The life of a small business owner is full of new challenges at every step of their journey to success. One of the best ways to deal with them is to learn from the past and be prepared for the future. As technology continues to become an intricate part of businesses, the world of IT will meet new problems in 2022 that SMBs must pay attention to.
Remote Working Due To Impact Of COVID-19
Techaisle suggests that remote working became a top-three priority for SMBs in 2021. Even though the social distancing rules and regulations are slowly getting relaxed, over 85% of adult workers in the United Kingdom have shown their willingness to work in a “hybrid” manner. This would include mostly working from home while coming to a common physical space or a “temporary office” for one or two days a week (Office of National Statistics).
When it comes to the various negative impacts of the coronavirus pandemic in the IT sector in a physical space, two of the biggest challenges that European nations will face are the provision of hardware to the employees working remotely, and tracking the inventory and licenses for these employees. However, issues such as supply chain disruptions and chip shortages will have a greater impact on North American countries, according to an SWZD report.
Therefore, companies would need to move most of their daily work material, database, and tasks to a cloud-based system in order to ensure seamless functioning of the team despite not being in a common physical space. They would also have to take some time out of their schedule to train their employees to be familiarised with the new technology if required.
Further Digitalisation Of Business Processes
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OCED) report that ever since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, over 70% of the small-medium enterprise have increased the intensity with which they have been using digital means to carry out their day-to-day tasks.
Regardless of whether you run a B2B or a B2C business, the decision-makers would have to be mindful in purchasing the right kind of digital tools that they feel would help them carry out the required work more efficiently. However, this doesn’t mean that SMBs should blow their complete budget on digital tools. The applications that are being developed to improve an organisation’s employee and customer experience are simply tools of the trade. It is up to the business owners to invest in the tools that work best for them.
Data Protection And Cybersecurity
The American Bar Association revealed that over 22% of law firms face some sort of breach in their database due to the lack of cybersecurity setup. Unfortunately, is not just limited to one of two sectors but is a cross-industry phenomenon that can land all sorts of organisations, big or small, into serious trouble.
External threats such as ransomware, phishing attacks, and DDoS attacks, as well as internal data security issues that may originate while internally due to remote working and transferring of data to the cloud, are all important issues to look into.
Getting Money’s Worth From IT Service Providers
According to Statista, SMBs spent approximately £420 billion on seeking IT solutions by hiring service providers. In 2021, the figure went up to approximately £500 billion. Based on this trend, it can only be estimated that the cost of ITSM will continue to increase in 2022.
What makes cost-cutting so difficult in the IT sector is that the managed service providers (MSPs) are competing in a highly saturated market, which means that they have already reduced the cost of their services to the lowest possible margins with the scope of earning some profit. Then how can SMBs ensure that they get value for their money?
Arguably the most efficient way to do so is to look for Experience Level Agreements (XLAs) instead of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). What are XLAs? In one sentence, they are SLAs driven by the Quality of Experience (QoE).
Feeling Overwhelmed
As stated at the very beginning of the blog, SMB owners have a lot on their plate and when things aren’t going in the positive direction, it is easy to lose focus and feel overwhelmed with everything that needs to be done. Things become even worse when the entire team isn’t working in a common physical space.
Most businesses took a severe financial hit and are trying to stand on their feet once again as the COVID-19 restrictions begin to relax. As a result, the process of hiring new staff members, especially in the IT department, may not be something on your mind in 2022.
Outsourcing your IT needs to good MSPs, therefore might be a solution that would not only be lighter on the wallet but also take care of a major chunk of important IT problems that your organisations might feel in the upcoming year.
About Bright Horse
Very often, organisations tend to act on impulse while looking for IT solutions. They sign fancy-looking SLAs, which, on paper, look extremely impressive, and yet, when it comes to the returns that they expected for their hard-earned money, they are seldom satisfactory.
At Bright Horse, we help organisations know how to get the most value for their money while looking for IT solutions in the market. We help the decision-makers find out the loopholes and gaps in their IT system which might be adversely impacting the experience of their employees or even their customers.
If you’re worried about the IT issues that you may be facing in 2022, contact us and we will do our best to help you out.