IT Consulting

A skilled and knowledgeable IT consultant can do wonders for your business, regardless of whether you’re a small business or a larger enterprise. Unfortunately, the reverse is true for IT consultants who are only interested in turning a profit. If their priorities don’t align with yours or they can’t handle your company’s needs, they can cause significant damage to your data infrastructure and your wallet.

The first thing you need to do is determine whether you need an in-house IT team/consultant or if hiring a third party out-of-house will satisfy your needs. In many cases, you may only need out-of-house assistance, which is fine; but the caveat with hiring consultants is that you should always apply the same vetting process to them as you would for full-time hires. An IT consultant can and likely will play a crucial part in ensuring the integrity of your network, helping you maintain backups, and providing proactive maintenance for your computers.
Your approach to hiring a consultant—and vetting them—is a multistep process that begins with understanding what you need to fill that role in the first place.

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When talking with business owners, we’ve found time and again that many simply don’t pay much attention to their network. For many small businesses, it takes a little blip (or worse, a major catastrophe) before they realize that their network had been neglected for far too long. In the business world, the old adage “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” rings true, perhaps most especially on the IT side of things.
A haphazard or an uninformed approach to dealing with network issues ensures a few things.

• Time will be lost; and as a result, money will be lost.
• Network issues will persist even after the last fire is put out.
• Instability will inevitably lead to a network disaster at some point.

However, most small businesses, and a good deal of medium-sized ones, lack the resources to manage their network with an experienced staff of full-time IT experts. The solution is to choose an IT provider to perform regular network maintenance. This introduces a really interesting (and unfortunate) catch-22 to addressing network concerns: hiring the wrong IT vendor can be nearly as disastrous as doing nothing at all. According to The Digest, some of the most important things to look for in a vendor include trustworthiness, reliability, quality service, and quality customer care. I couldn’t agree more. So what are the most important things to avoid?
I’ve written extensively about this in the past, but for the sake of brevity, here are some of the most important things to steer clear of when choosing an IT professional to service your network.

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