Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

Your business has a choice to make with its IT solutions: reactive or proactive. You might be wasting countless dollars on an IT model that works against your best interests, and worse, you might not even realize it until it’s too late. Today, we want to explore this idea that reactive IT actively hinders your business’ growth and operations—and what you can do about it.

Running a business isn’t cheap. Nobody can blame you for wanting to save a few bucks wherever you can. That said, one place you should not pinch pennies is your business technology, particularly when it comes to updates. While that old computer may still look like it’s perfectly fine, technology being broken is measured on a spectrum. Yours could easily be holding your business back and costing you potential income.

Let’s estimate just how high these costs could be, and how to resolve them moving forward.  

Business is all about friendly competition, and you might be wondering how your competitors reach out to leads to turn them into paying customers. With automated technology solutions like customer relationship management software, it’s as easy as can be. If your competitors are using innovative new technology solutions in this way, you might also be wondering, “How can I use technology to beat them at their own game?”

The success of a business is heavily dependent on the smooth operation of its technology. When the technology it depends on fails, it can disrupt productivity and ultimately alienate customers. Obviously, this is bad for the profitability of the endeavor. One key to avoiding many of the technology pitfalls you could encounter is a conscious change from a reactive strategy to a proactive one. 

Businesses face a constant tug-of-war. How do you keep your customers coming back while also rigorously protecting the data they share with you? You know it to be true that if you want sustainable success, you’ll need to do both. It's a delicate balance between steps to optimize data protection while also ensuring that it doesn’t hinder your ability to turn a profit. Today, we’re going to take a look at how you can lay down the law while also rolling out the red carpet for your customers. 

Technology should be an advantage for your business, not another headache. You have enough to go around as it is. But for many business leaders, managing their company's IT can feel like a constant battle against unexpected problems and costly downtime.

When it comes to IT support, there are two main approaches: the old-fashioned "break-fix" model and the modern, proactive model known as "managed services." While break-fix might seem simple on the surface, it often creates more problems than it solves. Managed services, on the other hand, offer a more strategic, reliable, and ultimately more profitable path forward.

Employees often face a variety of challenges when learning new software, which can lead to frustration, decreased productivity, and resistance to change. These struggles are not always due to a lack of technical skill, but are often rooted in a combination of psychological, organizational, and training-related factors. Today, we will go through some of the most common ways employees struggle with learning new software.

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.