Wouldn’t it be awesome if you had your own personal pit crew?

Imagine pulling your car into your garage and going about your business at home. Sometime during the night, a highly-trained pit crew enters your garage. They quietly and confidently top off fluids, change tires, fix anything that needs repairs, take care of any recalls, certify that your brakes are good, wash, wax, vacuum, and then leave quietly.

The next morning, you head off to work and step into the garage knowing without a doubt that your car has been taken care of from top to bottom. It’s in the best condition it can be and is far less likely to have an issue on the road. And, you’re certain that even if you do have any roadside problems, the same pit crew will be there in short order to solve whatever the problem is with skill and care.

While the Pit Crew story may be a pipe dream for our personal vehicles (or mine at least), that standard of attention, focus, and care is an absolute necessity for our IT and our business networks.

IT is the central nervous system of your business. If your servers are down, or your team is frequently having IT issues, or you lose data due to unreliable backups, there is a significant impact on your business — and not a positive one. Unlike the fairly static and consistent nature of a newer vehicle, your IT network is a complex web of different devices, servers, and software that is frequently being updated, changed, tweaked, or modified to meet the needs and expectations of your business and your people.

At the same time, your IT is being targeted by every hacker and would-be-hacker who can create an automated bot to break your security. These factors alone make having a top-notch IT pit crew necessary — but what exactly does that crew look like? 

I’m glad you asked.

Here are 7 IT Pains That a Top-Notch IT Pit Crew Will Solve:

1. They Offer the Team Advantage – A top-notch IT crew isn’t one who always seems to be stretched so thin it is constantly fighting to just keep up. These struggles are quite common if you are relying on a single technical person for your IT. One person can’t do it all. You need the depth of a full team with varying knowledge and diverse skill sets. Some IT people excel at troubleshooting, others show strength with innovation, cybersecurity, or in working with people to solve their everyday computer and technology issues. Plus, when you are backed by the strength of an IT team rather than a single person, you never have to worry about being at risk, if that person wins the lottery, goes on vacation, or leaves your business.
2. They Provide Stability – At times, IT feels like a fire drill. When priorities are always shifting or your technology is unreliable, getting projects done can be much more difficult, or even impossible. Implementing a strong process is extremely important to be effective in IT.  Quite often in a one or two-person IT environment, there is very little process and everything is done in reactive mode. As a result, the long-term goals and objectives of the business are neglected. But, when you work with a process-driven IT team, they will be able to prioritize immediate trouble-type user issues, while dedicating an equal amount of attention and focus to your long-term objectives as well.
3. They Establish and Implement Best Practices – Best practices are essential to building a solid IT platform. A top-notch IT team has an established best practice baseline and is willing to share it with you. They are able to point to their experience at other organizations and navigate industry standards in order to provide an assessment of your current state and recommendations to improve.
4. They Handle Security and Recovery – Security risks like viruses or information theft should never be brushed over or placed on the back burner. Security practices may feel like a hassle. Having to change passwords, deal with screen locks, use email encryption, and implement other security measures is, admittedly, no small task. However, these things can save your company huge amounts of downtime, lost information, and even financial damage. And, when you have the right IT resource, they will be the ones to routinely optimize and manage your ongoing security, in order to help you build a network that strikes a healthy balance between proactive defense and uninterrupted function and productivity. That, and in the event of a security breach, you will want the expertise and urgency of a knowledgeable team on your side as you recover, repair, and reinforce your security measures moving forward.
5. They Deliver Technology Wins – It’s not uncommon for businesses to feel like they haven’t had any real technology breakthroughs in a long time. There may be some areas where change is possible, but there always seems to be something in the way. This is a common IT problem, but it can be easily solved when you have the strength and capacity of an expert team at your side. In order to consider ways to build efficiency and automate, you have to first be stable. If you never achieve stability, you never move on to leveraging technology to the next level, and the next level brings real productivity. With the right team, you’ll be able to do both.
6. They Create Consistency – IT expenditures are often a bit of an unknown. When your technology isn’t managed consistently, it can result in unexpected purchases and an IT budget that is rarely, if ever, on target. The good news is that with the right team, your IT can be planned and budgeted with very few surprises. A solid IT team will address the issues creating instability, correct them, and make optimal performance a constant. Instability and an inability to budget are usually created when we’re trying to “just get by” with short-term fixes or failing to follow best practices altogether. When these issues are addressed by the right team, stability is the natural result.
7. They are Transparent – When your IT feels a little unstructured, you may be reasonably concerned about the behind-the-scenes stuff. A top-notch team will alleviate those concerns by addressing the everyday technology and maintenance — the  IT equivalent of brakes, tires, and oil changes — and the long-term performance of your technology and workflow systems. Top-notch teams are those who clearly and consistently communicate with you about things like bi-weekly security patches, reviewing log files, updating firewalls, tracking software licensing, testing backups, and processes that have the potential to be optimized or even automated using specialized monitoring tools. With a top-notch team, you’ll never be in the dark about how your technology is currently performing, and you’ll never have to wonder about what else it could be doing for you and your business.
   

The highly performing IT Pit Crew is a bit of a rarity, and it is particularly difficult to create the process and discipline needed if you only have one or two people addressing IT concerns for your entire organization. 

A specialized IT Team is what we offer at CTaccess — and that team strives to deliver laser-focused care and attention to our clients and their businesses every single day. If you don’t have an awesome IT Pit Crew in your corner yet, we’d love to talk to you about what our top-notch team can do for you and your business.

Scott Hirschfeld

Scott Hirschfeld is the President of CTaccess, a Brookfield IT support company that has been helping businesses stop focusing on IT and getting back to doing business since 1990. Under his leadership CTaccess provides the business minded approach of larger IT companies with the personalized touch of the smaller ones. Connect with Scott on LinkedIn.