In todays day and age, businesses spend their time communicating with other businesses and we know how common it is for a virus to travel from one to another. Here are the most common IT Issues we see in businesses who don’t have suitable IT Support in place:

Spyware Infections

Spyware is the most common issue businesses face, often because it received via emails or web page links and is almost always undetected by most anti-virus applications. These malicious programs work unnoticed in the background transferring secure data back to their creator and typically aren’t noticed until unusual patterns in bandwidth and network performance are detected during monitoring.

Network Downtime

Connectivity is critical to business operations. From phones and computers to your entire cloud infrastructure, your business relies on constant Internet connectivity and encountering down networks can bring your organization to its knees.

Out Of Date Systems and Hardware

Anything operating in your data center that is out-of-warranty, or has officially been deemed ‘end-of-life’ by the vendor needs to be on the high priority list for virtualization, migration, or upgrade. Older devices may fail on you unexpectedly or even die after a scheduled or unscheduled reboot.

Lack of Monitoring and Reporting

Need to know why your Internet connection always slows down to a crawl at 2:38 p.m.? Monitoring enables you to detect threats like spyware, pending hardware failures, and unapproved activities. Alerts help you stay a step ahead of failures, and get you out of the break-fix mentality. Most businesses handle their IT in a very reactive way, but actually being proactive could save you both time and money!

Security Breaches

Unlike spyware, viruses are meant to take a machine down. Keeping all of your devices up-to-date with the latest patches and virus definitions is a simple way to quickly secure many known vulnerabilities.

Unverified Backups

Most businesses take the time to go through a variety of backup methods. Whether it’s on portable hard drives, cloud backup, or whatever. Very few actually test and verify that their backups are actually usable or successful. Schedule a time and procedure to simulate a disaster recovery drill so you can identify what the damage will be should disaster strike!

Passwords

Just to be clear, email isn’t highly secure so sending crucial things like passwords via email is a big no! Let your staff know that sending usernames and passwords over email is not safe practice. Also, show them how to password protect or encrypt documents by zipping them up before sending.