When is the right time to call an IT consultant? As information technology continues to change, the lines can be blurred as to when your business should bring in an IT Consultant. Any modern business with more than a handful of people has an IT infrastructure, and this has been the case for at least a decade. What has changed is, people are generally more familiar with technology, and the technology itself has become more user-friendly. Many aspects of maintaining that infrastructure have grown easier.
Another change is the depth to which technology has permeated business operations. It’s not just crunching numbers anymore or word processing. Technology affects every aspect of a business, from marketing to operations, accounting, and communications. This should be seen as a good thing, but managing the IT infrastructure has not become easier. With clouds, and SaaS, VDO, DNS, VMware, it’s no wonder companies drift off course.
This is where an IT consultant can make a huge difference for your company. Even if you have an in-house IT staff to deal with parts of your network, there are some areas where a consultant can add tremendous value. Here are a few of them.
Strategic Planning
Despite IT being an integral part of most businesses, we don’t see many hiring IT staff with business skills. An IT consultant can help you align your IT initiatives with your business goals, going beyond technical details and guiding IT decisions and plans with a business context.
Multi-Vendor Management
Most infrastructures contain equipment and services from a variety of vendors. But all these things have to work together reliably for your business to really realize the power of this technology. When things go awry in a complex environment, vendors often default to a ‘not our fault’ mode, making sorting out of responsibilities and next steps a real struggle. A consultant can aid in unraveling issues that span several vendors’ products and services.
Hybrid Environments
The cloud is here to stay, but most businesses aren’t moving everything to the cloud for a variety of reasons. For businesses that are considering moving workloads to the cloud, an IT consultant can help by evaluating a company’s existing IT environment and devising a cloud strategy to determine which workloads should be moved to the cloud, when to do it, and how to manage the resulting hybrid environment.
Clare Computer Solutions has helped hundreds of companies in the San Francisco Bay Area grapple with the complexities businesses encounter with regards to technology and helped companies integrate IT into their business operations to provide the best advantages. We can help you too, and it all starts with a business discussion. Contact us today to begin the process!
