Few industries have experienced greater periods of rapid change than IT support. Even as recently as twenty years ago, most employees didn’t have access to a computer, and data security was seen as storing and destroying paper documents correctly. Now, almost every user has a mobile device, and terabytes of sensitive data need to be protected at all times. The sector of IT support is facing myriad challenges this decade. Managers must learn how to handle all of these issues as they help their companies transition to a 21st-century technology platform.
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
In the early days of smart devices, the only name in the enterprise game was BlackBerry. This made it relatively simple for IT support to manage the mobile devices, and they were typically only distributed on a need-to-have-basis. Now, many companies have instituted a BYOD policy in order to provide convenience to employees and reduce hardware costs. The flip side is that an IT support team typically has dozens of different devices running disparate software platforms which they must manage and secure. This results in a significant time investment to get the company’s mobile platform ready for all of the various systems. To complicate things, end-users often don’t understand the components of agreements they must enter into in order to store company data on a personal device.
Cloud Computing
Whether it’s as simple as switching to a cloud-based email service like Google or migrating your entire operation to a complete cloud service, cloud computing is revolutionizing the way many companies are doing business. It offers numerous benefits including streamlined access, uncomplicated pricing, scalability, and flexibility. However, there are still some challenges that arise during the transition to cloud computing. Notably, many employees will be resistant to a new system and may need extensive training – a task usually left to IT support.
Mounting Infrastructure Costs
Although storage is getting cheaper, the amount of data that most organizations must now process and secure has increased exponentially. Everything from financial records, marketing and communications materials, customer information, and HR files are now stored digitally for almost every company. Add to this the fact that new software platforms often require upgraded hardware, and it becomes clear that many IT managers are seeing their budgets consumed by increased infrastructure costs.
Increased Demand
It’s rare now for any company to have an employee who doesn’t use an IT-managed system. That makes nearly every employee of the company an end-user, and it’s the responsibility of the IT team to respond to their issues and make sure they have the tools needed to perform their job.
Data Security
If your customers or employees don’t trust you with sensitive data, it’s hard to get ahead. Data security has become such a hot button issue for organizations, both because there is now so much data to secure and because there are more people looking to exploit security flaws. This is one IT support issue that isn’t going away anytime soon.
