Business + IT Insights

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.

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.

You are in the market for an IT company that provides you with the technology support you need, not only to fix issues when they come up but also to help you think ahead and use technology to support business growth. You want to partner with a team that that cares about your success as much as you do.  

It is not surprising that data security breaches are spiking. Few situations offer as many opportunities for cybercriminals as a global pandemic. The most recent flavor of COVID-19 related cybercrime feeds on confusion around the recently-approved Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. 

When it comes to cybersecurity, one thing is for sure: when a global crisis emerges, it’s only a matter of time before criminals find a way to exploit it. And few situations offer as many opportunities for hackers as a global pandemic.

In 2019, cybercriminals cost businesses $3.5 billion, according to the FBI. That’s up from $2.7 billion in 2018. Cyberattacks happen so often that many businesses don’t even realize they’ve been breached until cybercriminals have compromised a significant amount of data and cost them millions in damages.