It’s that time of year, when Business Link Magazine invites the region’s business leaders to offer up their predictions for the year ahead.
It has become something of a tradition, given that we’ve been doing this now for over 30 years.
Here we speak to Ben Solomon, MD at Octavian IT.
The challenges in 2022 continue to be related to secure, productive and effective remote working and cyber security. The cyber security landscape is constantly becoming a more dangerous place and it’s more important than ever for businesses to have even just a basic layer of security protections in place.
Related to remote working, we’re still seeing a large amount of the UK’s business and residential networking infrastructure is not up-to-par. There are still so many locations that cannot get stable and necessary speed fibre connectivity. This causes IT partners such as ourselves a large headache as we work with businesses to work as effectively as possible from outside of the office or with cloud services.
Recruitment is also a challenge, there does seem to be a shortage of experienced engineers with the right culture/mentality.
Opportunities though are plentiful – the cloud and cloud services are in a very exciting era – MSPs like OIT have the great responsibility of helping businesses select the best cloud technology for them and there are now a lot. It’s key to select software and services that will correctly compliment your business and not actually hinder it. Cyber Security is a huge area that still requires expertise and experience in order to provide quality consultancy to businesses. If businesses can find their own ways to provide a service or product that helps keep their clients safe, this will be a huge market for SMBs.
