What are your IT Pain Points?
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) depend on IT infrastructure.
Even small-scale operations, such as the smallest cafe in your local town, use IT. Think of point of sale (POS) systems, online/app ordering, internal networking infrastructure, and even Public Wi-Fi that they may supply to their customers.
For SMEs, it is critically important that they have the right infrastructure and support in place, as they are more likely to feel the effects of IT-related challenges. This is primarily due to limited resources and knowledge within their business around IT infrastructure, support and security. This is often paired with a lack of regular audits and upgrades to older devices and infrastructure.
Our managed IT services enable your business to drive efficiency and security in everyday operations.
Knowing how to identify risks and work against pain points in your business is an important asset for business owners and decision-makers alike.
From our very first meeting with businesses, we work with them to identify their pain points and design action plans; this allows us to work with them to apply mechanisms to minimise these risks. Additionally, as we work with businesses, we continuously monitor these pain points and assess these (and others) through regular Quarterly & Annual Business Reviews.
What are some common IT pain points?
- Cyber security vulnerabilities.
- Rigid, inflexible systems.
- Unreliable connectivity.
- System downtime.
- Fragmented data integration.
- Escalating expenditures.
Connectivity Challenges
Whether it is your business internet being slow, or the Wi-Fi not reaching where you need it in the office, or even in a warehouse environment. Connectivity within a business is the backbone of your business infrastructure, without it, many of your employees just cannot work.
Internet
Whilst approaching your regular home ISP (Internet Service Provider) may seem like a good idea for your business internet, often these providers do not supply adequate SLAs for uptime.
Navigating the world of FTTC, FTTP and Leased Lines for your business can seem quite complex and ensuring that you have a reliable connection when needed is of the utmost importance. We work with a range of ISPs across the country to ensure that we can supply the best service at the best price where our customers require it.
However, we also know that in some remote areas finding an ISP which can provide FTTC, FTTP or a Leased Line is either incredibly expensive or not even possible. For this reason, we also work with businesses to be able to provide satellite connectivity and mobile data connectivity services to ensure that they have connectivity when and where they need it.
We also know that for many businesses, 99.99% uptime still means that there is a risk of around an hour of downtime. When businesses rely on their internet connection to operate, an hour of downtime could cost a small to medium-sized business anywhere between £4,000 to £500,000 depending on the industry and business size.
For those businesses who need as close to 100% uptime as possible, we work with them to implement high availability failover solutions comprising multiple connections from different providers and on other infrastructures. For example, a Leased Line may have a Satellite Internet failover.
Wired & Wireless Infrastructure
You have probably all experienced something like this at some time or another;
- You are trying to get some work done, when all of a sudden, the Wi-Fi drops out.
- You are in a meeting room in the far corner of your office but can’t get connectivity.
- You could be in a business with a large warehouse and external yard for loading and unloading where you can’t get connectivity,
- You are offering Public Wi-Fi to your customers, which overloads the network, and nobody can connect.
These are incredibly common connectivity issues which many businesses around the world face every day. In the majority of cases, this is all down to the business’s needs not being adequately considered when recommending and deploying connectivity solutions.
From network cabling not being routed to the rooms or locations that require it, underestimating the capacity and requirements of the users, or not performing a Wi-Fi analysis audit for the business to ensure that they can receive connectivity where they need it. Understanding a business’s needs means that we can recommend and implement solutions that will be suitable for them now, and as their business grows in the future.
Cyber Security
The harsh reality is that SMEs are considered ‘low-hanging fruit’ by cyber criminals. This is primarily because many small to medium businesses do not have modern cyber defence solutions and strategies in place to protect themselves from the latest threats.
Often SMEs rely on older solutions, such as traditional anti-virus, which is no longer considered effective against modern threats. This paired with many small to medium-sized businesses also not updating, patching, or even upgrading their devices regularly, means that they are particularly vulnerable.
Per the UK government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2024, 70% of medium businesses reported some form of cyber breach over the past year.
Despite this, only 31% of UK businesses undertook a cyber security health check/audit at that time.
SMEs in industries handling sensitive financial data or client records, such as accounting, real estate, law, charities, and many others, are especially vulnerable.
Environmental Factors
Post-pandemic, many SMEs have adopted hybrid work models. Research suggests that during the pandemic, businesses in accounting, real estate, and law faced a new pain point where they struggled to provide secure and efficient remote access to their sensitive data.
Industry Examples:
Law Firms
Amidst the 2020 global lockdown, legal practices had difficulty ensuring lawyers could securely access case files remotely, which led to delays in case preparation.
Accountancy
During this time, financial consultancy firms also allowed employees to use personal laptops for remote work. However, without proper security measures, it became a common theme where malware infections on those personal devices exposed confidential client data to cyber criminals.
How did we support businesses with similar issues?
We worked with businesses to supply company-managed devices, complete with our full suite of cyber security tools and monitoring for secure access. For instances where we could not supply devices, we provided cloud remote desktop solutions to secure environments that complied with our minimum cyber defence level for data access and device security.
Additionally, we enabled businesses to collaborate and work effectively, with cloud-based collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, Microsoft SharePoint, and Managed Endpoint Defence and Response (EDR/MDR) and utilise VPNs to protect remote devices and connections.
Compliance Challenges
Industries like accounting and law must comply with strict data protection regulations, such as UK GDPR and anti-money laundering (AML) laws. Failing to meet compliance standards can result in heavy fines.
For example: A solicitor’s office in London was fined for failing to secure client case files, leading to a GDPR violation, and a popular bank was penalised for not properly securing financial statements under AML laws.
For businesses concerned about GDPR compliance, we recommend implementing data loss prevention systems which comply with Privileged Identity and Access Management (PIM & PAM) which allow granular content access and inspection to prevent unauthorised data loss or access.
Learn more about PoLP.
IT Sprawl & Shadow IT
IT sprawl is very common in small to medium-sized businesses. This is where you are pressured to solve problems and make decisions quickly, and your internal teams must make decisions which require immediate solutions in mind, rather than ensuring that these decisions align with your business IT strategy.
Whilst quickly resolving issues you may experience sounds like a good thing, this ad hoc approach can lead to weaker integrations and more complex dependencies within your business. Over time, this contributes to a disjointed IT environment that is not adequately managed, leading to issues that may take longer to identify and resolve down the line.
Similarly, Shadow IT is where your employees may be using software or tools which are not managed or controlled by your central IT systems. These shadow apps and solutions could lead to vulnerabilities within your business network if not identified and controlled. For example, a vulnerability within a seemingly harmless PDF reader could lead to attackers being able to grant remote access to your devices or steal your data if you do not have the right tools in place to protect your business.
Basic Security Measures
Nearly three-quarters of cyber actors say traditional firewalls and antivirus software are obsolete! Whereas newer solutions such as SASE protect businesses at the “edge of the internet” and link in with a business's larger cyber security suite.
Does your business rely on traditional Antivirus?
Traditional cyber security software, like Norton Antivirus, primarily focuses on detecting and removing malware with known signatures. However, cyber criminals are designing modern malware to be polymorphic and metamorphic, meaning that for each new machine they infect, they have unique signatures.
Therefore, these traditional tools are no longer providing adequate protection against modern advanced threats, including ransomware, phishing, zero-day exploits, and more.
It is estimated more than 560,000 new cyber threats are discovered daily, these modern threats require modern solutions such as EDR/MDR, Advanced Email Threat Protection, Application and Device Ringfencing and others, which use AI & Machine Learning to identify and block unknown, suspicious and malicious activity.
Compliance also plays a role in this, regulations such as GDPR and security and data protection standards such as Cyber Essentials, Cyber Essentials Plus, and ISO27001 define minimum acceptable requirements and are not tailored to specific businesses or threats.
To be able to meet these compliance standards it is important to maintain a strong baseline for cyber security. Our minimum cyber defence level ensures that businesses comply with Cyber Essentials should they wish to become certified.
For example, requiring passwords to be at least 12 characters with a mix of upper and lowercase letters and numbers might fulfil the compliance requirement. However, this doesn't protect against common attack vectors like phishing attacks, brute-force attacks and dark web data leaks. This is why our minimum cyber defence level requires multi-factor authentication across managed devices and SaaS applications.
Business Data Protection
If your laptop/desktop died, or your business server/NAS experienced a hardware failure with a data drive, could you recover all of your data? We highly recommend that businesses implement the 3-2-1 backup rule (three copies, two media types, one offsite)!
- Use automated cloud backup solutions to protect business data.
- Regularly test disaster recovery procedures.
- Implement access controls to prevent unauthorised modifications or deletions.
However, it is also important that your backup cloud data, such as that stored in services such as Microsoft SharePoint and Dropbox. You may think that because your data is stored in the cloud it is automatically backed up, and whilst data stored in the cloud is protected by high availability infrastructure, it is important to know that these services are not responsible for your data and employ a Shared Responsibility model.
This means that whilst they are responsible for the infrastructure, you as a business are responsible for the data stored. For this reason, we highly recommend cloud-to-cloud backup solutions for business data as part of the 3,2,1 solution.
How can SMEs stay secure without the resources, expertise, and IT environment of an enterprise-level organisation?
The first step comes from consulting with your trusted IT and Cyber Security provider... of course, we mean ourselves. We can work with business owners and decision-makers to resolve their common pain points, whilst ensuring that they are supported and secure to promote business growth.
- Cloud-based solutions like Microsoft 365 and Azure to reduce hardware costs
- A staggered IT refresh plan to upgrade critical systems first whilst also aligning with a wider business Technology Alignment Plan.
- Outsourcing IT support through a managed service provider.
- Government grants or financing options for digital transformation projects.
Cyber threat actors understand many SMEs don’t invest in 24/7 monitoring, so adversary groups often strike after-hours, when they’re more likely to get through an SME’s defences undetected.
If you’re interested in proactive monitoring for your business, this can be effectively delivered through our 24/7 security operations centre (SOC) service.
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Your IT enables your business to drive efficiency and security in your everyday operations, which supports you in driving your business growth. Book a consultation today.