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.
When your organization is implementing a new project, there are a lot of expectations and deadlines that are watched with a close eye. While it might be ideal to get the project finished as quickly as possible, doing so can put a lot of pressure and stress on it that can ultimately be its downfall. For example, if you don’t think out the planning phase carefully, the entire implementation process can suffer--particularly when working on new IT initiatives.
When we talk about best practices, we are typically referring to the practices used by successful companies to garner the best results. A new study by Disaster Recovery has shown that, as backup and recovery solutions go, enterprises are providing some pretty disappointing results as many fail to continuously back up their data and it results in additional inherent risk.
As a modern business, your success depends on your technology functioning properly. As many businesses have discovered when their solutions did not function as intended, the effects can have considerable impact to their success rates. To help keep your business running, you need to be sure that your solutions are maintained.
How much time does your staff spend actually doing work compared to simply communicating about work? There’s a big difference, primarily in terms of making you money versus costing you money. Truth be told, employees spend nearly 80 percent of their time either in meetings, on the phone, or responding to emails. By finding ways for your team to communicate more efficiently, they will effectively spend less time yapping and more time making you money.
When your business experiences an IT outage, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? A typical response (after expressing frustration) is, “How long until operations resume?” An answer to this question isn’t always obvious, which leads to another question, “Why did my system go down in the first place?” Being able to quickly and accurately ascertain what’s behind an IT outage is a responsibility that every business should have handled, yet implementing such a procedure is often overlooked until it’s too late.
As more and more businesses rely on technology solutions to accomplish their everyday tasks, there is a natural expectation for there to be a bit of a learning curve as these advanced solutions are prioritized and accounted for. However, a few industry research firms have compiled their expectations for how this learning curve tendency will influence the needs and challenges businesses will face during the rest of the year.
Two major concerns of every business owner are the protection of their company and making sure their technology does what it’s supposed to do. It can be overwhelming to manage these two aspects on your own, which makes outsourcing the security and maintenance of your IT such an attractive option.
