Michael DeMarco

Meaningful business productivity requires a lot of elements to line up, particularly when remote operations and mobility enter the picture. This week, we wanted to offer a few tips pertaining to the kinds of applications that could prove beneficial to your operations.

Technology has helped countless businesses, big and small, approach their operational challenges and overcome them. As an example, let’s look to what global toy producer The Lego Group did to resolve some of the technical hurdles they were encountering with improved IT solutions, before we consider how your business could do the same to scale.

While many people seem to have little problem sharing their data with social media platforms, there is definite pushback against sharing the personal data generated by a messaging platform. This can be witnessed in WhatsApp, the cross-platform messaging application whose main selling point has been its end-to-end encryption, and its announcement that its users will soon be forced to share their personal data with Facebook (which acquired WhatsApp in 2014).

The fifth generation of wireless communications—5G—has been hotly anticipated, already appearing in advertisements for cellular connectivity and set to expand the potential of automated processes. One particularly pertinent application is to the smart devices and services that make up the Internet of Things. Let’s consider where 5G currently stands, and how its capabilities could impact the IoT.

Today, every business needs a certain amount of technology. The more that people depend on the Internet to manage their affairs and procure goods and services, the more businesses will need to focus on getting the IT infrastructure in place to help them succeed. Over the past several years we have begun to see a lot of businesses dipping their toe into the cloud computing pool. Many started with cloud backup and moved to some type of hosted software platform like hosted email through Outlook or Gmail or cloud-based productivity suites offered by Google and Microsoft. Today’s business is moving past these platforms and actively hosting their computing infrastructure online. It was only a few short years ago that this strategy was looked upon as far too risky. Let’s take a brief look at hosted infrastructure and its benefits.