Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

Even while on vacation, it’s difficult to resist the urge to open your email app and see what’s going on with your business. Of course, it’s not a true vacation if you’re constantly engaging in activities typically reserved for the office. Let’s examine ways you can encourage your team to step away from the business from time to time, and how they can do it without causing disruptions to its operations.

For many business owners, choosing the right technology is a real challenge. You're faced with countless hardware and software options, each promising to revolutionize your business, often with a hefty price tag. It's a tough spot to be in: you want to empower your team and innovate, but it's hard to justify the cost of a new tool when it might not be worth the investment. At the same time, holding back can feel like you're stifling progress.

It’s easy to think about technology updates as unnecessary. After all, your technology seems to be working perfectly fine, right? The reality is that updates keep your business functional and profitable, and every update you skip means more vulnerabilities in your infrastructure, more bugs to work around, and more dramatic a fallout when it all comes to a head… and it will—trust us.

When a team works well together, it feels like magic; but, for a myriad of reasons, collaboration can sometimes go off the rails. It takes a lot of effort to get a team to work in harmony, and it's easy for things to go sideways. Here are four ways your collaboration efforts could be heading for trouble.

Imagine for a moment… it’s a little after nine on a Tuesday, those on your team who drink multiple cups of coffee are well into their second of the morning, and everyone is busily typing away. Suddenly, the typing stops, as everyone’s screen suddenly gets the same pop-up: everything’s been encrypted. The business is, in effect, gone.

This is a too-common occurrence nowadays, thanks to a nasty type of malware called ransomware… but there is a way to fight back. The smart move is to be prepared with a backup and disaster recovery (BDR) plan.

You want a productive team, therefore, you want to be responsive to their needs. That being said, there comes a time when you have to question if their requests are in the best interest of your operating budget. Today, we want to explore how you can balance the needs of your employees with the needs of your business’ budget.

You want the money you invest into your business technology to come back in the form of productivity and value, but how often would you say this is true for your business? If the answer is “less than I’d like,” then you might need to reexamine your IT spending and adjust it in a way that makes a difference for your business’ needs and goals. Today, we’ll examine what your infrastructure is trying to tell you and how you can make better spending decisions to make the most of your budget.

The Internet is an incredible asset, and while it connects the world and allows organizations to innovate in previously unseen ways, it houses a dark side that is difficult to ignore. We’re talking, of course, about hacking. It’s interesting to learn about how laws are interpreted as they relate to hacking, and the consequences are dire if you get caught.

When you hear the words “digital transformation,” what do you envision? SMBs might be intimidated by such a buzzword, especially if implementing new technology is something they avoid due to the perceived price tag. But digital transformation is something all businesses can afford and benefit from, and we’ll show you how.

It’s difficult to overstate how important security is, and when it comes to improving your business’ security, not all tips move the needle in the same way. Today, we want to emphasize the most important security tip of all: actually make cybersecurity and protection of digital assets a priority. Doing so yields several benefits, including the ability to avoid financial and reputational damage from data breaches, ransomware attacks, or other types of cyberthreats.

When you have a business with employees, things tend to get a whole lot more complicated, especially when tracking time for hourly employees. The sad fact is that some individuals are not going to invest their full effort into making sure they’re following operations and procedures as intended. This can bleed into your bottom line. What are you going to do to stop time theft?

Listen up, nerds. We’re here to talk about desk and device hygiene. Yes, not only do you have to keep your devices digitally clean, but you also have to keep your devices physically clean so as to keep them working effectively. Let’s take a look at why it’s so important and what you can do to keep your devices in pristine condition.

Google is a staple in pretty much any office, even if only as a search engine. How can you make sure you’re getting the results you want to see? One way you can do so is by adjusting your Google searches in various ways to refine the results you get. Here’s how you can do it without sifting through dozens of returned results that are useless or irrelevant.

Your business data holds vital information, but it needs to be organized and presented in a way that makes this information accessible. Visual representations will be immensely helpful as you translate this data into a form that is more comprehensible to everyone. Let’s go over five ways that data visualizations and interactive dashboards can help you express your information to those invested in your success, whether it's your team or your external stakeholders.

One of the most frustrating parts of operating today’s technology is how easy it is to grow disorganized from your day-to-day file management. The good news is that your digital workspace practices can be tidied up easily with just a couple of simple tips. Today, we want to go over how you can become more productive by taking better care of your digital workspace.

As a business owner, you’re always plotting out that next big project, as well as what technology you need to implement to make it happen. Today, we want to give you some pointers on what you should strive for with your project management, as well as discuss how you can make it easier by working with a managed service provider like us. We’ll go over how you can improve the odds of your project’s success, implement tools that will make the process easier, and common-sense practices that will help your team carry out the project in record time.

Have you ever been met with resistance when you implement a new IT policy or solution? You’re not alone; countless CIOs and business owners experience this issue any time they go to implement an innovative new tool that can have a significant impact on operations. Here’s how you can have a rock-solid approach to taking the friction out of new IT initiatives for your organization.

So you want to implement an innovative new IT solution for your business. That’s great, and we’re happy to hear that you’re investing in the transformative power of technology… but what do your employees think about the change, and how can you communicate with them in a way that encourages them to embrace the new technology rather than disregard it?

Securely protecting your organization’s data and network has never been more important. Our primary line of defense for doing this, especially as companies start to really lean on cloud solutions to bring a level of cost control they hadn’t established before, is the password. The less secure the password, the less secure your data. If you are going to rely on passwords as the priority safeguard for your business accounts, you need to be using two-factor authentication (2FA).

Downtime is a serious issue for businesses, sometimes to the point of it being a business killer when it’s left unchecked. But what is downtime, and why is it such a problem? Today, we want to help you understand just that, and we’re doing it by calling on the exact opposite of downtime: uptime.