How to Support Your In-House IT Support Team
Ever notice how your own in-house IT support staff or team seems to be stressed out a lot? With digital transformation growing into every nook and cranny of your operations their responsibilities have grown exponentially. They have to manage their day to day workload (helping personnel with email issues, etc.) while keeping on top of advancing cyber threats and looking for ways to increase efficiencies through your company’s IT infrastructure. As they exist to make your life easier, you too can do the same for them through the following.
3 Practical Ways You Can Show More Support for Your In-House IT Team While Serving Your Organization’s Overall Goals
I. Have All Staff Watch Out For and Report Cyber Concerns
Cybercrime is a major concern for your IT staff. The AV-Test Institute reports that there are 350,000 new malware strains being generated every single day. In addition, phishing schemes are also becoming more targeted and advanced, and spawning vishing (voice or VoIP phishing) and SMSishing (SMS phishing) campaigns to cast a wider net and reach members of your organization at all “touch points”.
Your in-house IT team needs help from all members in your company to watch out for and report potential instances of cybercrime. Given that all personnel (C-level executives included) are the targets of hackers and hacking groups, they are on the frontline. They are the ones receiving malicious emails, texts, and other solicitations. While it’s great that they know to avoid opening suspicious links and attachments, they should not simply dismiss these communications to their spam and trash files. Instead, they should get into the habit of reporting all suspicious communications directly to your IT team for investigation. This will allow in-house IT to identify new and potentially concerning threats for which they can better prepare for with updates to AV software along with more advanced forms (those leveraging AI and machine learning) of cybercrime prevention.
Cyber crime prevention is a group effort. The more your organization understands this, the greater the appreciation from your in-house IT team.
II. Invest in IT
For far too long IT needs sat at the bottom of the priority list when it came time for annual budgeting. But that is starting to change. As of 2020 Flexera reports that the average IT spend across all industries is 8.2 percent of revenue. If your company is not allocating at least that much you’re doing your IT team a disservice, and preventing them from doing their job effectively. But is the over 8% mark even enough? Take the financial services industry for instance, where IT spending averages (as a percent of revenue) 10%. The more you require digital transformation to secure and create efficiencies for your business the more you need to invest in it. IT infrastructure’s intertwinement with all operations is greater than ever before, so budgeting less that 10% no matter your industry leaves your in-house IT team without essential tools for 2021 and beyond.
Show them support via financial backing and you’ll enjoy an ROI that you can take to the bank.
III. Empower Them by Supplementing the IT Workload
The best way you can show support for your in-house IT team is to alleviate the burden of mundane tasks to free them up to work on more engaging and important company projects – the ones that they are actually excited about.
One of the biggest myths and misconceptions about outside IT support is that makes staff redundant and replaces current IT teams. This is not the case. Instead, by bringing in outside IT support to both complement and supplement your in-house team’s workload you will be able to automate a large number of tasks, add a more impenetrable level of cyber security to operations, and ultimately allow them to focus on improving company productivity and revenue-generating projects.
In addition, outside IT support can train your in-house team on new applications so that once that part of the consultancy is done your in-house team will have gained a more advanced knowledge and skill base.
SAV Technology is available to work with and support your own in-house team. Unsure of how it all fits together? No problem! Simply contact us for a friendly noncommittal conversation about what we can do for you and your valued staff.