When considering a business’ strengths, there is a tendency to focus on its more quantifiable aspects - it generates x dollars in revenue, or leverages advanced solutions a, b, and c. While these kinds of competitive advantages are valuable to have, it is also important to recognize how critical one of your more qualifiable strengths can be: your company culture.

Whether they are expected or not, there will always be situations when your business incurs some damage or loss due to natural disasters, downtime, or other issues. You might find that a little preparation could have kept some of the disaster at bay, and it could honestly save you a ton in terms of lost time and resources. In fact, it could save your organization from the brink of disaster.

Business can be tricky, especially if you’re good at it. It’s important to know when to be comfortable with your position without starting to feel complacent. If you fall into this trap, you’ll be running the risk of hindering your organization’s growth, potentially blocking any future successes.

Do you know what can completely kill a business’ momentum? Downtime. Businesses of all types look for a myriad of ways to save themselves the headaches that come from significant downtime. One way that is sure to reduce an organization’s downtime is by having conscientious IT management and support at the ready. One problem with this is that it's typically costly to hire a team of IT professionals with the experience and knowledge to keep your technology up and running.

One industry that most people wouldn’t necessarily consider to be IT-rich is manufacturing. With automation becoming a major point of emphasis for many businesses, IT has taken on a larger role for today’s small and medium-sized manufacturers. Today, we will take a long look at what the manufacturer’s IT needs are, and what solutions they use to help steer their company forward.

Technology training is something that all employees have to go through at some point in their career, whether they are a CEO learning how to use a new solution, or an end user that uses it every day. However, we know that your employees don’t necessarily have time to sit down for training, as they likely have other responsibilities that must be tended to. How can you make sure technology training is a valuable investment on your part?

Business owners; ever sit down and run through all of your expenses and ask yourself (or your accountant) what you are actually paying for? We’ve been there. Technology expenses like hardware, software licensing, cloud hosting, management and maintenance, support, and service agreements all add up quickly and it makes it easy to question what you can trim to save money without sinking the ship, especially when you rarely need to call your current IT provider.

Productivity is a key facet to our success. However, many offices seem to have an environment that focuses more on keeping busy than it does being productive. While they often intersect, these two statuses are very different. Here’s why.

Technology can go a long way toward helping businesses be more productive with their time, but only if the solutions implemented are right and proper for your organization. We’ll discuss three services that you can provide for your business that can maximize productivity with technology solutions.

A.I. is one of those technologies that captivates the imagination with endless possibilities. You can’t turn your head these days without using something integrated with early artificial intelligence. Machine learning platforms, which are very rudimentary forms of A.I. are now being used to improve many of the tools a small business uses. Today, we will briefly go into what machine learning is and how small businesses are using it to their advantage.

The holiday season is upon us, and with it comes the spirit of gift giving. Your IT department would certainly appreciate receiving a few gifts of their own to dabble with over the next business year. We’ve compiled a list of the best technology you can get your IT department to save them both time and resources.

Telephones have been around for so long that nobody alive today lived in a time where they weren’t in use. While the general use for the telephone has remained the same, the major difference between older telephone systems and many of the telephone platforms available today is how they are deployed. Businesses have more options for telephone services today than they have ever had before, and with so many options at your disposal, we’re happy to help you weed out the right one for you.

It’s no secret that cloud computing has become a major part of what most small businesses’ operations. One aspect of business administration that many businesses keep in-house is their HR department. Today, we’ll take a look at HR and payroll software, and how moving your business’ human resources department to the cloud is a good solution.

Businesses these days rely on technology in order to function properly, but what happens when this technology doesn’t operate as intended? If your organization doesn’t have a dedicated help desk on-premise, you’re probably suffering from unnecessary downtime and technology troubles with no recourse.

As the technology that businesses have available to them develops, so does the propensity for this technology to be used unethically. This has become especially apparent where data collection is concerned, and what that data is used for after it has been collected. How can you keep operations moving both productively, and ethically?

There are various types of user accounts that your employees and administrators can use to access their workstations, but one of the biggest points of contention to consider when planning out data access is the use of administrator accounts. Specifically, you want to avoid handing out administrator account access to users like it’s Halloween candy.

Chances are you’ve encountered a couple of tech support scams in your days. These people frequently dial random numbers in an attempt to get the person on the end of the phone long enough to trust them with remoting into the device. These kinds of scams are designed to be as vague as possible, and since most people have computers that are at least a couple years old, they tend to experience some kind of sluggishness that makes them believe that something is genuinely wrong. This can turn out to be a grave mistake.

Your business depends on a budget to come out in the black at the end of the fiscal year, and the way you invest that budget will have a considerable impact. As you create this budget, your IT needs to be one of your top considerations - after all, it is what effectively powers the modern business. Here, we’ll discuss how diligently incorporating your IT into your budget can help your business be more successful down the line.

It’s always exciting when the idea of a business becomes real by finding a space to conduct operations. It’s extra exciting when a business has outgrown its space and has to move into a new space. Whatever situation you are encountering, it can be excruciatingly difficult to affordably move into new offices.

All businesses hope that they’ll never have to use their data backup and disaster recovery plan, but the point stands that each business should have one, just in case of a worst-case scenario. For a small business with a limited budget, the prospect of investing in a solution they might never need is daunting. To help you get started, we’ve put together a couple of basic backup practices that you should keep in mind for your business.