Businesses today need technology. It plays an essential role in any organisation, big or small. Technology is often one of the largest investments in a business. So you should also invest in looking after it.

This is where professional IT support is required. If your technology fails the effects on your business can be catastrophic. But IT support is about prevention and compliance as well as solving problems when they arise.

The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the issues that business can face when they have poor IT. For many moving to remote working was easy. They had the technology and the plans in place. But for others it was almost impossible and has even led to businesses failing.

In this article we will talk about just some of the reasons why professional IT support really is vital to your business.

 
<h2>Data Storage, Management and Security.</h2>
The new General Data Protection Regulation (the GDPR) came into force in May 2018. This is a major tightening of the regulations around data protection.

The most significant change was an increase in the amount of money regulators can fine companies who do not comply with the legislation. Fines cane be up to 4% of their global turnover or 20m euros (£15.8m), whichever is greater.

The biggest fines issued under GDPR so far in the UK went to British Airways (£20m) and Marriot International (£18.4m). But SME’s have been fined significant sums too.

The charitable organisation The Bible Society, with a turnover of approximately half a million, was fined £100,000. It stored personal data on an insufficiently secure internal network. This was deemed by the ICO to grant inappropriate remote access rights and was accessible via an ‘easy-to-guess’ password.

The Bible Society is not the only charity with hefty fines for data breaches. The RSPCA has been fined £25,000 and the British Heart Foundation £18,000.

Life at Parliament View Ltd, London based Estate Agent, was fined £80,000 for leaving 18,610 customers’ personal data exposed for almost two years.

So it’s time to start taking data protection very seriously.

The role of an IT Support team is to make sure your data is stored in a secure environment. They make sure it is easily accessible but only to the people that are allowed to view it.

Without the support of a professional IT team you could end up storing data in a vulnerable location. Or giving access to somebody without the right permissions. This can be a big issue where data protection is concerned.