Companies are leveraging IT at levels unheard of in times past. With the introduction and growth of cloud-based applications, an increase in cyberattacks, and compliance regulations applying to more types of businesses, IT is no longer a small piece of the strategic puzzle. It’s now a key component of every company’s business strategy.
Many organizations cannot staff the level of expertise required to keep up with changes in technology, compliance requirements, and the day-to-day changes within the industry. Partnering with a managed cloud service provider that also provides IT consulting, IT services, and IT support in Orange County allows your organization to leverage the varying levels of expertise needed to maintain its strategic direction.
BRITECITY’s dedicated IT teams support key parts of your business strategy, including:
· Meeting compliance requirements
· Protecting against cyberattacks
· Maintaining productivity in a distributed environment
Meeting compliance requirements
Privacy laws vary across different countries and industries. These regulations describe how organizations must meet certain legal and regulatory standards for collecting, processing, and maintaining their customers’ personally identifiable information (PII). Data breaches are bound to happen when companies fail to implement the proper protection. Such breaches can lead to fines, investigations, and other legal consequences.
BRITECITY has spoken with many firms that face new compliance requirements. They don’t have the expertise to weed through dense issues like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), or to determine when different regulations apply. As an organization, you are legally required to protect your customers’ PII, which means you must take steps to prevent data leaks.
IT plays a strategic role in ensuring compliance requirements are being met. As a result, organizations must partner with cybersecurity companies that have compliance knowledge and expertise. A dedicated IT team can ensure that your customers’ data stays safe and protected in all of its different forms and uses. They can also help to keep companies in line and in compliance with the regulations that involve their business.
Protecting against cyberattacks
Security requirements are being driven by the growth of cyberattacks on many businesses in different industries. Cyberattacks are no longer being perpetrated by disgruntled individuals or lone criminals trying to steal a company’s corporate data. Cyber-criminals consist of international firms employing teams of people whose primary goal is to find new ways to infect organizations’ computers, steal or hold their data for ransom, and make money in the process. These organizations are also unregulated and untraceable, as they’re often located in other countries.
Companies need to partner with cybersecurity firms to defend their systems and files, and to mitigate different types of cyberattacks. 94% of the most common cyberattacks come through email. Email is the easiest way into your environment because human error and choice enables cyberattacks to get past your firewalls and other forms of cybersecurity. All it takes is one person, either accidentally or on purpose, deciding to click on an infected file, and your email has been breached.
A dedicated IT team understands potential threats and implements the necessary safety nets to keep your organization as safe as possible. They take a layered security approach to protecting your companies’ computers and data against email and other threats. This can include email record filtering for spam and malicious content, multi-factor authentication of employees’ email credentials, and email encryption for secure communication. Your dedicated IT team will also ensure overall cybersecurity, using a layered approach to protect against different threats to your systems.
Maintaining productivity in a distributed environment
To keep their employees working, many organizations have moved to more distributed environments. Employees and their computers have left the security of the office and are sitting in homes or satellite locations around the United States. This leaves them vulnerable to cyberattacks, as well as everyday IT-related problems.
When productivity loss happens, it’s important to have a dedicated IT team that understands your business and that can respond to all your IT requests. When technology fails and an employee calls in for help, having a dedicated IT team assigned to your account ensures that employees will be speaking to and working with someone they know. They will understand your environment, how the employee uses their computer, and how best to help them overcome the problems in the system. This will ensure that employees remain productive no matter where they are working.
Going digital just makes sense. It is becoming essential to integrate a digital strategy into the overall business strategy. For example, sales and marketing teams need to access information to formulate strategies, as well as the tools (e.g., phone systems, email, infrastructure) to
implement their plans. A dedicated IT team can strategically design your IT infrastructure to help employees leverage these resources to perform their duties. This supports individual employee productivity, as well as the ability to meet corporate goals and fulfill a digital strategy.