Page 48 - BusinessWest March, 21, 2022

IT Firms
Continued from page 46
pared SMBs will unfortunately become an ideal target.”
Mollison said Northeast doesn’t conduct free assessments with potential clients because he wants companies to be committed to the process.
“We want to develop a relationship with an organization and be their outsourced IT depart- ment and provide these types of services and help them grow, and that starts with being invested in participating in their assessment,” he told BusinessWest. “I’ve seen a lot of boilerplate, free assessments from other IT firms, and there’s not much to it, and they don’t do much for the clients.”
From a Distance
The shift to remote work over the past two years (see related story on page 6) kept IT firms busy, but the ease of transition varied, Beaudry said.
“Working remotely is so different for each business; some clients just use Microsoft Word and Office docs, and working remotely is a pretty easy-to-accomplish task, versus some compa- nies, which have a line of business applications and complex software, and you have to set up secure, virtual private networks to allow employ- ees to access them.”
Businesses that weren’t already set up to work remotely found challenges early on, but they soon adapted — as the still-ongoing work-from- home revolution has made obvious.
“Most of our clients already had the techno-
logical components to work remotely, so it wasn’t a big issue,” Mollison said. “Numerous insurance agencies were remote within 48 hours. It really wasn’t a big deal for most companies — it usually boiled down to licensing and multiple security steps and VPNs.”
Whether at a business site or remotely, Beaudry said Bloo handles a wide range of IT issues for clients, including supporting the serv- ers, hardware, and software applications; creating file shares; managing the servers; and maintain- ing security measures and patches.
“It’s a constant
process; you have to
be vigilant with those
things,” he said. “We’re
also dealing with end-
user issues — ‘oh, my
app won’t run,’ or ‘this
program is giving me
an error.’ It’s a lot of
stuff to deal with, and
now that this all stuff
going remote, it’s evolv-
ing — instead of moni-
toring hardware, we’re
having to monitor the dashboards for multiple cloud servers and take a look at 100 or 200 alerts a month; do these alerts all need action? Is it just an informational alert, or is there a pattern of things happening constantly?
“We’re a managed service provider,” he went on, “which means we are proactively doing all these things just as if you had an internal IT department. If the user is constantly pushing the limits of performance of that machine, we can see that on our dashboard.”
Speaking of which, Beaudry makes sure hard- ware assessments happen on a regular basis, “but we do a good job monitoring these things pro- actively, so we can avoid too many surprises,” he said, thereby avoiding unexpected downtime and loss of productivity. “Those surprises are what cost you the most money.”
And the bottom line matters, Hogan said, which is why companies of all kinds are investing in IT to boost efficiency and protect their assets.
“IT spending has increased so dramatically because the pandemic forced decision makers to
“
reflective of a world that is accelerating its migration into a fully digital world, when we thought things were already moving in that direction as fast as they could.”
make their organizations more flexible. They’re starting to understand the increased potential that they have to become more efficient with the latest in technology,” he wrote. “All of this increased IT spending is reflective of a world that is accelerating its migration into a fully digi- tal world, when we thought things were already moving in that direction as fast as they could.” u
Joseph Bednar can be reached at [email protected]
All of this increased IT spending is
SEAN HOGAN
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TECHNOLOGY
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