This year hasn’t been easy for anyone. Many businesses have closed, some have reduced their workforces, some have pushed their employees to work long hours from home. Regardless of your current position, you have to make efforts to keep the lifeblood of your business, your staff, engaged to keep turnover from becoming a major problem. This month, we thought we would look at the current situation and give a couple of examples of how you can keep from alienating your employees.

It doesn’t take a deep thinker to know that your business is extremely limited without its data. There are dozens of antivirus solutions on the market for this very reason. One of the best ways to protect your digital assets is to back up data using a reliable backup platform. In today’s blog, we’ll go over a few basic considerations to make if you want a data backup that you can trust.

Situations happen all the time to businesses that can really put a lot of stress on their ability to sustain operations. These situations don’t often remediate themselves. Simply put, every business needs a business continuity plan; and one-in-five don’t have one. This month, we thought we would break down a successful plan into its components to try to give businesses that may not have a plan, the basics needed to establish one.

Unified communications might seem like a pipe dream, but today with cloud-hosted solutions, it is not only possible, but simpler to deploy than you may realize. This month, we’ll take you through what a unified communications platform is and how it can help your business be more efficient and productive. 

After dealing with months of regrettable news, a lot of businesses are trying to find the right strategy to navigate all the challenges their road ahead presents. With costs rising and revenues shrinking, there needs to be a strategic urgency that will allow your business to sustain operations when other companies are laying off their workers and folding into obscurity. Today, we take a look at some of the technology services that you can use to keep your business afloat during the economic downturn. 

If you have been running a business for any length of time, you definitely don’t need to be told how important risk management is. One problem you see from business owners today is that while they understand just how many problems there are--and which ones they need to find solutions for first--they want to grow their company fast, and as a result, they overlook potential problems and end up hurting their business as a result. 

The office is in itself a tool designed to improve business. Remember the office? Some long for the day when they can get back there, while a majority of remote workers enjoy it. One thing is certain, many people are still working from home, sent home in March. Many, with no return date in sight. Today, we’ll take a look at a couple pieces of technology that are popular with the remote work crowd. 

When people talk about cybersecurity nowadays, there certainly seems to be a lot of emphasis put on phishing attacks and ransomware. This is for good reason. Not only can either of these attack vectors create significant difficulties for a business, they are often used in tandem. Let’s discuss why these threats are so potent, and why they so often show up together.

COVID-19 has every business on edge and looking for ways to cut some costs without directly affecting their ability to put out the product or service that their customers expect. When you begin to look at your IT, and try to establish what your IT support costs are, you may find that you are paying a lot more than you might like to keep your business’ IT running right. This is where managed IT services come in.

Bad things happen. If your business fails to plan for the worst, when something terrible does happen, you could be looking at disaster. If you have a comprehensive continuity plan in place, however, you have a fighting chance. Let’s discuss some of the elements you absolutely need to address when making your business’ continuity plan. 

Small business owners are always on the lookout for that “special something” that will bring added value to their offering. In 2020, with COVID-19 sticking around, it has been difficult for businesses to commit to any new investments. To keep revenue coming in, a lot of businesses have been forced into allowing their staff to work remotely. To make this work, many have rolled out VPN for their business, but seemingly like everything else, there are very serious risks about leaning too heavily on your VPN. Let’s take a look at some of these risks.

We’ve all been affected one way or another by the COVID-19 pandemic. Small businesses have been some of the hardest hit, as many were not deemed to be essential and were forced to close. Some were able to work from home. Regardless of what your pandemic strategy was, businesses are opening for business, and we thought it would be a great opportunity to discuss what to expect from your staff during this confusing time. 

Think of how easy it is to trick a human. Entire industries are centered around it. Just think about the flashy magazines at the checkout counter promising us perfect summer bodies if we just follow Channing Tatum’s simple 30-step breakfast routine. These magazines sell. They wouldn’t exist if they didn’t work. Phishing works for hackers, and it works extremely well, and they are constantly making it harder to not get tricked.

If you were to mention the term “smartphone addiction” to an incoming college freshmen (if you could get their attention), it would either illicit laughter or they would scoff at the notion that it is possible. We live in mobile times, and as a result, most of us actively use a smartphone. That’s not to say that most people are addicted to their device. This month, we wanted to look at the phenomenon that is smartphone addiction and take a look at its effects. 

With half of 2020 behind us, I think it is fair to say that 2020 has turned out to be a pretty sucky year for everyone. Business owners are now concerned about how they are spending, and different means to avoid procedural interruptions. One issue that all businesses should be aware of—and act to mitigate—is the loss of data that can cause these interruptions.

If there is one thing that the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us is that a person’s environment may not have as big of an effect on productivity as we once thought. That said, many businesses that were forced to disperse their workforces as stay-at-home orders were put in place, have seen their overall productivity drop by about one percent (depending on who you ask), which considering all the variables is a win for any business that needed to go that route. In fact, some employees are so much more productive than they are at the office that now that many businesses can reopen, there is a decision to be made. This month we thought we’d talk about how crucial your productivity figures are to your business and how it may have an effect on your management style moving forward.

With a few notable exceptions, businesses today are largely in a holding pattern, waiting for the time to come when their operations can resume in full force. When the time comes to do so, however, there are likely to be some growing pains as everyone settles back into their old processes and operations. To help minimize these impacts, we recommend spending this time to improve your business communications.

Over the past couple of months millions of people have been working from home. Those who have, may or may not have had a dedicated space to work from in their residences. If you haven’t gotten around to creating a home office space for yourself and still work from the kitchen table, you’re in luck. Today, we take a look at what makes a modern office built for productivity.

Quick question. If I were to ask you, on the spot, to tell me where all of your company data is, right this moment, could you tell me with absolute confidence? What if I could prove you wrong?

Despite stay-at-home orders and general social distancing policies currently making the workday that we are used to impossible to sustain, many businesses have found that cloud services have helped them to adjust. Let’s review what cloud services are available right now, and how exactly they can help many businesses operate.