Have You Outgrown Your IT Team?

Can you tell when it’s time to move on to another IT company? Consider the signs below, and think carefully about whether it’s the right time to make a change. Thrive can help you accurately assess the needs of your growing organization and ensure they are met.

What Happens When You Outgrow Your IT Team’s Capabilities?

In today’s economic environment, your IT team is an integral part of your organization.

They need to be going above and beyond to do more than simply fixing broken equipment and installing new hardware—they need to be there when you need them most, and they need to find new ways to apply technology to enhance efficiency and enable new organizational capabilities.

Above all, they need to help the organization grow and operate more profitably than ever before.

Regardless of whether you have an internal IT team or an outsourced IT support company, if they can no longer support your business, then you need to consider an upgrade.

The big question is: how do you know when you’ve outgrown your IT team?

The Downside Of Growth

Organizational growth is a double-edged sword. Yes, success is great; more clients, more sales, more profits. That’s the goal, after all, right?

But with growth comes growing pains. As you take on new clients, you need more staff to be able to service them. You need more resources for those staff members. You draw more greatly on the support services you use every day.

If one part of that fragile system can’t keep up with your growth, you might have to turn new clients away or risk delivering a low-quality product or service to them.

One of the key components that is most likely to fail you during a period of growth is IT. Every single part of your organization depends on available, functioning IT—as you grow, your demand on IT does as well.

5 Signs You’ve Already Outgrown Your IT Team

Here are five red flags that tell you that you’ve outpaced your IT team’s capabilities:

• Unidentified Risks: Your IT team may be capable of handling day-to-day maintenance and support just fine, but that doesn’t mean they’re handling everything IT-related. Failure to properly plan and maintain the disaster recovery and business continuity plan can put your organization at serious risk without affecting your daily work.  One primary way to tell if your emergency recovery management is being handled correctly is to determine when the last full disaster recovery fire drill was executed.  If your organization has never completed one, that’s a very bad sign.  If it has been longer than a year, the potential for the plan to fail increases significantly because of updates or missing critical data and systems that have been added since the last fire drill. A failed disaster recovery plan during a real crisis can be an existential risk to any organization. That’s why your IT team needs to obsessively manage and test your disaster recovery and business continuity plans.
• Cyber Incidents: A mishandled cybersecurity incident or the inability to report on cybersecurity incidents is a key indicator that your organization has outpaced your IT team. Even if it did not result in considerable downtime or data loss, a mishandled incident exposes a serious oversight in your cybersecurity management processes.  A lack of incidents is an even bigger indicator of risk, as the underlying security weaknesses are going unnoticed. Similarly, if you lack basic cybersecurity defenses like multi-factor authentication, that’s a clear sign you need to find a more capable IT team.
• No Automation: Is your IT team handling maintenance tasks manually? The fact is that a lot of IT maintenance work, while necessary, is tedious, repetitive, and ill-suited to manual execution. More advanced IT teams automate these tasks and provide exception alerting to ensure they are carried out in a timely and consistent manner.  If your IT team is still doing everything manually, they may not have the management capabilities your growing organization requires.
• Lack Of Digital Transformation: As an organization grows, it will gain the resources to invest in more complex and advanced systems and software.  A key example of this is the migration of IT workloads to the cloud—while there are plenty of consumer-level cloud platforms that work for small organizations, as an organization scales up, it can greatly benefit from more tailored and complicated cloud deployments. If your IT team keeps telling you the cloud isn’t right for your organization, it may be because they lack the expertise or resources to properly migrate your data to the platform you need.
• No Annual Assessment And Planning: There are many tasks that your IT team must handle on an ad-hoc basis.  Internet outages, system failures, and corrupted storage devices don’t happen on a scheduled basis. However, planning for these events and building a long-term strategy for the application of technology should not be handled on a reactive basis, especially for growing organizations.  In order to properly plan for the future of any organization’s IT, budget accurately, and stay ahead of necessary expansions and upgrades, your IT team needs to establish a comprehensive annual assessment and planning process. If your IT team is only making changes and launching projects after they become necessary, then your IT management as a whole lacks strategy. Eventually, this lack of foresight will catch up with you, resulting in downtime, lagging systems, security issues, or worse.

Is It Time For You To Move On?

Your organization needs the best IT services to thrive.  It’s really as simple as that. From productivity to security, to communication, to innovative new ways to get work done—IT is at the heart of it all.

Here are the facts: properly chosen technology combined with true expertise can achieve real results for your organization.

All that depends on finding the right support—have you settled for something less? Get in touch with the Thrive team to get the IT expertise and resources your growing organization needs.