Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

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?”

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

At a time when artificial intelligence is the biggest technology-based trend going, and while more and more people are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet, there is a question on how the two fit together for workers in different industries. The impact of AI could go many different ways, with many wondering if it will be a solution for businesses that are looking to reduce their expenses (by replacing workers).

How often do you think about the amount of downtime your business suffers and how much it’s costing you in lost profits and productivity? Estimates show that SMBs lose somewhere between $427 and $8,000 PER HOUR of downtime. Instead of dealing with downtime, we recommend an approach called proactive maintenance.

Social media is a potent tool for use in business, but it also offers cybercriminals countless opportunities to steal data and exploit your organization. Today, we want to highlight some of the ways your business can practice safe social media. These practices also transfer well to other types of security, so you’re sure to leave this blog with more than a few takeaways.

Data is what your business runs on, but it can also hold your business back from success—especially if people lack access to what they need to carry out their duties. Data democratization is a solution that can help your business improve operations and make better decisions… but what is data democratization, and what can you learn from it?

For any business, technology is humming in the background. It's the engine driving sales, communication, and operations. We have all come to rely on it daily. With all the benefits, it’s not that often that we sit back and consider the environmental footprint of the technology that keeps our businesses running. It’s absolutely a conversation worth having.

Business depends on technology; this fact is what drives businesses to adopt new solutions from vendors and providers around the world. If your business needs to acquire new technology solutions to maintain operations, you’ll likely be working with third parties to make it happen. Today, we want to discuss the idea of business contracts and how to get the best deal from IT vendors you possibly can.

It’s easy to see all the reasons why you should make data regulations and compliance a priority. After all, you want to ensure you don’t violate the trust and security of your customers, as well as the integrity of your operations. If you make even one mistake, it could spell legal trouble for your business, as well as financial losses and loss of reputation.

Data loss can be from a cyberattack, hardware failure, or just plain bad luck. Either way, it is a real threat to your business. You can hedge against it by having solid data backup strategies in place. Today is World Backup Day, so we thought we’d go through some ways to build a data redundancy platform that will keep you from being left scrambling should disaster strike.

Automation makes sense from an operations standpoint, and people see this despite the many who advocate for scaling back to save jobs. For every task that can be completed, however, less than half can be automated. When you consider all the tasks that a human might be responsible for at their job, that number further dwindles, resulting in surprisingly few jobs that can be fully automated by artificial intelligence. Today, we want to look at reasons why you shouldn’t implement automation for certain tasks and why working with humans is still the right call for many.

Technology touches nearly every facet of our lives. They make smart toothbrushes if you want it to touch every facet of yours. As a result of being such a tech-driven society, there were opportunities for businesses to set themselves apart by appealing to the incendiary demand for more. Today, we just wanted to point out that, while it has happened throughout the information age, today’s top tech companies are some of the most powerful ever. 

Windows PowerToys is a set of cool tools that can make your workday easier, if you know how to use them. Let’s take a quick look at some of the most useful ones for businesses and how you can put them to work.

Before we dive in, just a heads-up: these tools aren’t something you should install just anywhere. It’s always best to have a trusted IT professional handle software installations on business computers, whether that’s our team at Business Solutions & Software Group or another reliable provider. That way, everything is properly managed and documented.

Downtime is a business killer, and if you’re not actively monitoring your network to keep it to a minimum, you’re doing yourself and your business a disservice. Downtime can be defined as any time when your organization is not operating as it’s supposed to, and it must be controlled at all costs. Otherwise, you’ll run into the following three issues that are difficult to deal with.

Water is often used as a cooling agent for hardware solutions, including gaming PCs, data centers, and other powerful hardware systems. A business can use similar cooling methods for its entire building. In fact, Microsoft wants to implement a similar style of cooling for its data centers.