Enhancing Mobile and Cloud Solutions through IT Support
The trend of businesses moving away from desktop-based applications onto more versatile mobile and cloud-based solutions is continuing, owing to their greater capabilities, efficiency, and flexibility. But how exactly does IT support add tangible value to these newer solutions? In this blog, we discuss how IT support can help your business to get the highest benefit from mobile and cloud solutions.
If your business has not migrated its hosting and applications to cloud-based solutions, this blog also outlines the benefits they can offer to your business, and how IT support providers can help you to tap into them.
What Is Cloud Technology and Why Does It Matter For My Business?
Before diving into how IT support can empower the mobile and cloud-based IT solutions that business is using today, such as cloud hosting and web-based applications, let’s delve into what cloud technology is.
Cloud technology refers to services that are delivered over an internet connection. For example, Software as a Service (SaaS) enables businesses to use software that is hosted online, without the need to install it using a CD, or to store its data directly on a computer. A solution such as Microsoft 365 has Teams for example, which is a collaboration and communication tool that enables businesses to communicate, share documents and work on them together in real time. Adding, managing and configuring users, files, applications, and channels can be done at the click of a button in real time using SaaS solutions.
When it comes to hosting your applications and data using servers, instead of having your servers on a physical premises and managing it yourself, instead you can migrate your data, apps, and systems onto a cloud hosting platform. The provider will allocate computing resources to your business to run its services as normal and this can scale with your needs in real time, without you needing to physically manage the servers or purchase new ones outright to support your growth. If one server malfunctions, this can cause some disruption to a business with an on-premises setup, but with a cloud provider, the server is ‘virtualized,’ meaning your data and systems can be securely ran by other physical servers that the provider owns without causing a hitch in your business.
As you can see, cloud solutions offer a lot more flexibility, opportunities to lower costs, and efficiencies to businesses, while simplifying IT for them. This is why businesses have turned to the cloud over time to tap into these benefits. An IT support provider can help your business to access the power of the cloud using their technical expertise, let’s explore how.
Enhancing Mobile Solutions
Mobile solutions have revolutionized the way companies in places like Youngstown conduct business. Consider a sales rep working in Mahoning County who travels across Ohio to engage with potential clients, using a smart device with an internet connection, they are able to access information in their company in real time such as inventory data, which can help them to work while travelling and to negotiate and work with clients and prospects more effectively.
These tasks are accomplished using apps designed specifically for business needs. However, without the appropriate IT support, there can be some issues:
- Apps might not be optimized for all mobile devices or operating systems.
- Important updates could be missed, causing a lag in performance, or opening up security vulnerabilities.
- The company may lack oversight over the user’s activities on a work device, which can have implications for productivity and cyber security.
- Users might encounter roadblocks in syncing data between mobile and desktop platforms.
IT support providers can help with issues like these. They can:
- Ensure that your workplace’s devices and applications are consistently updated and optimized, ensuring smooth performance across devices.
- Integrate your mobile devices and tools with other software and systems, creating a more seamless, observable, and integrated digital work environment.
- Offer proactive and rapid support for your mobile and remote workers, helping them to address issues that otherwise would eat into time and productivity.
- Implement cyber security solutions for your mobile or remote work devices, ensuring that only authorized applications and websites are used for example.
Optimizing Cloud-Based Solutions
Cloud-based solutions such as global CRMs like Salesforce and collaboration platforms such as Microsoft 365 are offering great benefits to businesses that leverage them. With these solutions, a business can magnify their flexibility, scalability and productivity. They are not without there own challenges, however.
Security remains an important concern, it’s important to ensure your business is cyber-secure whether it uses cloud-based tools or not. Integrating different cloud software and applications can be a complex affair, and often, a business does not tap into the deeper capabilities that these solutions can offer, both in terms of empowering their operations, and staying cyber secure.
An IT support provider can ensure these solutions are working to their full potential. They can implement secure configurations and protocols that empower cyber security and data protection compliance, without compromising convenience, they can help your business to smoothly integrate its applications, network and devices together into a more harmonious, streamlined and interoperable whole, and they can take care of optimizing, maintaining and updating your cloud based solutions for your business, keeping them working at their best.
Leveraging Technical Expertise
IT support brings the technical expertise that businesses need to succeed with the cloud. They offer a range of benefits that address many of the common challenges that businesses face, due to technical barriers. For example, an IT support provider can benefit your business by:
- Saving it costs and time by seamlessly managing the migration of your servers onto a cloud hosting solution, enabling it to benefit from more scalability, cost-efficiency, and flexibility.
- Ensure remote access works seamlessly for your teams in a way that is efficient and cyber secure for your business.
- Manage your cloud infrastructure for you. For example, an IT support provider will be able to optimize how your servers operate on a cloud hosting platform such as Microsoft Azure, boosting network performance in your business while optimizing costs.
- Ensuring your data and systems are backed up securely in on-site or cloud-based locations, meaning that they can be restored quickly and fully should your business need them.
In all, an IT support provider helps businesses to tap into the benefits of the cloud, such as scalability and flexibility, while minimizing risks around remote working and ensuring that their cloud setup is secure.
Cost Savings
Contrary to the belief that IT support is an added expenditure, it’s more of an investment! They can help you to save money through giving more time to your business, while also directly lowering costs. IT support providers can work across the full scope of your IT environment to find opportunities for more efficiency and to lower waste in your business.
Their expertise also helps your business to troubleshoot and resolve problems more quickly, and to make more cost-effective investments into technology that achieve your goals, without incurring unnecessary expenses or compromising your wider strategic goals. Through their robust cyber security solutions, they can save your business from the significant costs that a cyber-attack or data breach can cause as well.
In Conclusion
As the trend towards adopting mobile and cloud-based IT solutions continues, it will be important to keep up with the competition by using these solutions in a tailored, secure, and efficient way. IT support providers can help your business to access the benefits of these solutions more quickly and easily, generating returns for your business in the form of saved time, lower costs, greater flexibility and scalability, and an enhanced cyber security posture. IT support isn’t a ‘nice to have’ in today’s digital world, it’s essential for driving your success and competitive edge.
Empowering Ohio’s Businesses with Transformative IT Support Solutions
We help businesses in Youngstown, Mahoning County, and the wider Ohio state to tap into the potential that technology has to offer, all in a way that is tailored to them. Our helpful and fast helpdesk support, IT infrastructure and modern workplace solutions, offer an end-to-end solution for businesses seeking to get the best from their technology. Curious to see what our IT services can do for your business? Get in touch! We’d love to hear about your journey, where you would like to go next, and help you to tackle the challenges that are on the way to your commercial success.
