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Three Ways Cloud Helps SMBs Escape the IT Treadmill

Three Ways Cloud Helps SMBs Escape the IT Treadmill

By Matt Schvimmer - 2015-06-29

 

Spending at small and mid-sized businesses on IT is expected to grow faster in the next five years than at the overall market, according to a Gartner report.

 

This is putting a lot of strain on those mid market IT groups who have historically relied on email, spreadsheets and homegrown solutions to manage all of their work.  It’s common that these folks are expected to be a "jack-of-all-trades" to their businesses, and unfortunately, some are exhausted just trying to run in place.

 

Express

 

Although SMBs have different pain points than the Fortune 500, there are some valuable lessons to be learned from large companies that have been transforming their IT operations for years.  With the continued expansion of cloud offerings, taking the leap into IT Service Management is now within grasp of most SMBs.

 

Luckily, SMBs are no stranger to cloud computing for automating business tasks. These firms already drive more than half of global cloud consumption, according to IDC. SMBs recognize the benefits of using more agile, lower cost, cloud applications.

 

Here are three steps that SMB IT leaders and teams can take to help more effectively grow their business with cloud-based service management:

  • Move out of email and spreadsheets and automate the workflow. Personal productivity tools are no way to run an IT organization!  Without visibility into IT requests and incidents, IT teams struggle to prioritize and assign work to the right expert, resolve bottlenecks and provide timely responses to employees.  From my experience, just the act of quickly getting incident management running is a big win that can drive up to a 20 percent improvement in the time it takes to resolve open issues.
  • Track all of your IT assets — A single system of record is critical to understanding what assets you have, where they are located, and who has access to them.  Connecting assets to incidents, requests, problems, changes, etc., makes IT’s work more 500 Internal Server Error

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