Dealing with things in a reactive way is all well and good in the now, but are you ready to stay relevant? This is what future proofing your business is all about, providing an excellent service to your customers and adapting to their changing needs, keeping up with the competition, and saving you and your team precious time. So, what ways can you anticipate and address your technical support needs in order to future proof your business?
Future-proof your tech
The development of technology moves at a rapid pace; anyone running a business for longer than a couple of years will know how quickly the latest must-haves in efficiency can appear and make your life easier by saving time, effort, and money. Slow or outdated technology could be bogging your staff down, frustrating the customer buying journey, and wasting money.
Therefore, it’s important to keep up to speed with the latest technological releases that make sense for you and your customers, both in terms of hardware and software. This includes everything from the laptops your team work on and the card machines your customers pay with, to the accounting software you use, and the analytics tools used by the marketing department to gain insights into your brand’s performance.
It can be hard to cut through the noise, but by identifying what the tech you use needs to do, you can keep an eye out for efficient solutions.
Future-proof your security
With sensitive customer and/or financial data being held by your business, and online security threats becoming not only more frequent but also more high-tech, you should prioritise your cyber security as we head into the future. This not only includes the software designed to detect and protect against cyber security threats, but also the training your staff receive so that they know when to recognise something that could compromise the security of customer and company data.
Cyber security isn’t a ‘set it and forget it’ thing; regular updates need to be done to maintain strong protection against evolving threats. It’s for businesses large and small too; data breaches can affect organisations of any size, so whether you’re a one-man-band or a multinational business, you’ll want your cyber security protection to be seriously robust.
Future-proof your storage
Gone are the days of floppy disks; we store things on ‘the cloud’ now. Delivering services to your customers generally means you’ll need some kind of cloud-based storage solution, particularly if you’re doing so online, or you have a team working with you who aren’t always working from the same place. Thanks to the cloud, you’re no longer constrained by the physical space available to you, but it does still need to have the capacity for your future business growth.
Future proofing your storage not only means looking ahead to what your storage system can accommodate in the future, but also looking back to see if legacy storage problems are slowing you down, assessing the security of your storage, and ensuring it works seamlessly, regardless of where you and your team are in the world.
Future-proof your technical problems
Technology can and does go wrong – and it’ll never be at a convenient time. A technological problem can be catastrophic to a business, and without proper IT support, it can be a very lonely time indeed. That’s why part of futureproofing your business in a technical sense involves having a team of experts on hand to get you up and running again before you or your customers lose out.
