Macro Systems Blog

How many Vendors do you have to deal with? The answer to that is most likely, quite a few. Now consider how much time is spent managing each of them. Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was some way to limit this time to essentially nothing? 

Your business operations are contingent on your budget; your business will rely on its budget to guide it fiscally through the next year of operation. Alas, IT resources, which can be unpredictable, care little about your budget. Let's examine some ways that you can keep your IT budget from breaking the bank, as well as how you can improve success over time via proper management of your IT assets.

You serve as a vendor to your clients, supplying them with a required good or service. Similarly, you have vendors that supply you with the goods and services that enable you to do so. Yet, how well are your vendors managed?

Organizations of all sizes utilize varying degrees of technology to upgrade productivity, efficiency, and security. The more an organization depends on its data, the more imperative it is for them to manage and maintain the systems in which this data is dependent. For businesses that have a lack of financial resources to support these systems, it is often left to unqualified employees, putting your organization at risk. What do you do when you need expertise that you lack and can’t afford to hire in-house staff?

While small businesses can obviously benefit from technology, they can also bite off more than they can chew, which can result in a dangerous increase in costs. A responsible business owner will avoid this temptation and prioritize the solutions they need over the ones they want, creating profitability and generating capital needed to make other improvements.

If you don’t recognize the worst-case scenario when constructing your organization's disaster recovery strategy, you’ll inevitably suffer from it when it disaster strikes. Taking into account all of these nuances is one of the key ways your business can prepare for such an event. All of these instances need to be considered when implementing your business continuity plan. Let's examine this below.

There is a chance that you view your vendors as a necessary evil. While you have to work with them to get the software or tools that your organization needs to function, it’s difficult to not think of everything else that could be accomplished in the time you spend dealing with them. Alas, there are even more costs to dealing with vendors that you may not have considered.

More often than not, technology is expensive. You’ll rarely look at your IT invoices without cringing a bit. Nonetheless, it’s imperative that you take a look at these AT LEAST every once in a while to understand just what you’re getting from your technology budget. You want to ensure that your IT purchases are yielding a positive return on investment, and thus providing value for your business.

A couple sounds are familiar to any office: keys clacking away, coffee being drank, and the rattling, squawking hum of the printer. Yet this image presents a critical question: do you know how much your printer is costing your company each time it is utilized? Let's review how you can calculate this investment.

How does your organization leverage data backup? Depending on the way your organization functions and your particular needs, your data backup solution will vary from others in your industry. Still, one thing is absolutely undeniable: your business can’t afford to not utilize some type of data backup system.

Most organizations are reliant on software solutions in order to stay productive. It could be a spreadsheet builder, a word processor, or merely data storage in the cloud; all software is deeply entrenched in the current business world. Your organization be taking full advantage of this! You can start by implementing Software as a Service.

IT project managers are an imperative part of any new technology initiative in your business; you should be looking for particular requirements when searching for a project manager for your latest project implementation. Listed below are some specific traits that your organization should look for in an IT project manager.

Nearly everyone, at some point in time, has been involved in a situation where personalities clash. This is natural; different people are born with different predispositions and are raised in different environments. Still, in the business world, one should do their best to keep personal differences from affecting their necessary professional relationships.

Your company has a solid plan to manage its IT maintenance, or it does not. There is no middle ground. Either your business has an internal team devoted to maintaining your IT infrastructure, or it’s not being taken care of as well as it should be. Even if your organization does have an internal team, you might notice that they don’t have enough time on their hands to handle all of their responsibilities. Let us introduce you to one of the most notable ways of keeping your technology in sufficient working order: managed IT services.

How does your business control its mission-critical technology solutions? We know that most small businesses have some trouble with this topic, either due to budget restrictions or a lack of personnel. There is a better way to manage your business’ technology: managed IT services.

For small businesses to remain competitive in this economy there has a chance for them to participate as a viable competitor. This is the goal of a United States bill that has passed through the House of Representatives and is moving forward to be voted on by the Senate.

Google is developing ways to protect the data of a small group of its users who have the greatest risk of encountering a data hack or breach. The Advance Protection Program is the name of this new service and shows promise in protecting the information that these select few can access.

You have a worker who wants to save your business money on a piece of business software. They find a “free” version of it on the Internet and assume they have found you a bargain deal. What you and your employee don't realize is that there is an agency out there that’s specifically looking for organizations like yours that don’t keep track of their software licensing, just to make a quick buck off of copyright infringement.

As a business owner, you expect to stay in control of what your business does. Unfortunately, there are certain variables in running a business that simply can’t be controlled, like the weather. Therefore, you need to take special care to ensure that these uncontrollable instances don’t become a threat to your business’ prolonged existence. To this end, we recommend a business continuity plan.

As one would expect, a business will run a lot more smoothly when its employees have the resources to work cohesively toward a common goal. This is why collaborative solutions are becoming a staple in many office environments. Today, we’ll examine how one of these solutions, Microsoft Office 365, can help a workforce to achieve its goals.