1. DATA MANAGEMENT
Businesses such as law firms, accounting firms, and doctors’ offices are required to keep records, such as patient medical records, tax records, and more, for extended periods of time. Those documents need to be filed either electronically or physically. There is a specific government regulation that requires the business to keep certain documents for a duration of time before destroying them. Keeping up with records and securing them can be very difficult and resource-consuming.
2. SCALABILITY
Scale your business, scale your technology for efficiency, and scale systems and storage to improve performance. Scale your business to keep up with demand during peak periods or seasons. You need technology that can scale up and down according to the demands.
3. COMMUNICATION
You need to have a steady IT infrastructure and reliable connection as well as a robust network. Network and system breakdowns can slow down communication between staff members and customers.
4. IT SECURITY
Data security is the most important aspect for all businesses, especially for doctors, lawyers, banks, insurance and accounting firms, and others. Keeping up with the latest security measures requires constant monitoring and updates on technology. Maintaining and monitoring your systems and network for security breaches while being proactive in every measure is very challenging.
5. GOVERNMENT REGULATION
Keeping up with regulatory governance on the standards for your industry can be hard for small and mid-sized business, especially if you are in the medical industry. The same applies to drug regulations as well as systems and software upgrades.
6. OPERATION
Keeping the lights on and making sure the business is running efficiently is the top priority for most firms. Making sure the websites are up and running 24/7/365 with backup operations ready in case of a power failure or disaster is vital.
7. MAINTAINING AND KEEPING UP WITH TECHNOLOGY REQUIRES SPECIAL IT SKILLS
You need to have unique IT skills to perform specific tasks. Like many other skills, these can be learned. However, you need to practice and have real-life experience with them. I believe that becoming an expert in technical expertise takes up to ten years of practice. Likewise, most SMBs struggle to get experienced IT staff who have mastered the necessary skills.
Hiring an experienced IT staff member can be costly for a business operating on limited resources. Large corporations usually have the resources to hire experienced IT staff. An inexperienced IT engineer is cheap and requires years of training to master the skills.