The Top IT and Tech Challenges for Businesses in 2019

Companies, whether small, large, or enterprise-level organizations face their fair share of challenges at any given time. Currently, many of the most pervasive challenges for businesses related to IT and technology.

There’s everything from the challenges of harnessing the power of the multitudes of data most organizations are collecting and storing, to security challenges that never seem to wane and instead only grow and evolve often more quickly than a business can keep up.

The following are some of the examples of the biggest challenges in tech and IT right now from the perspective of businesses of pretty much any size and in any industry.

Global Visibility

It’s difficult, especially for businesses without a dedicated IT team, to know the best way to keep their technology assets centralized and globally visible. For example, appropriate resource planning may rely on the use of IPAM Linux services, which allows for ease of installation with IT resources, improved team productivity and agility, and better workflow management.

If a business doesn’t have the experts on staff or access to third-party IT experts, they’re not going to have an understanding of how to improve efficiency and implement global visibility.

Securing Data

We hear over and over again about the importance of data. The economy is gradually being rebuilt with data as an integral currency. Data is necessary to understand customers and entire industries,and it’s one of the most powerful tools a business can have at its disposal.

The challenge comes with knowing how to truly protect that data and appropriately store it. For example, if necessary, are data storage and collection efforts GDPR-compliant?

Even before similar regulations are enacted in the United States, businesses need to be looking ahead and preparing as if they are already facing the level of regulation that stems from GDPR, rather than waiting until it’s too late.

Despite so much attention always on security issues, there’s not a lot of action on the part of businesses, probably because they think the issues don’t apply to them or because they simply don’t know where to begin.

Skills Gap

The skills gap isn’t exclusive to technology challenges or any certain industries. It’s being felt across the board for businesses, but there is definitely an IT skills gap.

Businesses of all sizes are going to have to expand their talent pool beyond the people that graduated from the best universities with electrical engineering and computer science degrees. They’re going to have to be creative in the people they recruit and ultimately hire, and the ways they go about doing this.

With More Options Available, It’s Difficult To Select and Optimize the Right Ones

With so much attention on IT, it’s only natural that means the options for products, services, and various tools will expand. However, this expansion can in and of itself prove challenging for businesses.

When they don’t have the necessary level of expertise available within the organization to not only choose the right IT tools but also property implement them and optimize them, it comes with a whole set of challenges.

This is especially problematic in small businesses that maybe have one person on their IT team if anyone at all.

Also, many businesses are slow to increase IT budgets or even attempt to bring on more staff, but the IT workload continues to significantly increase.

Scalability and Flexibility

Scalability and flexibility are the names of the game when it comes to IT and technology for competitive, forward-thinking businesses. Still, many businesses are slow to understand the importance of these concepts with their technology-based resources. For example, they don’t have plans as to what they’ll do when their current tech assets reach their end-of-life point.

Even though its presence is pervasive, a lot of businesses haven’t yet moved to the cloud, even though that would in and of itself provide a high degree of scalability and flexibility.

Without moving in a more flexible direction with technology and IT, businesses are self-inflicting serious limitations on themselves. Finally, the Bring Your Own Device or BYOD movement continues to be a problem. It logistically makes sense for employees to use their own devices in many cases and combine their use for work and personal purposes.

However, this takes a lot of control away from IT departments, and while that can boost productivity, it can also present security challenges. It’s nearly impossible to have a high level of control over all devices, and that means the focus should be on securing data on servers first, and then limiting access to that data and making sure it’s never stored on outside, personal devices.