As if running a business isn’t hard enough. Day in and day out most business owners face challenges such as searching for new business, managing cash flow, hiring .. and unfortunately sometimes firing as well as simply paying the bills. To make matters worse many businesses still have to face the considerable frustration and expense of IT problems. IT support issues cost businesses money and it’s not simply the cost of getting the problem resolved, most businesses suffering from IT issues report that the cost of downtime for them and their staff within the organisation costs them significantly more than the cost to fix the IT problem itself.
The quality of an IT support call can vary and sometimes simple problems if managed improperly can lead to bigger problems and more unnecessary expense.
Whether you have an IT support guy, a relative who’s a moonlighting IT expert or a an IT partner like I Know IT, here are some classic IT issues that most businesses face and some simple solutions:
Backups
You’re probably aware that you need to backup your critical business data such as financials and contact databases. The challenge many business owners face is that there are so many different backup solutions and they’re not all up to the task. The best advice I can give here is that you should assume nothing and always plan for a worst case scenario – the past few weeks has seen mother nature unleash and destroy people’s livelihoods and businesses everywhere. As a business owner or someone responsible for the data in your organisation you should not be taking any chances.
So what is the simple solution? First of all, it’s important to know whether you do have a backup strategy at all. Ask yourself, if my office were to be destroyed by [insert your worst nightmare natural disaster here] what would I need from my computer system to be up and running again?
In many businesses case this is to have the company financials. A simple solution would be for either you or a reliable staff member to ensure that the company data file such as what you might find in MYOB, Quickbooks or Attache is copied and stored offsite. I email my financial database to a private email address once a week – it’s obviously not our only backup solution but it gives me that final assurance that if all else fails I can get access to our financials.
If financials were all you had to worry about then the above would be a good solution for many small businesses. Unfortunately the rest of us have other critical business systems and staying in business could mean having to be back online after a disaster within minutes, hours or at worst a day. I think of companies in mission critical functions such as finance or emergency services and their downtime is calculated in minutes – what do you do if you can’t afford more than a small amount of downtime (if any) per year?
First of all, it is important that your data isn’t seperated and stored across different computers and laptops across your business. Many times I have experienced a siutation where a business has had a major disaster only to find out some critical information such as payroll or financial data was kept on someone’s workstation which wasn’t backed up. Another very common issue that people assume documents saved to their desktop or My Documents folder are being backed up alongside other important company data - this often isn’t the case. This is where ensuring you and your people are saving documents and other important data to the server or an external storage drive such as a NAS.
There have been a number of advancements in backup and disaster recovery services. The latest reliable technology is called Disk Imaging or some might be familiar with the concept of ghosting. If your organisation has a server then installing software like this is a bit like having a photograph taken of not just your important files but also how everything was set up on your system. In the event of a disaster (and assuming you take your backups offsite everyday – you do this already right?) then restoring everything back the way it was with all of your important business information should be a matter of restoring you within a matter of minutes or hours which is good news for most businesses who can’t afford the downtime.
Email Problems
Email is now the #1 form of communication for businesses. It is hard to imagine a world without email although sometimes we wish that was the case!
The worst kind of email problem and one often required IT support is email downtime or lost emails. This is when either your own mail server, or the company who provides your email goes down. Recently even Google’s widely praised Gmail service went down for almost a week affecting millions of people wordwide.
When your email system goes down there is every chance that emails being sent to you during the downtime period are lost and often the sender is unaware that you didn’t get their message – this is devastating if a key customer has requested a quote for your product or services and you don’t respond.
The best line of defense is to plan for this type of downtime. While you’ll want to ensure you’re working with an IT partner who keeps your Internet and email services up and running as much as humanly possible, you can also protect yourself by having a backup email service (often referred to as a backup MX or an Email Disaster Recovery Service)/ We use SpamWow! which also filters our emails for spam but even more importantly, backs up all of our email online so that we never lose an important customer request.
While we’re on the topic of spam it’s also an equally problematic IT support issue for companies. Through our own surveys and monitoring of email services we’ve found that up to 85% of all email is spam. Whilst you might feel as though most of the email you receive is junk, you’re probably not receiving 85% spam because some basic filtering services exist within your system. Spam is often accompanied by a virus and most viruses enter your network either through email or from a dodgy website. The aforementioned SpamWow! spam filtering service eliminates spam from the Internet before it reaches your computer and effectively reduces the risk of having costly (and often offensive) spam reaching you and your team.
Monitoring and preventing use of non work related websites
Some companies are more liberal than others and may be comfortable with their employees spending a little time on Facebook or Twitter throughout the day, but few however would be comfortable with their employees looking at pornography or spending an unreasonable amount of time on the web. The risk of employees using company computers for personal use is that it opens up the organisation to a wide range of other issues.
This is where Content Filtering becomes one of the best and most simple IT support requests to fulfill. With a content filtering service you can generally choose to either block content or monitor content. By choosing either, you should be able to see a report of how company resources are being used. If nothing else you can combat the risk of viruses and spyware entering your network and if you suspect inappropriate conduct on your IT system you can address it accordingly.
Crashes
A very common reason to call for IT support is the issue of computers crashing. If you’re running your computers on Microsoft operating systems you’ve probably experienced the “blue screen of death” at one time or another, and despite Apple having a better reputation for stability they aren’t completely guilt free when it comes to crashes and are increasingly prone to such problems.
Crashes can be prevented by keeping systems maintained, ensuring somebody is looking after regular updates, antivirus protection, defragments and disk clean ups. But even still, if your computer crashes and a trusty reboot doesn’t solve the problem then it pays to have another solution on hand.
Try keeping a spare computer system in your office ready to be utilised in the event that you need it. One important thing to note though, I really recommend you keep this computer maintained and up to date as well. It’s not uncommon for a business to allocate an old computer as a spare only to leave it gathering dust in the corner. The trouble is, when they go to use the computer in an emergency it’ s not running the right software, it has a problem of its own or it doesn’t even start up and this just compunds the problem. When obtaining IT support ensure all machines including spares are kept up to date.
Viruses
Viruses still constitute a very real risk to businesses and have become even more cunning and malicious over the years. Apart from the aforementioned strategies of using a spam filter like SpamWow! and a content filter like WebWow! it is also important to keep up to date antivirus running on all systems (including spare computers).
Not all virus applications are built alike but many can prevent the latest viruses from infiltrating your system.
Whatever drives your business, the last thing you need are IT problems slowing you down. This is just a short guide of the most common IT support problems and their simple solutions. Feel free to email me if you have more 
Happy computing.
