Your internet is down again, and you’re having a hard time getting a hold of your managed IT services company. Where’s your IT help? Isn’t it their job to monitor your network anyways, to make sure they can fix these issues before you even know they exist?
If you’re asking yourself any of these questions or similar ones, it might be time to seriously consider what your managed IT services team is doing for your company. Or, what they’re not doing.
Whenever you outsource any of your business obligations, it’s essential that you're getting all the services your company needs to perform at its best. After all, isn’t the point of outsourcing to make your job easier, allowing you to focus on the tasks that specifically apply to your business goals?
It can be tricky choosing the best-managed IT services company for your individualized needs, and you might even feel trapped in a contract with a company that really isn’t benefiting your IT infrastructure in the ways you thought it could.
Fortunately, we’re here to help give you some great insight into some common IT problems you could be facing. It might just make you think twice about the managed IT services you’re paying for!
Take a look at our list of some of the most common IT problems we see companies experience within their IT networks. You might even need IT help more than you think. Keep in mind, all these problems can be handled by a managed IT services company that is experienced and proactively servicing the systems of you and your employees.
Not Onboarding and offboarding remotely
Was this one of the first things you and your managed IT team discussed? If your answer is no, they’ve got some explaining to do! If you're like most businesses, you probably recognize the importance of a smooth and comprehensive onboarding process. However, you may not have considered the importance of a seamless, effective offboarding process. Given that offboarding can occur under less than pleasant circumstances, it's understandable why you might want to get it over with as quickly as possible.
Remote offboarding procedures should be put in place before they'll be needed. If you are frantically trying to offboard an employee in real-time, you're more likely to make mistakes that could lead to non-compliance issues.
Part of your remote offboarding procedure should be removing access to sensitive data and protected information. The employee should be removed from accounts, and passwords should be changed and updated. They should return any company equipment and supplies, such as mobile phones, tablets, computers, corporate credit cards, ID badges, and keys. Your cybersecurity team should be kept up to date regarding the employee's last day so that they can update their databases as well.
No MFA and Single Sign On
We can’t stress enough the importance of setting up password protection systems.
With Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and single sign-on (SSO) being a few of the most effective countermeasures against modern threats, organizations should consider a Cloud Identity as a Service (IDaaS), and MFA solution, like Azure Active Directory (AD).
Here are seven benefits:
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Azure AD is simple to set up and works with almost everything, meaning once identity is in the cloud. It may be accessed by any entity that requires access and is used for all on-premises and cloud applications. Azure AD MFA—using the Microsoft Authenticator app—is one the easiest MFA solutions for users to adopt and one of the fastest ways to take a passwordless approach.
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SSO reduces the threat of untimely termination/identity decommissioning by decreasing “identity sprawl,” so you can have one identity in multiple applications per user.
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A single, unified MFA reduces the success of phishing attacks due to password reuse or social engineering with the enforcement of MFA.
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The SSO/IDaaS approach paves the way for eliminating basic authentication and password spray attacks.
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MFA and SSO increase user satisfaction—making the CISO a business enabler rather than a productivity and collaboration roadblock.
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Azure AD is more available than on-premises AD FS and other IDaaS. Microsoft guarantees 99.9 percent uptime—a difficult SLA to achieve on-premises.
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Azure AD Conditional Access enforces the Zero Trust model for all authentications.
No Data Loss Prevention --- Remote Wipe, Safeguarding of Company Data
You might be sensing a theme here, and that’s planning! Just like a password security plan, it’s also essential your managed IT team provides your business with a data backup plan. If this is unfamiliar to you, your data and files could be at risk.
Data loss prevention (DLP) is a set of strategies and tools that you can use to prevent data from being stolen, lost, or accidentally deleted. Data loss prevention solutions often include several tools to protect against and recover from data loss.
If your business uses laptops that contain valuable information, you should consider installing anti-theft software on these devices. This software allows you to track a laptop that has been stolen so that law enforcement may be able to retrieve the stolen device. Anti-theft software often includes the option of a remote wipe if there is valuable data stored on the laptop.
The most effective way to prevent business data loss is to back up all of your files and documents. Backing up data means that you have at least one additional copy of all important data. For the most effective backup plan, store your backups in a physically separate location to prevent the risk of data loss from physical destruction or theft.
No matter how you choose to back up your data, it is essential to make sure your data is backed up properly before a catastrophic data loss occurs. No one wants to realize after a data loss that files did not write correctly to the backup server and are corrupted. Perform periodic tests of backed-up data to ensure your documents are properly formatted and there is enough space to store your files in your backup destination. Backups should be performed frequently so that minimal data is lost should your main system for data storage go down.
Lack of Account Management
One solution is to allow your IT team to focus on business growth by entrusting a partner to handle the heavy lifting of device deployment and everyday operations. A partner who can provide workplace services or a managed office solution will simplify your IT — from procurement, configuration, and testing to deployment and ongoing management.
Some benefits of a managed office solution include:
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Reduced support costs and higher return on investment
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Reclaimed IT resources for business-critical projects
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Improved service levels and end-user support
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IT governance and scalability
To get the most from your investment, look for a managed office solution that provides customized Device as a Service (DaaS), cloud applications, and comprehensive support. A DaaS solution tailored to individual user needs can help you deliver the competitive devices workers need while offsetting capital expenses.
A partner who provides hardware, software, and cloud applications can also speed deployment with preconfigured and provisioned devices upon delivery to the end user.
Here at RCS, our account management team & vCIO meets with clients regularly to share all kinds of reports, including KPIs and those to identify security risks. We also help our clients create a roadmap & budget, and we learn their business goals to connect them with the right partner. Our strong presence and partnerships within the community allow us to introduce our clients to experts and solutions that will enhance their business and make their life easier.
Not Enough Training
Security training certainly needs to improve how it accomplishes the in-depth and continuing training of IT personnel. It isn’t enough to train and update IT security staff. All of IT, and very definitely including developers, must become well-versed in security threats and technologies.
But perhaps the biggest weakness is how organizations address the issue of ensuring that all personnel becomes well-trained in security. In an era of phishing and ransomware, you really can’t do enough security training for general personnel.
In some companies, the security training given to staff only goes as far as insisting all users sign off on reading organizational security policies and procedures. But how much of it are they likely to retain? It is one thing to devise robust security policies and another thing to have them applied. Policy is of little value if IT personnel and users violate them or fail to be diligent in their application.
Security training can help establish what might be considered a human firewall i.e. every employee is sufficiently clued in that they are actively on the alert for attacks, know when they face suspicious traffic, and apply peer pressure to knock out any sloppy security behavior they see around them. They realize that one inattentive person is all it takes to open the door to online predators.
Next-generation firewalls notwithstanding, the weakest point in your security infrastructure is invariably going to be your people. While your company may conduct a fire drill every year, a data breach is a much more likely scenario than a four-alarm blaze. This is why frequent security training needs to be a frequent enterprise-wide undertaking.
For more information on optimizing your IT and securing your network, contact RCS Professional Services to speak with an IT professional or visit our website www.rcsprofessional.com. You can also visit on youtube channel to view our past live stream on The Top 5 Things Your IT Provider is Not Providing You With.
