It’s impossible to ignore news of the forecast credit crunch at the moment, but what does it mean for small to medium sized businesses, and how can you protect your business from the economic downturn?

Here at Online Connect IT, we’ve got some handy tips for how you can manage your IT and comms to help you to guard against the unexpected:

You get what you pay for

Beware of false economies on essential, variable services, such as your internet connectivity.  Are you with a reliable ISP?  You might be on the cheapest deal on paper, but look back over the last three months – how many times have you lost connectivity, how was this resolved, and at what cost to your business? 

Employee time spent on the phone to a call centre, or call-out fees to outsourced IT help is a wasted expense.  Choosing an ISP such as UK Online will give you the peace of mind of reliability, along with free 24 hour customer support.

Getting the best price

Just as the advice to consumers is to shop around when it comes to gas and electricity suppliers, you need to make sure you’re getting the right deal for your business too.  Could you find a cheaper supplier for your utilities?

What about your other low-tech office suppliers, such as printer toner?  Everyone is aware of the looming credit squeeze, and so should be amenable to buyers asking for discounts, particularly if you are a regular buyer.

Rapid loss and gain

Your business might have expanded recently, but you still need to prepare for an unexpected squeeze – to your finances or to your workforce.  When you’re putting IT systems in place, the key is to make sure they are scalable. 

So for example, looking at your internet connectivity, as your business grows, so your internet traffic is likely to increase in volume. You may also be receiving and sending more information across your network that is critical to the daily running of your business. Similarly, if your business traffic decreases, then the bandwidth you need will decrease. 

A Business ISP such as Easynet Connect provides Etherstream, which offers scalable bandwidth – so if due to a change, you need more than your current capacity, you can do this with Easynet Connect, without you having to put a new service in place.  Similarly, this can also be done if you find you need to decrease your bandwidth, so you can get a saving, without having to switch suppliers.