One of the reasons companies turn to IT engineering firms for help is that, frankly, managing information technology is hard. If you aren’t in the IT business yourself, how do you cope with all these challenges?

1. Keeping up with technology

Today it’s cloud that’s the new technology businesses are struggling with; tomorrow it will be something else. Unlike businesses that simply use technology, IT engineering and managed services firms have relationships with vendors that give them insight into the upcoming changes in technology. They also have access to additional training and support from the vendors to help them master the new technology. And because they work with a wide variety of customers, they see how the technology works in reality as opposed to how it works in the sales pitch, and develop insight into leveraging the technology effectively in many environments.

2. Hiring skilled technology professionals

If you aren’t in the technology business, it’s difficult to hire and retain top technical professionals. You may not have the knowledge you need to ask good interview questions and tell whether the potential hire really has the skills to match the buzzwords on their resume. IT engineering firms are in the technology business and have to meet deadlines everyday. They know how to assess whether a potential employee will be able to get the job done.

3. Keeping your systems safe

Keeping systems and data safe is extremely important for businesses. It’s a legal obligation as well as a matter of your reputation and trust with your customers. There are so many threats, with new threats developing all the time, that it’s very difficult for non-IT companies to keep up. In addition, the time you spend working on information security and other routine maintenance pulls your team away from working on business problems.

4. Managing remote systems

Employees used to work at their desktops connected over an internal network to servers in your data center. That model is long gone. Your systems are in the cloud, and employees access them from everywhere using devices you don’t control. IT management was difficult under the old model, but in this new model, where you need to support systems running offsite on equipment you don’t control accessed by devices you don’t control, the challenges multiply.

5. Protecting the business against risk

We talked about security above; there’s another kind of risk you need to protect against, too: the risk of downtime. Disaster recovery and backups are extremely important functions that are easy to get wrong. The problem is that you may not find out your solutions aren’t working until you’re in a middle of a crisis where you really need them to work. An experienced IT engineering company has implemented many backup and disaster recovery solutions and helped companies execute their recovery process. With a strategy designed by an IT engineering firm, you can be sure these critical processes are reliable.

What are your IT challenges? Prescient Solutions offers IT engineering services in Chicago and Schaumburg and helping our clients address these and other IT management problems. Contact us to learn how Prescient Solutions’ IT engineers can help you solve your IT challenges.