduced Maintenance Costs: IT Strategies for Guaranteed Business Success

The most obvious benefit of the cloud is that you don’t need physical hardware. This means you can eliminate existing servers and backup power systems. Additionally, you can redirect expenses that would have otherwise used for maintenance and upgrades to address your priority business needs. Cloud providers, such as Rydal Group, will be fully responsible for managing your server updates and software.

Lower Energy Costs

Transitioning your storage to the cloud eliminates expenses dedicated to cooling and powering your physical IT infrastructure. Studies have shown that cloud computing is 93% more energy-efficient than physical data centre racks.

Pay-as-You-Go with IT Strategies for Guaranteed Business Success

Another clear financial advantage is that you don’t need to make any hefty upfront payments or worry about hidden costs. You will only be paying for what your business uses. You and your cloud provider will negotiate an agreed fixed fee

2. Establishing an IT Budget

One of the IT strategies for guaranteed business success is to fully understand, monitor, and plan your financial capabilities, you need a robust and clear IT budget. Once your business establishes an IT budget, you can easily identify IT expenses, track ROI, and manage financial outgoings. Budgeting helps allocate expenses correctly, especially if your business faces an emergency or anticipated industry changes.

A budget will also help you track recurring business expenses, such as Office 365 subscriptions, telecommunications costs, network infrastructure, and business security. Having these expenses listed in an organised and easily accessible space allows you to have a clear view of your business’s spending patterns.

Most importantly, an IT budget will help you make informed decisions. For example, you might discover that you’re paying for a project management tool that your team no longer uses because they’ve switched to a different platform.

3. Embracing Automation: IT Strategies for Guaranteed Business Success

Repetitive tasks cost you and your team a significant amount of valuable working time. With successfully integrated automation, you can change that. This allows your team to fully focus on high-priority, important tasks. Automation improves the end-user experience, increases ROI, reduces mistakes associated with human error, and enhances overall business efficiency and guaranteed success.

A Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) system replaces manual processes. As a result, your system will benefit from better protection, increased efficiency, and peace of mind in the face of potential threats and losses.

The most popular automation processes include:

• Security monitoring and response
• Configuration management
• Network oversight
• Cloud automation

An automation tool that isn’t spoken about often enough is Business Intelligence (BI). BI allows you to assess, create reports, and bring data to life seamlessly. BI tracks a vast range of metrics, KPIs, and real-life trends, applying your existing data from different business departments, such as sales, finance, marketing, HR, etc.

Long gone are the days when your team would have to set aside three working days for traditional end-of-month reporting. With automation, reporting takes less than half of that time. Your team not only saves time to focus on other pressing business tasks but can also concentrate on strategic decisions for guaranteed business success.

4. User Awareness Training

Cybersecurity awareness training is no longer optional for businesses. To truly protect your business from potential threats, you must implement cybersecurity training as part of your weekly or monthly business exercises. Statistically, human error is responsible for a significant percentage of data breaches—an eye-opening 90%. This suggests that 95% of cyber-attacks could be prevented if businesses prioritised basic cyber awareness practices.

In 2023, a UK Government survey stated that 4 out of 10 businesses had suffered a cyber attack, leading to major financial losses, with the median cost of cyber incidents being £4,500 over the course of 12 months.

As technology and AI continue to evolve, so do cyber threats. It’s crucial to train your team to respond and react correctly. A strong culture of cyber awareness should be fostered through security training, phishing simulations, and open communication. Only then can your team become the first line of defence against cybercrime targeting your business.

5. Outsourcing IT Support

the last IT strategy for guaranteed business success is the most obvious and primary reason to consider outsourcing your IT support is cost reduction. Employing an IT Manager on premises costs a company between £50,000 and £65,000, and that’s just the flat salary, not including additional business costs such as recruitment, NI, pension, equipment, sick leave, and training.

By choosing Rydal Group as your Managed Service Provider, you can save both money and time, allowing you to focus on your core business needs and operations and we will focus on strategies for your guaranteed business success.

We offer fully managed IT services or additional support during busy times, tailored to meet your unique business needs. Our fixed fees, 24/7 support, proactive monitoring, maintenance, and on-site or remote support make us a reliable and award-winning IT provider.