The IT department often gets forgotten about in companies and people don’t always recognise the important role that they play. The sales and marketing department are the people that attract the customers and bring in the money; the accounts department handle all of the money and make sure that the business can carry on running properly as well as paying everybody; the HR department make sure that everybody in the company is comfortable with their working environment and has everything they need. All of those departments have a defined role and it’s obvious why they’re important, but when it comes to IT, people don’t often know what it is that they do day to day. Obviously, they’re responsible for fixing any problems with the computers around the office but that’s only one small part of what they do.

If you’ve been neglecting your IT department because you don’t think that they’re that important you could be doing some serious damage to your company. These are just some of the reasons that your IT department deserve more investment.

Cyber-Security

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you should already know that cyber-security is one of the biggest dangers that businesses face right now. The number of attacks is on the rise and criminals are constantly developing new ways to crack security systems and get at all of your private data. It’s especially dangerous if you lose sensitive customer data because it’s likely to cause a very big public scandal. Earning the trust of your customers is vital, especially if you’re asking them to give you their credit card details to buy products online. A data breach can be incredibly hard to recover from and you’re likely to lose a huge amount of customers which is why it’s so important that you protect yourself online. Most companies understand this, but they often underestimate just how much work goes into that.

Constantly updating your security software is important because hackers will always come up with a way around the latest security measures. You’re in a constant battle and if you don’t update software regularly, you’ll leave yourself open to attack. As well as updating software, you need an IT department who can install a vpn which allows you to transfer data securely in the office, keep on top of the latest developments in the cyber-security world, and plug any gaps in your security. If you’re only hiring a small team of inexperienced people and paying them a small salary, you aren’t going to get the protection you so desperately need.

Customer Service

We all know that customer service is essential if your business is going to be a success. The staff in your customer service department obviously need to be doing their job properly and you need to make sure you’re providing a good product at a reasonable price and delivering it on time. Most people don’t think that the IT department has much to offer when it comes to customer service but that’s not true. They are the ones that can give your customer service staff the tools that they need to do their jobs more effectively. By streamlining the software that staff use so they can access information quicker and carry out solutions without having to make customers wait, the IT department can massively improve the level of service that you can offer. However, your IT department has a lot of other duties day to day and if you don’t hire enough people, you won’t have the manpower needed to develop new customer service software on a regular basis.

Data Management

The amount of digital data that a company deals with has increased rapidly over the last decade. Pretty much every employee in the company is going to need access to some of that data to do their jobs properly. If it isn’t organised properly and they can’t get what they need easily, it will slow everything down and you’ll see a huge dip in productivity. One of the most important things that your IT department does for you is organise that data and create software that the rest of your staff can use to access it easily. On top of that, they can handle archiving and deleting data that you don’t need anymore. That doesn’t seem so important but it is; if you’re keeping all of that data that you have, even if you don’t need it anymore, you’re just increasing the risk of cyber-attacks. The more data you hold, the more there is to steal. Managing this huge amount of data and making it accessible is so important and you won’t be able to do it without a good IT department.

Maintenance

This is the function that most people recognise when they think of the IT department. All companies are heavily reliant on computers and if there is a problem with them, that means a massive loss of productivity. Consider just one employee, if their computer crashes, they can’t do any work at all until it comes back online. Now imagine that the computers across the entire company stop working, nobody gets anything done until the problem is fixed. If you’ve just got one or two people working on it, it might be an entire day before the company is back up and running again and that means a huge loss of earnings. If you want to limit that damage, you need a well staffed IT department with the resources they need to get your systems back online as quickly as possible.

Without a good IT department, your company is at risk of cyber-attacks which could effectively kill the business. On top of that, you’ll be a lot less efficient than you could be and your staff won’t have the tools they need to do their jobs properly. If you can’t afford to hire enough people yourself, you should consider outsourcing to an IT company that can provide the services you need. It often works out cheaper than hiring a large IT department in-house.