7 IT Challenges Every Business Faces

Businesses face different challenges now and then, and while most businesses manage to work around the challenges, some fail. There are various categories of challenges that businesses face. This guide focuses on the several technology challenges affecting businesses. Take a look!

Technology Challenges Every Business Faces

These are the common challenges affecting most small and large-scale businesses.

1.  Technological Advancement

Technology keeps advancing, and new products and technology continue to be developed. While this advancement is preferred, it becomes a challenge to businesses when they fail to keep up with the latest technology.

For instance, a business running on a 4G network must shift to 5G as it is the latest internet technology if they want to remain competitive. The need to keep up with technological advancement attracts unplanned expenses. When the business can’t afford to adopt the new technologies, it uses legacy systems, which may be less productive than other businesses.

2.  Data Security

Any system is vulnerable, and when a hacker has time, motive, and resources, they can exploit the vulnerabilities. Cases of cyberattacks on businesses are rampant, and no business is ever safe and away from the hacker’s eye.

Keeping data and devices safe is a challenge for most businesses. Those that add another security layer spend more to hire cyber security experts and white hat hackers to test their enterprise IT infrastructure.

Small businesses and those with a small IT budget remain at the mercy of hackers. Most organizations have reported data breaches. In the last year, reports showed that most businesses were directly or indirectly affected by cyberattacks affecting their income, customer trust, and activities.

3.  Hiring the Right Technical Team

Staffing IT practitioners is challenging, especially if your business is not IT-related. For instance, if your business involves a shopping mall and you want to hire mobile app developers, how do you know where to source the personnel and check if they meet the required skills?

Moreover, IT skills are scarce, and when you want a quality product, you must employ an expert in the particular field. You can work around it by using a hiring agency to scout and interview the right skills to fill the available position in your business.

The only drawback is that relying on a hiring agency means you will spend more money to staff the new IT experts.

4.  Network and Infrastructure Failure

For a business to run, a network is needed, especially if the business relies on online transactions. The main challenge comes when customers lack a stable internet connection to interact with goods or services online.

Besides, some online business applications become unavailable, which causes losses and discourages customers. For instance, in 2021, Facebook (Meta) lost an estimated $100 million due to an outage caused by the failure of its infrastructure, affecting its availability for six hours.

Most businesses face issues with their IT systems becoming unavailable or faulty in the middle of business, such as failed POS systems affecting shopping centers and causing business losses.

5.  Integrations and Upgrades

Digitization is an inevitable challenge that businesses face. Digitization comes from technological advancement, which brings new technology and systems. For instance, big data has changed how people collect and analyze data. Therefore, when a business relies on the collected data, it must upgrade its systems to match the current technology.

Again, businesses must integrate with new technologies. For instance, when working with remote JS developers for your company, you must incorporate remote collaboration tools to keep your team productive. Moreover, you must rely on integrations, such as time trackers, online hosting, and video conferencing platforms for remote work and meetings. These integrations and periodic updates become a challenge.

6.   Backup and Recovery

Loss of data is a challenge for most businesses. Most small businesses are yet to adapt cloud storage and instead use local storage. The result is that most businesses have reported cases of data loss and failed recovery processes.

7.   Virtual Working

When businesses need the skills of IT specialists, the best talents are available in different locations, meaning remote working will be adapted. For most businesses, handling a remote development team is a challenge compared to having your team in one physical place.

Besides, virtual working calls for the need for other resources, such as cloud platforms and services like IaaS, which ensure effective virtual working,

For instance, when you have a virtual IT support team, they must remotely connect with your business IT infrastructure, meaning you must employ cloud storage to facilitate remote connection.

Conclusion

Any business that relies on IT services faces one or more challenges mentioned above. The intensity of the challenge depends on the size of the company, location, budget, etc. Thus, different businesses get affected differently.