P2 M2

P2 M2

Policies and procedures are essential for IT technical support and ensure that everything runs smoothly. I will now explain the impact of policies and procedures have on IT technical support.

The first of the policies and procedures that you have for technical support is security. An organisation will have to make sure that they have adequate security for the users and the IT technical support. This means that the organisation will have to provide many things such as password protection with password expiry’s and cycles and using their lightspeed (Web filtering and monitoring application) to block malicious advertisements, proxy servers and to restrict admin access to only trusted members of staff. One final procedure you would have to follow for security is to make sure that they have an onsite backup of all the data, and then have another backup in a centre at least 25 miles away.

The second of the policies and procedures that you will have to follow for your technical support is the data protection act. The data protection act is a law that has been put in place by the government that requires any organisation or company to adequately protect their user’s data, such as usernames, emails, passwords and all of their other information. This means that they will have to make use of multiple types of encryption within the virtual world but also physical security such as CCTV and use of locks to ensure that all of the user’s data is safe and secure.

The third policy and procedure that you will have to follow for your technical support is confidentiality. Also this is very similar to the data protection act but is more into regard of restricting the sharing of the data to third party companies. This means that your organisation will have to keep all of the user’s data confidential unless specifically given permission to the user.

The fourth of the policies and procedure that you as an organisation would have to follow is service level agreements. Service level agreements are a part of a service contract which is where a service is formally defined. This means that if you have a service level agreement with another company or customer, you must obey those terms written, for example if in the SLA states that you will have repaired the clients systems within 5 hours then you have to abide by that time limit or you may be liable to a fine if stated as a clause or give the client ground to break contract. This is why you must abide the SLA.

Another Policy and procedure that you will have to abide by is dealing with sensitive information. This is essential for letting your company get an edge in the market because the sensitive information is usually plans about your company or information that if released could damage your organisation. This is why sensitive information need to be kept quiet with things like gag orders and injunctions.

The final policy and procedure that you would have to follow is dealing with viruses. You will have to follow a certain procedure when dealing with viruses to cause as little damage as possible to the clients systems, this is especially true with things such as ransomware where an half effort and non-researched could be detrimental such as if the client was infected with CryptoLocker rendering the system useless and making everything worse.

M2

In today’s world there are many different ways of providing support to your customers and users. You and your organisation could do either two different things. The first thing you could do is do all of your work in house and do everything yourself. On the other hand you could outsource you work. Outsourcing your work means that you pay another company to do the work for you and on your behalf, these can be anywhere in the world by anyone in the world. I will now go through all of the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing work.

Advantages

The first advantage to outsourcing the IT support is the cheap/ cost effectiveness of the work. This is because the work can be outsourced to different countries with lower minimum/average wages, such as china or India. This enables your company to have fewer outgoings in the company, saving money since it will end up being a lot economical than doing it all in-house.

The second advantage to outsourcing technical support is making extra profit, which is a knock on effect of the previous advantage because when the cost of the outsourcing is less but the revenue is the same, it overall results in a higher profit for the company or organisation.

The third advantage to outsourcing IT support is the reduction of liability to the organisation. This means that because the company is outsourcing they will not have to follow many different policies and even laws and regulations themselves because it is all taken care of by the outsourced companies such as the data protection act or terms of device etc…

Another advantage to outsourcing IT support are time zone agreements. Time zone agreements can be a very useful thing for an organisation in being multinational as well as providing 24/7 support. This is because when you outsource your work, you can make it available to anywhere in the rest of the world, all with different time zones meaning that during late night to early morning where working hours are little and unlikely in the uk, the call centre will be located in India where it’s almost midday and there are many workers available to take calls. This is the method that a lot of multinational companies use to keep their support lines open 24/7.

The final advantage to outsourcing IT support is that the companies the organisations outsource to are specialist organisations. This means that the companies are usually very experienced with IT support and know how things work, making them more efficient and cost effective, much more so than if you were to do all of the IT support in-house. Another advantage to this is that as well as having specialist experience in the industry they also are already likely to have specialist hardware and software’s such as RDC or hardware monitoring.

Disadvantages

There are also however disadvantages to outsourcing your work and there are advantages to keeping you it support in-house instead.

The first disadvantage to outsourcing work is bankruptcy. This is a very big disadvantage to outsourcing as if the company you outsourced to have of collapsed, you are left on your own with no IT support for your users or your customers and can lead to very heavy damage to your business, whereas if you make the support in house, then if you go bust, then there is no problem.

The second disadvantage to outsourcing your IT support is that you don’t have full control over the outsourced company which means that they may not follow all the laws, regulations, DPA’s and confidentiality which will also hold you liable to pay for the damages and could give you multiple punishments by the retrospective government, whereas when it's in house you have lots more control over the it support. 

The third disadvantage to outsourcing to other companies is that if the outsourcing company does something wrong or there is any kind of drama revolving around them, this will result in a negative reputation from consumers and users leading to reduced profits and possibly damaging your company, and although there is also a risk with in house it support , but there is a lesser chance of it happening.

Another disadvantage to outsourcing you work is the language barrier, this is because where most outsourced companies are based in a company where English isn’t their first language, multiple problems arise such as difference in terminology, hard to understand accents and terrible grammar all of which could have a negative effect on customer support and therefore onto your business in turn could lose reputation and then business, nut if you were to do it in house then your call centres (which is in house) will be in the UK so this wont be a problem.

The final disadvantage to outsourcing your IT support is the lack of training. This is because a lack of training could make your IT support essentially useless because they are unable to help the users or the customers in solving any problems because they have no idea what they are talking about, giving the users a bad impression on to your business.however if you do this in house you can then set standards for all of your staff, making sure the are properly trained and prepared to do their jobs properly.Whereas when it is all done in house, you can ensure yourself that all of the staff have the correct training.