What Are the Most Important IT Solutions for an SMB?

While all a business’ technology solutions are important, some are bound to take priority over the others, especially when certain ones become an industry-wide focus. A recent survey evaluated the top concerns of small-to-medium-sized businesses for the coming year. The results of the survey identified a few telling trends regarding the priorities that SMBs hold now, and for good reason.

Techaisle, a market research and industry analysis organization, collected and consolidated data to identify where SMBs and small businesses specifically saw their biggest business issues and their technology challenges and priorities. Let’s bear down specifically on the answers provided by the small businesses to see if your internal priorities and concerns match up to theirs.

Issues

According to the survey, a small business’ largest concerns are all what one would generally expect of any business. Here they are as the survey identified them:

1. Attracting and retaining new customers
2. Increasing profitability
3. Increasing business growth

These were the highest priorities for the survey’s respondents. The areas of least concern, as the survey identified, were: 

1. Improving workplace productivity
2. Improving effectiveness of sales and marketing
3. Focusing on new markets

Oddly enough, these areas of lower concern could directly benefit the efforts of their top concerns if perhaps prioritized more… but I digress.

Priorities and Challenges

Speaking of the priorities that the surveyed small businesses presented, the trends therein were exceptionally clear. Nearly as clear, is how directly these priorities line up with the IT challenges that these businesses face.

Here are the top four priorities and challenges, respectively:

1. Cloud / Cloud security
2. Mobility solutions / Customer experience
3. Collaboration / Maintaining current IT infrastructure
4. Managed services / Budget constraints

What this tells us is that businesses largely have the right idea of how they can use information technology to help address their biggest concerns. By adopting relatively new approaches to IT services and their delivery of them, like cloud solutions and managed services, businesses can better increase their profitability and scale upwards through bringing in more people to sign on.

The IT challenges that the surveyed businesses specified are also well-managed by implementing precisely what they have prioritized. It makes sense that, with cloud ranking as their number-one priority, cloud security is correspondingly elevated. Similarly, with customer service standards to uphold, the ability to collaborate with the rest of the team needs to be a priority.

Finally, the budgetary limitations and the maintenance requirements play even more deeply into the adoption of managed IT services, which help relieve both concerns for businesses.

There’s a lot more that a managed service provider can deliver to a business, and we’d be happy to discuss it with you further. If you have any more questions or want to learn more about managed services and what they entail, give the professionals at Directive a call. Reach out to us today at 607.433.2200.