London Computer Support | IT Support

Choosing IT support services, especially if you’re looking for IT support London, is a tricky job. You’ll be required to assess the needs of your business when choosing the company and, more importantly, the package. Many IT Support companies offer graduated levels of support, with you choosing the requirements for your business to start. Usually, IT companies offer two basic packages.

1.      Full, managed IT support. This is perfect for the business that wants nothing to do with its own IT support and devote all of its resources to other tasks. From your IT company, you’ll want constant monitoring, with protection software installed and taken care of out of your sight. You’ll want a dedicated helpline, your own account manager, and a guaranteed port of call whenever you have a question or something goes wrong. If you don’t have your own IT department and aren’t planning on hiring one, choose this type of package.

This is also a good choice if your business is larger. Problems are going to crop up and outsourced IT support will be cheaper than having your own in-house IT department. If you have a medium-sized employee base, it’s likely that you’ll have more support calls. With this in mind, it may be cheaper just to have the full service than to worry about system upgrades and email bugs.

2.      Pay as you go IT support. Perfect for very small businesses or those who have an IT support department but want a little extra help, this naturally means you determine how much support you need and pay for that. For example, if you want a speedier response time, you can pay extra and you get it. If you have extra phone calls, you pay for them. If you identify a problem, the team will fix it. This type of support is really ideal for those who know they’re not going to require much help, but need extra advice or backup for crucial situations.

Many IT companies also offer a third tier, which is consulting. This isn’t a contract option; when you go to the company looking for something in particular, they’ll help you with just that. Services of this type can include bespoke software development, phone system installation, or infrastructure services. If you’re moving offices, for example, a good think about where you’re going to put your technology and how you can expand is essential. IT support can help, with dedicated teams for just this purpose.

What do you use your IT support company for?

It can be difficult when to specifically make the decision to hire IT support.  You may have other events going on in your business; you may have an IT department who has been satisfying your needs for some time now.  But there are always times when you want to consider taking on extra IT support.  IT support London for example is plentiful and can help keep your costs down while improving your business in countless ways.  Here are a few situations in which you should find yourself thinking about hiring external IT support:

1. An office move.  A large IT support company can help you find excellent opportunities for improving use of space, upgrading equipment, and negotiating cost savings on unnecessary equipment.  They can plan with you all the fundamental aspects of your new office and may even be able to move all of your equipment over on a weekend, so you won’t even miss a single day of operations.  If you couldn’t manage this so speedily and smoothly, it may be worth bringing in an extra IT company for help.
2. Installing a new office phone system.  VoIP is, of course, the newest and probably the best option for the future, and it can be a bit confusing to put in.  If you’re upgrading your office phone system, it’s a fantastic time to contact IT support.  They can help you minimise the cost of your new installation and will likely be able to hook it into your existing system.  It’s the perfect solution.
3. One of your essential IT employees decides to leave.  In a small company, one man can end up doing a huge variety of different jobs, which can make them very difficult to replace effectively.  Even if you can find someone with the exact same range of skills, they may not fit in with your company’s culture; they may also crack under the stress of being the only person to do a range of tasks.  If you do find someone, you may still find yourself under the gun when that person goes on holiday or, worse, becomes ill and does not know when he will be returning to work.  An external IT support team will probably cost less than your single employee ever did, while providing you with a range of skills.  If you’re in London IT support will be at your doorstep and ready to solve the problem in record time, so there’s no real need to have an in house IT department at all.
4. You need custom software developed.  Rather than hire a single developer, why not take on external IT support to have a range of options presented to you?  These teams will have developers skilled in a huge variety of different programming languages, so they’ll more effectively choose the one that suits your company and your needs the best.  Upgrading your custom software can seemingly be an insurmountable task, but it’s incredibly important.  Running old operating systems and browsers just to keep software working is dangerous and can ratchet up costs of its own; it’s a much better option to get some new software developed and run with that, instead.

Hiring external IT support is never a bad idea if you can’t hire a team of your own – but if you find yourself in one of these situations, it’s downright essential.

Here is a really helpful video brought to you by Octavia IT Support that addresses the current hot topic of privacy by providing useful information on how to make you browsing experience more secure. They explain the privacy settings in the Mozilla Firefox browser and how to clear some of the data that is stored on your PC while you browse the internet.

You might think that you don’t really need IT support, London or anywhere else.  If your business is small with less than five computers, you might be right, but only if you have someone on your team who can handle any issue.  Before you decide against hiring any IT support, consider what might happen in these situations.

1. Due to some user error, because no one was checking, your backups are destroyed and lost.
2. Your database is permanently corrupted and all of your essential information for day-to-day functioning is impossible to access.
3. A virus hits and because no one was monitoring your network, it has spread and corrupted all of your office PCs.
4. Backups haven’t actually happened because no one was available to monitor them.
5. An upgrade completely disables your PCs.
6. Your website is hacked, but you’re no longer in communication with the developers.
7. A flood strikes and water gets into all of your hardware, so that it’s unusable without significant repair work.

In all of these cases, it is virtually impossible for one or two people, even experienced ones, to fix the problem.  Worse, recent statistics show that 59% of SMBs can only handle 4 hours of downtime before they start losing money.  Worse, up to 90% of SMBs with significant data loss or downtime of more than ten days will be out of business in five years according to some studies.

That doesn’t have to happen to your company.  Before starting out and establishing yourselves, really think about what IT service might mean for you.  Consider your requirements and whether it’s actually cost effective to simply ignore potential problems for the first few years.  It’s always worth creating backups and having them checked for problems on a regular basis, for example.  You can either outsource this need or hire employees to do it yourself.

In London IT support is plentiful; don’t let your small business fail simply because you wanted to cut pennies from your budget.

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Presentation Slide Show

IT Support is one of those services where you don’t enjoy paying for it until you have to use it, similarly to insurance it’s better to have it than to find yourself without it.

If you have a technical failure, software, hardware or otherwise, it is important to know that you have IT support available to sort a problem quickly and efficiently without interrupting the day to day operation of your business.

IT Support is given 365 days of the year, often from remote support offering an answer to the simplest and most challenging questions. The flexibility of IT Support allows you to pick an IT strategy which suits your demand. The flexibility allows IT services to cover Mac and PC networks as well as all server setups, be it Unix, Windows or any other. The reassurance of skilled IT engineers or efficient remote support can be accessed with a simple phone call, after the phone call the problem is no longer yours and in the hands of trained specialists. What would happen if they weren’t on the end of a phone call.

It isn’t worth thinking about. We rely so heavily on information technology so it is no surprise that the demand and necessity for IT support is apparent.

The introduction of remote support, VOIP in particular offers you the option of having IT support to fit your business demands, Pay as you go cover you could say. You can monthly instalments or one off call out fees depending on your use, you are then assured that if something goes wrong you have a qualified team behind you ready to solve the issue.

The technical services and diagnostics can cover the smallest of printer issues to whole server disconnection, IT technical assistance is offered across the board giving you piece of mind and substantial cover.

The outsourced remote IT support works on so many levels, both server and client issues can be solved with one phone call, they can access server information as well as solving issues with your desktop computer, and my personal favorite, some offer a back up service allowing you to send copies of important information to back up server. They offer preventative measures as well as solving your inevitable IT issues.