The Business Exchange Swindon & Wiltshire Edition 36: April/May 2018 | Page 22

TECHNOLOGY Take Comfort in Extended IT Support From CIS By Gareth Johnson, CIS For many businesses the idea of outsourcing IT support signifies the passing of one of their most precious of assets to someone outside of their circle of trust. Yet for most small to medium sized businesses it is something they must often look at doing based on the cost implications of having their own internal IT department. When you reach that point there are obviously various aspects you must consider. Does this organisation have a track record as IT consultants and do they have extensive references in support of the case for placing your trust in them? How long have they been in business for instance and what do their accreditations say about the work they carry out? Another thing to consider is the range of clients. Does your 22 prospective new IT solutions provider or consultancy look to provide the same service and focus for businesses locally as it does for other national and internationally renowned brands that it serves? Serving a range of different sized brands with varied needs – such as IT strategy, storage, cloud migration, virtualisation and managed support – means that your THE BUSINESS EXCHANGE 2018 supplier will be forced to prepare for and insure against every eventuality. By encrypting data securely to latest standards such as ISO 27001 and helping to prepare you for upcoming regulations such as the GDPR, your supplier of IT support services should already be looking towards your future and guiding on what kind of strategy you should deploy for your business. Do you, for instance, take a mixture of on-premise and cloud to give yourself a hybrid solution or do you need to take advantage of a private cloud solution wrapped up in 24/7 support in a UK data centre? CIS has been answering questions like these for our clients for the past 25 years and has recently rolled out extended office support from 8am until midnight. This brings businesses two new benefits. Not only does it give you the additional comfort that comes with the extra cover provided, but it also allows for increased levels of uptime as updates and security patches can be taken care of once everyone else has left the building. To find out what we can do for you please visit www.cisltd.com or email: [email protected]