6 Useful Tips Your Small Business IT Support Services Company Wants You to Know

As a small to mid-size business owner in Northeastern Pennsylvania, you often face several challenges with your computers, network, and cybersecurity. Whether it’s your employees practicing bad online habits or not having enough resources to stay up to date with the latest security patches, these problems can threaten your company’s success.

But when you partner with a company providing small business IT support services like ours, we can help you mitigate these risks and drive your business toward success. And if you already have an in-house IT department, we can partner with them to tackle any issues they are too busy or inexperienced to do, ensuring your business’s IT is always covered.

So, contact us today to talk about IT solutions for small businesses. And in the meantime, check out these six useful tips to protect your company against cyber criminals and ensure your systems run smoothly.

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1. Create Unique Passwords

You use many passwords daily: to read your email, log into your computer, access Microsoft Teams, use your company’s collaboration tools, and so much more. While using the same password for all these applications is much easier, it’s also much more dangerous. If just one of those third-party companies you use—like Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, or Adobe—gets hacked, your password could be on the dark web for cybercriminals to retrieve and perform an account takeover.

And companies are getting hacked all the time. It’s nearly a weekly occurrence that you hear about a major data breach in the news. Plus, you’re in deep trouble if you or your employees use the same passwords for your banking, social media, or other accounts.

Our first tip is to remember to create unique passwords and practice good password hygiene. You’ll want to avoid reusing passwords or derivatives of the same password and ensure your password is complex, with at least eight characters. It’s also important to enroll in multifactor authentication to have a second security step to ensure the actual person logging into that account is the real person.

2. Train Your Employees to Fight Cybercrime

A Security Training note in the center of a desk surrounded by a laptop, pen, glasses, and phone.

Your employees are often your first line against cyber threats and your most significant security risk. From inadvertently clicking on phishing emails to sharing too much personal information on social media and anything in between, your employees usually stand between your company and the hacker. That’s why small business owners and their employees must understand the latest security practices to protect their sensitive data.

One way you can mitigate these risks is with security awareness training. This type of training strengthens your frontline and helps enforce data security’s importance to your business. Your employees can train to spot phishing emails, create strong passwords, understand the dangers of Wi-Fi, identify phone scams, and much more.

Training your team can help prevent future problems and is an affordable way to enhance your security against advanced threats that try to sneak past your employees.

3. Cover All Your Bases with Co-Managed IT Services

For companies with internal IT departments, it’s often beneficial to partner with third-party small business IT support services like ours. This partnership gives you the ability to achieve more IT benefits without the expense of hiring more internal tech support. Additionally, outsourcing part of your technology needs is often more affordable than adding to your team.

You can customize this partnership to meet your business’s unique needs. For example, suppose your internal team is handling help-desk tickets and triage. In that case, our team can ensure that your anti-malware, anti-virus, firewall, and other security protocols are updated with the latest patches installed.

All small businesses need an effective cybersecurity strategy, and sometimes companies can’t cover all their bases. But with co-managed IT solutions, you can rest assured that your computer network has protection against cyber threats without losing traction on your other technology projects.

4. Ask for Help

As a small business owner, you are often inundated with projects that move you closer to your business goals. So when your cloud-based email, computer network, hardware or software, or IT infrastructure goes down, you must get it back up and running quickly. You may think that trying to solve the problem yourself will be quicker and more cost-effective, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Ask for assistance from the company you hired to provide small business IT support services. We are here to provide effective collaboration, email security solutions, and threat protection to keep your business running. With our remote IT support services, we can quickly diagnose and often resolve issues without wasting much time.

5. Keep Your Emails Safe

A person typing on a laptop with an email-concept image overlay.

Email security is a top priority for your business because about 85% of emails are spam. Spam emails present security risks to your business, leaving you vulnerable to losing sensitive data to the wrong people. That’s why it’s important to have robust email security solutions. Our email and spam protection provides:

  • Intelligent, custom spam filters
  • Email encryption
  • Multiple defense layers
  • Anti-malware
  • Protection against hackers
  • Compliance with secure data storage rules

As today’s technology advances, so do phishing scams. And most of those scams come through email and appear legitimate, and it’s easy to fool a trained eye. That’s why you need email protection.

6. Test Your Backups

With the looming threats around us, ensuring your data backups are running properly has never been more important than now. And, unfortunately, if you are relying on tapes or disc drives to back up your data, you are putting your business at an even greater risk. These backups have a 100% failure rate and often happen without you knowing.

But with robust data backups as part of your small business IT support services, your data is securely backed up to the cloud. Your business data is automatically backed up multiple times to different locations. This type of backup ensures that if a server goes down at one data center, the other backup will still have all your files. Best of all, we can take care of this data loss prevention service for you, so all you must do is worry about growing your business!

Need Small Business IT Support Services? Talk to Us!

Your clients depend on you to get your job done, but that’s sometimes difficult to do when you are battling technology issues. Turn to the experts at InnoTek today for small business IT support services. We’ll help ensure your business stays protected through regular security training, email security solutions, automatic data backups, and so much more.

Plus, we can work alongside your IT department or person with our co-managed IT services. This partnership helps ensure your business’s technology needs are met without any gaps in cyber protection. Get in touch with us today to get started!

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