When a business hits a growth plateau, leadership teams usually audit their sales processes, marketing spend, and hiring pipelines. More often than not, the bottleneck isn’t human capital or market demand, but the invisible digital ceiling overhead. Ask yourself the simple question: Is your technology infrastructure a ceiling that caps your potential, or is it a foundation that is engineered to support your scale?
An hour might not seem like much time on the weekend, but in business, it can be the difference between a task getting done or not. Chances are your employees waste at least an hour every day moving between the various Software as a Service tools your business utilizes. It’s this administrative task that’s the silent killer in your budget, and if left unchecked, it can add up.
Phishing attacks are no longer easy to spot. Scammers now use artificial intelligence to generate highly sophisticated lures that trick even the most observant employees. To protect a business from becoming another security statistic, it is necessary to identify the clear differences between legitimate communications and fraudulent messages. While these risks exist every day of the year, fraudulent activity spikes dramatically during tax season and the holiday season.
Tim Cook has been at the helm of Apple for 15 years, and as he’s set to retire as CEO in September we thought we’d take a look at some of the differences between the Apple, Inc. he’s leaving behind and the one he took over in 2011.
No matter how you look at it, there will always be a significant difference between a data backup and a successful recovery. Businesses are too often under the impression that they are one and the same, but this is a faulty belief that puts them at risk. If you back up your files to the cloud, your business needs a way to recover those files, and fast. Otherwise, downtime ensues, and you don’t want that.
Who at your business has the organizational knowledge to keep your technology up and running? The problem with small business IT is that the information on how to keep that technology in proper working order is siloed in one particular individual’s head, whether that’s you as the business owner or one particularly tech-savvy person on your staff. By allowing this information to remain undocumented, you’re actively putting your business at risk by artificially creating a single point of failure.
If you’ve ever looked at your phone—or your laptop, or whatever allegedly “smart” device you happened to be using—and wished that things were how they used to be, you certainly aren’t alone. You aren’t imagining things, either… this perception of the products and services we rely on getting worse over time is widespread enough to have its own term, which has expanded beyond its social media-specific origins to all technologies, regardless of whether it’s hardware or software. This term was actually named to be 2023’s Word of the Year (per the American Dialect Society), beating “AI” in relevance. That word? Enshittification, as coined by tech critic and author Cory Doctorow. Let’s explore the concept and what it inevitably leads to.
We’ve all said it. It’s the unofficial motto of pragmatism, the quiet commitment to frugality that businesses cling to: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. It feels responsible. It feels safe. Here is the hard truth from an IT professional: When it comes to your business technology, this motto is a recipe for disaster. It is the single most dangerous, most expensive, and highest-risk strategy you can have.
Good luck going about your day without hearing how AI is changing the workplace as we know it; let alone running a business without considering its useful applications. While you might feel pressured to adopt AI, we want to urge you to think before you act. Doing so could prevent you from investing money into a solution that doesn’t help your business in the slightest. To find out if AI is an appropriate next step for your business, consider these steps:
Ah, the IT budget. So crucial, yet so stressful at the same time. It doesn’t have to be! You too can get your IT budget under control, and all it takes is keeping the following in mind. We’ll look into why you should have an IT roadmap, how your business can minimize downtime, and how you can strategically outsource your IT to ensure your budget remains in control at all times.