When your business is facing IT hurdles, one of the best places to start is to find an experienced IT consultant that can help you alleviate those IT problems, fast, cost-effectively, and with a roadmap for scaling and future technology in mind. Not all IT consultants are the same and some key areas to be aware of are years of experience, what areas of technical expertise they have, and what industries do they have exposure to. Also, geography comes into play since the weather can play into IT planning more than most think. If you are in Orlando, FL then you will be facing more lightning and the risk of hurricanes whereas if you were in New York, New York, then you would be more concerned with freezing weather and potentially more people-orientated risks.
Why do years of experience matter?
When finding a consultant of any kind the years of experience come into play more than if you are hiring an employee. You are paying this consultant to be aware of and potentially have faced those “gotcha” issues. When asking Secure Packet’s engineers what are some issues from the past that they have experienced but at the same time didn’t think would have been a problem they were able to come up with some great examples.
Our data center engineers brought up that different batteries for uninterrupted power systems have different life spans and need to be checked at least annually if not bi-annually. Most people would think that they just replace their batteries when they go bad or the UPS unit would notify them when to replace the batteries, however, when you receive that notice the batteries are already in a degraded state with the possibility of dropping your IT load due to voltage sags. This is one of the reasons companies like APC and Eaton recommend normal UPS maintenance. Power outages can cause massive IT headaches with data loss and downtime being the top two. If the voltage sags are bad enough without completely cutting the power it can also damage your servers, switches, firewalls, and routers. This has been found out by plenty of IT professionals the hard way.
One interesting tidbit is for our marketing and SEO clients, Google can devalue your domain and pages due to other bad or malicious websites that link to your site. The worst part of these penalties from Google is that Google doesn’t notify you about the issue or penalty unless it gets to a certain point and you have to take manual action to rectify it. Secure Packet has reviewed Google Search Console results using third-party tools on accounts with no Google manual actions on accounts to find these penalties before. Once those backlinks to malicious sites were removed then SEO results increased automatically. Without prior knowledge of these issues, there is no way to have known.
Why does the IT Consultant need certain areas of expertise?
When you are not in the IT industry, a lot of the software offerings can look the same on the surface level. It is actually not the case and it is something that Secure Packet faces constantly when ensuring our IT consultants and engineers are able to tackle our customer’s issues fast and efficiently.
We can use the example of a local new customer from Orlando that hired a prior IT consultant that stated they had 10 years of enterprise backup experience. This was supposedly a great fit, but the customer was using Veeam software and was under contract for another 2 years. There was no switching backup software and the customer has been happy with Veeam, it was just they need help with expanding to offsite backups and ensuring they have best practices met.
The IT consultant the customer first went with knew Zerto in and out but did not have any experience with Veeam. Best practices review along with troubleshooting errors were taking weeks instead of days and when the approved changes were made there became more errors on the daily report than there were previously. This isn’t knocking the IT consultant, but they were in over their heads on a more basic task from the customer. The customer came to Secure Packet and we had them fully sorted out in under a week which helped secure their data while reducing overall costs.
There is no IT consultant that will know everything so if you do find yourself in that place your IT consultant should be open and honest with you about their abilities. This is a key sign that you selected the right IT consultant for your company. Let’s take BGP networking for example you have historically been a small business that doesn’t need BGP, but you have started growing and now need to use BGP to obtain the best routes on multiple internet connections at your headquarters. Well, this is where your trusted IT consultant would be open and honest with you about not having any real experience with BGP and they can then switch gears to help you find someone specialized in BGP networking. The IT consultant would probably know enough about your company, the company’s needs, and networking to streamline the vendor selection process and ensure the right supplemental IT consultant is chosen.
A great analogy would be that you go to a primary care doctor for almost all of your health needs and if there is something off with your heart that they can’t take care of then he would find and refer you to a trusted cardiologist. IT and technology are no different.
Why does industry experience matter?
The IT consultant that you pick doesn’t necessarily have to work in the same industry that your business is in, but having knowledge and experience around the certifications, regulations, and all related industry challenges will ensure your business stays compliant while bringing known working and proper fit solutions to you the first time. Again, you are paying the IT consultant to have this knowledge and not have to figure it out on the job.
Where this doesn’t stand 100% true is when regulatory bodies release a new regulation or compliance standard. For example, CCPA out of California has caused a lot of confusion for people in technology, marketing, and c-level employees. It is a brand new regulation for anyone doing business with California residents and possesses a lot of new regulations that need to be figured out from the tech side as how you captured client data could no longer be compliant. With this being a brand new regulation, even experienced IT consultants will need time to figure out exactly what is needed to keep you out of potential fines. Having past experience with GDPR, HIPAA, and other regulations will definitely help though as having to navigate frameworks will be part of the experience you look for here.
How do I find an IT Consultant that fits my needs?
The best starting point when searching for your next IT consultant would be determining what your company need help with. Are you need someone to help build the technology roadmap, select vendors, and guide the company forward from a tech standpoint? Or are you looking for someone to perform work like a managed service provider where they can help deploy Microsoft O365 accounts and help with physical IT equipment? Or are you facing a single IT project that you need help with to get over the finish line in a timely and budget-friendly manner? These are three very different types of IT issues and each would use a different resource. Some companies, like Secure Packet, have different resources for each of these IT issues whereas other companies might only specialize in one of these like project management.
Using Secure Packet as an example, we never want to tell a customer that we can’t help them so our approach has been that if we find ourselves with a client or potential client and the IT issue is outside of our expertise then we will be open and honest about our abilities and the options at hand. This has worked best as both parties are aware of the details of the situation and sometimes Secure Packet will bring in a third party to ensure all of the bases are covered.
Once you have a handful of potential IT consultants and a list of IT wants and needs, you will want to ask the same questions to all the potential IT consultants to see how they respond and what their approach is to the different IT hurdles your company faces. During the interview process, you will be able to uncover a lot about the IT consultant’s business and what their process looks like. It is not up to you to fit their business model but there should be some common ground. What we mean by this is if you hire a new IT consultant, you shouldn’t have to change your entire IT stack to fit their needs. That would be far too costly in time and money plus the frustration of your staff. The middle ground though would be that there are some IT management tools that might change like remote monitoring and management tools. It is far better to have that changed out to fit your IT consultant’s skill set over forcing them to learn your previously chosen one as the IT consultant would be most likely using that software the most.
Secure Packet is here to help!
Secure Packet provides IT consulting services along with web hosting and advanced services. Our team is a group of experienced IT consultants with a large amount of our team around our headquarters in Orlando, FL. We are local to your needs and have the skill set to get you solutions fast and budget-friendly. We provide a free IT strategy call at no cost to you and no commitment to go with us. We also offer an IT consulting service where we strictly only provide IT consulting services. We will make you aware of our other services that would be a great fit but that is where it stops. We won’t push our services as IT consulting should be the best fit possible for your needs and not an upselling opportunity. With Secure Packet being run by IT professionals and not MBA business folks, this is one of the cornerstones of our mission statement to our clients.