Why You Need IT Support for the Holiday Season
The holiday season is upon us. While many seasonal businesses look at it as an opportunity to generate a significant amount of revenue it also comes with some very serious challenges. For obvious reasons this is even more true of the 2020 edition. To prepare for your final stretch of the fiscal fourth quarter you need to ramp up IT support. Here’s why.
5 Reasons Why You Need Additional IT Support Coverage During the 2020 Holiday Season
1. Online Activity Is Expected To Be Much Higher Than Normal
While your business may not have anything to do with the retail sector, you can look to projections for this year’s online sales as an indicator of what’s to come for a wide variety of industries. Adobe Analytics predicts that online holiday sales will total $189 billion. This figure shatters all previous year-over-year records by 33% – equal to two years’ growth in one season!
Whether you’re offering a product, service, or producing content for clients (and everything beyond and between) the percentage of your business being conducted online will be proportionately much higher than it has ever been. Can your servers manage the load? Do you have the IT infrastructure in place to handle the influx? If you’re entering the holiday season at status-quo from the last few months then your systems are most likely not ready to capitalize on the opportunity. In fact, there’s more than opportunity cost to be concerned with as an overload of your servers and systems can cause a literal and proverbial crash of epic proportions.
Seek IT support coverage today to gain access to a more scalable cloud-based solution to get you through the holiday season – one that can also scale back down as things normalize (or not) in 2021.
2. Staff Is Even More Remote
Your staffing needs may increase during the holidays, but the workplace environment will look much different than it normally does in December as a greater proportion will be operating remotely. This increases your need for more effective productivity solutions that allow staff and contractors to collaborate and communicate more efficiently even when they can’t be in the same physical space. Are you currently leveraging Software as a Service productivity solutions such as MS 365? What about G Suite? You need IT support from a firm with SaaS expertise than runs deep, or you won’t be getting the most from your staff and contractors during one of the most important times of the year.
3. The Most Wonderful Time of the Year for Cybercriminals
The historic rise in online B2B/B2C activity for the holiday season is to be accompanied by relatively equal growth in cybercrime. As of November (2020) McAfee is already reporting a 12% YoY increase in the number of cybercrime threats and we haven’t even dug deep into the season yet. The number of new malware strains is rising fast and targeted (especially at a C-level) phishing campaigns are also on the rise. Your company cannot possibly expect to maintain status quo when it comes to cybercrime and skirt through the holidays unscathed. Have an IT support firm perform an audit of your IT security systems right away, and provide additional coverage through the season.
4. Seasonal Challenges to Supply Chain
The provincial, national, and international supply chain is strained every December, and 2020’s version is being met with unprecedented challenges. By securing additional IT coverage for the month ahead you will gain access to more advanced tools and infrastructure for better logistics, better data management capabilities, and improved communication processes between partners and vendors. Learn more about IT for supply chain management support.
5. Ever-present Threat of Weather Events
Weather may not only disrupt the supply chain, it can result in other disasters for companies throughout our neck of the country. Extreme storms can result in power grid outages and other disruptions of IT based services leaving you without access to important data, online services, and brining your operations to a standstill. By bringing outside IT support you can better prepare for disaster of this nature, and ensure that you have adequate data backup and disaster recovery protocols in place.
Do you operate in the Greater Vancouver BC area? Get IT services to cover you through the holiday season. Whether you have an in-house team that could use additional support or you are running a skeleton operation you will benefit from this very practical investment. Contact SAV Technology today to discuss your current needs.