The entire purpose of modern IT is to improve the processes that work requires us to do. Today, we wanted to address a few business priorities—productivity, cybersecurity, and accessibility—that the right tech can help you accomplish, explicitly exploring how different tools can contribute to your success.
Technology Can Kickstart Productivity
Of all business metrics, productivity is arguably the most focused on nowadays. Fortunately, implementing modern tools can significantly improve your chances of running a productive business. For instance…
Automation
How many tasks must be completed but consistently take considerable time without offering your business much practical value? The fact that such tasks interfere with your profit-generating activities puts them in direct opposition to your productivity. However, implementing automation and allowing these labor-intensive but straightforward tasks to run independently in the background can give your team members a lot of time to commit to profit-generating or business-advancing efforts.
Collaboration
There’s a reason that people say “let’s put our heads together” or that “many hands make light work.” Collaborating on any goal can very easily reduce the time it takes, and many modern technology platforms are designed with this in mind. Microsoft and Google each offer entire suites of software built with collaboration as a priority, which means embracing these capabilities is simpler and more accessible than ever.
Data Management and Analytics
Collecting and analyzing the data your business generates throughout its operations empowers you to make better and wiser decisions for your company. Modern IT tools can collect and process this immense amount of information, identifying promising patterns and highlighting what you can accomplish much more quickly than you could otherwise.
Cybersecurity is Simpler with Modern Protections
Security, as the past few decades of near-constant cyberthreats and data breaches should have taught us all, is critical for businesses of all sizes to get right. While this is far from an inclusive list, the following are vital elements of proper cybersecurity preparedness.
Advanced Threat Protection
As a blanket term encompassing various security tools, advanced threat protection requires a business to adopt safeguards like antivirus, firewalls, and threat-detection systems. Doing so will help eliminate a vast majority of the threats that you would otherwise face, significantly lowering the likelihood of your team encountering an issue nearly as often.
Data Encryption
With data being so readily targeted by threats, the safe option is to take precautions to mitigate the damage that stolen data can cause. Encryption is one such precaution.
By scrambling the data to anyone that doesn’t have the proper credentials to access it, encryption helps preserve the privacy of any data that might be breached and limits the damage done. While the breach is still not acceptable and needs to be addressed, encryption allows you to focus your energy on resolving the problem.
Employee Training and Awareness
One of the most persistent cybersecurity threats comes from inside the house in the form of your employees because they can very easily serve as a vulnerability. This makes it crucial that your team is aware of the threats they’ll face and are ready to spot them, which investing in employee training will help. Be sure you also run simulated attacks to evaluate how well this training works and to catch potential weaknesses in your defenses.
Today’s Tools Offer Enhanced Accessibility
While the workplace was once firmly defined as the office where business took place, modern technologies allow work to be done effectively anywhere someone can access the Internet. The following technologies are instrumental for this to happen productively and securely.
Cloud
The cloud can support a wide range of business needs, from storage space to software delivery and many others, simply because it’s just borrowed (or, more accurately, rented) computing hardware that someone else maintains on your behalf. That, paired with the relative affordability and accessibility the cloud provides, makes it a no-brainer for businesses to use the cloud, especially to support remote work.
Virtual Private Networks
When considering remote work, however, you need to take security even more seriously. It’s one thing for your team to access sensitive data from within your protected and secured network, and it’s quite another for them to do so from some airport, coffee shop, or even home network with a password like “locationnameWificode.”
One way you can work around this is by implementing a tool called a virtual private network, or VPN. You may have heard of them in ads or YouTube sponsorships as a means of accessing geo-protected streaming content from the comfort of your home. In the business world, their utility is far greater. Business-grade VPNs allow remote workers to securely access data you have stored on-site, as the VPN creates an encrypted bridge between their device and your storage hardware.
Remote Troubleshooting
We must also address the ever-present fact that IT issues happen constantly, regardless of whether someone works in an office or outside its walls. This makes it essential for modern businesses to have some form of remote support available to perform remote monitoring and maintenance on their IT infrastructure and help employees efficiently address any issues they encounter. Today’s technology makes this kind of support-from-a-distance possible, whether it is performed by an in-house IT department or an outsourced provider.
We Can Be the Outsourced Provider to Assist With All of This…
…and, frankly, a lot more. Reach out to us at (604) 513-9428 to inquire about any or all of the above and learn more about what we can do for your business.
