Business + IT Insights

Did you know that small businesses tend to spend, on average, 6.9% of their revenue on IT? There’s no denying that technology is expensive. For some, IT can feel like a financial black hole.  

IT is a foundational part of your business and, when done right, can help create sustainable business growth. But, over the years, as IT has become more essential it has also become more complex. In 2020, the need for IT is greater than ever, but due to COVID-19 budgets have shrunk and margins have narrowed - so how can you get complex IT that supports your needs and your budget?

Fortunately, you’ve got options.

You want to set your team up for success. But due to the pandemic, today’s workplace landscape is changing and more people than ever are working remotely, so keeping everyone on the same page can be a really tall task. In order to ensure that your remote or in-person team is teed up for success, it is important that everyone is set up with the right tools to do their job well. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced companies across the world to adapt and transition rapidly to the cloud to enable remote work. What many businesses have not done is take a step back after the transition and ask themselves if the changes they implemented were the best for the business. Did the changes set their team up for success? Did the new landscape enable them to work in a safe, secure, and effective IT environment? Was their IT infrastructure better or worse than it had been pre-pandemic?

Since the onset of COVID-19, the world has become a truly virtual one. One that requires fast, secure, and cost-effective IT like never before. Because the demand for IT and virtual environments has skyrocketed, it’s important to find ways to save money, even more so since COVID-19 has affected the bottom line of most businesses.  

There are a few key areas that are often overlooked when reviewing how much your business is spending on IT and we recommend looking at first to reduce costs:

Cybersecurity can provide a crucial role in empowering small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to move forward faster, smarter, and safer. But there are many misconceptions about the state of cybersecurity in the SMB space. These misconceptions can alter how we think and plan for in our businesses.

In this whitepaper “10 Myth Busters for SMB Cybersecurity,” Cisco uses data to debunk ten of the most pervasive myths about cybersecurity for SMBs -- myths such as SMBs lack personnel dedicated to security or that their leadership teams don’t take data privacy seriously. Spoiler alert, these myths are resoundingly inaccurate with 99% of SMBs surveyed reporting that they have at least one team member dedicated to cybersecurity and 84% of SMBs made security awareness training a priority.

Your business uses technology for everything. From email to point of sale to accounting to communication - technology is involved. The problem is, technology, or IT, isn’t what you do. It’s what you use, but not what you like to manage.

Running a business is hard enough let alone managing all the technological pieces. In today’s world, IT is integral to the success of a business, but too often, business owners wear the hat of a Chief Information Officer among all the other hats they wear and it causes the business to suffer.

What you need is a Virtual CIO (vCIO).

Are your emails ending up in spam folders? Are you constantly worrying about whether clicking on a certain email will give you a virus? 

For the sender, email marketing is one of the most effective ways of building a lead generating pipeline, but when those potential leads aren’t seeing your content, all of your hard work goes unnoticed.

One of the most challenging things about cybersecurity is that so much of it depends on your vigilance and attention to detail. It can feel scary and frustrating that some of the emails sitting in your inbox could actually be from the bad guys. No one wants to be the person who clicked on the wrong link and allowed a cybercriminal to access your company's sensitive data.