Coleman Technologies Blog

We talk a lot about different types of technology, securing your technology and your accounts, and a lot of other technology-related issues on this blog, but because of the generalities of whatever technology (or strategy) we’ve chosen to write about that day, we never confront the thing that is most important to a business: How does any technology fit into what we do here? What value do we get from any type of technology? Today, we thought we’d talk a little bit about what you need to do to find the right technology for your business and how to come up with those decisions. 

Do you know those horror stories you catch every so often where a huge business has their network hacked and millions of their customers and employees have their personal and financial information leaked onto the Dark Web? Your organization isn't likely as big as theirs, but regardless of how much money, people, and diverse revenue streams an organization has, having its network breached and its customers’, or its employees’, information strewn about over the Dark Web is not an ideal scenario. 

Manufacturers have long been at the forefront of technology. Today, this trend continues, but with new, innovative tools that are designed to make business more efficient and workers more productive. This technology has helped much of the manufacturing sector despite costs continually rising, supply chain interruptions, and other variables. Let’s take a look at some of the major technology changes that have fueled manufacturers during the past few years. 

What Does “Normal” Mean?

Let’s just come out and say it: as terrible as the pandemic has been for so many, it has also given businesses some very strong motivations to adapt and innovate. Really, most had no choice if they wanted to remain open in the long-term.

This led to many businesses finally adopting the modern solutions that enabled productive and secure remote work and collaboration.

IT Management Matters More Than Ever

From a certain point of view, businesses now find themselves in a unique position to restructure their operations. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic has provided an inconvenient case study of sorts that shows a promising outlook on remote productivity.

It has also helped to shine the light on how impactful waste can be in poorly managed IT strategies. Without any engaged oversight, the heightened use of cloud services can lead to a few considerable issues, including

Tip One: Cover Everything that Your Business Requires

As you’re putting together your handbook, you need to figure out precisely what you want every member of your team to know. This will give your team the advantage of knowing what is expected of them, along with the other information that they will need to know, like:

Involve Your Team

In a crisis event, you need to have your team at your side (even if they must physically stay home) and supporting you. Here are a few ways to encourage this:

• Keep your team in the loop. Make sure that everyone has the information that they should, as withholding as much as possible will only distract from the goals you are trying to accomplish and make effective communications more difficult. Of course, don’t share information that they shouldn’t hear.
• Set the tone. As much as you can, maintain control of the situation at hand and make sure everything that you need to complete is still completed. Your employees will probably follow your example, making progress and recovery much simpler.
• Trust who you’ve hired. There is a reason that you haven’t fired your employees: they can contribute to the business. Allow them to make these contributions, rather than taking on too much yourself.

Let’s go over some of the ways that an MSP can help reduce your support costs, while still providing better support than the alternative.

Where Support Costs Build Up

Take a moment and consider why technology costs tend to rise so rapidly once an issue is discovered.

• The technology itself could be expensive to repair or replace.
• The repair fee will likely include fees and travel costs in addition to the cost of the service itself.
• The repair is likely only focused on fixing the immediate problem, without considering if it will recur or if the fix itself will cause further problems down the road, leading to repeat visits.
• If an issue does happen, you have to call in the technician for them to come and actually fix the problem. This all takes a lot of time, before the repair even takes place, which itself can take a large amount of billable time as well. So, in addition to paying for the travel time for the tech to get there and the time they spend solving the issue, you are also incurring costs through missed productivity.
• It is next to impossible to predict these kinds of expenses when trying to budget out your year, as you can never know when you may be surprised. If you set aside too little, you could drain your budget long before you planned.

Today, there is a shift in the ways that people are entering a contract. Using blockchain technology, businesses are using the technology to solidify their contracts, reduce process conflict, and save time. Blockchain offers faster, cheaper, and more efficient options in which to enter a binding agreement with someone. Let’s take a look at how companies are going about using smart contracts.

What is a Smart Contract?

To understand how a smart contract works, you first need to understand how it is smart. Smart contracts are designed to work on clearly defined and conditional principles that work to resolve ownership only after those conditions are agreed upon. Think about it this way, you have a product that you want to sell, but the buyer can only pay over time. You agree to hand over the product under the condition that the buyer pays four equal payments. After the third payment is made, the buyer doesn’t send another payment. It will be evident to the buyer, the seller, and any intermediary or arbiter that not all the conditions of the contract have been met because each action made by either party creates an individual block in the blockchain; and, that information is not only encrypted, it is completely transparent. This means that it can be seen by all parties involved because the information is stored on every system that is in on the contract. 

Why Would You Want to Use a Smart Contract?

The most advantageous part of the smart contract as compared to normal contracts is the speed in which agreements can be completed, but there are almost an endless number of superlatives when compared to traditional contracts. They include:

1. Accuracy - One of the best features of a smart contract is that it records all of the information that needs to be known in explicit detail. 
2. Communication clarity - The explicit nature of the smart contract leaves no room for miscommunication, removing much of the liability, and cutting down on inefficiency that comes as a result of misinterpretation.
3. Transparency - All relevant parties would have a fully visible set of the terms and conditions set forth in the contract.
4. Security - Smart contracts use the highest level of encryption available. 
5. Redundancy - Smart contracts save every transaction in explicit detail. If data were to be lost, it is easily retrievable. 
6. Trustworthy - Since smart contracts are made with some of the most secure, transparent, and reliable tools available, there is no room for outside manipulation and error. 

Where Will You Find Smart Contracts? 

These contracts will be found in some of the most important transactions humans undertake. Some of the industries you may find smart contracts popping up in include banking, insurance, healthcare, and real estate. In fact, anywhere you find the need for a lawyer, you may only need the use of a distributed smart contract.

Emerging technologies are changing the way people do business. For more information about blockchain or smart contracts, subscribe to our newsletter and visit us at www.colemantechnologies.com.

Which seems a little ridiculous to me, if I’m being honest. Your staff is one of your biggest investments. On top of that, it is important to remember that, since your employees are human beings, pushing them to do more might actually result in them accomplishing less.

In my experience, the best way to help an employee accomplish their best is to track their performance and evaluate their next steps. Is this always foolproof? No - but as I said, in my experience, it is the best way.

Understanding Employees

Before we go any further, it is important that I make something clear: we are proceeding with the understanding and acceptance that your employees are like any others: flawed human beings, capable of a lot and likewise distracted by a lot. Either way, holding them to the same standards as we would some automated alternative is unfair, as I am sure you would agree.

However, and somewhat unfortunately, this often isn’t the impression that employees get from management. Some common complaints from employees are:

• Their workplace lacks communication.
• They have no job security.
• They aren’t paid what they’re worth.
• Credit isn’t given for their hard work.
• Favoritism is alive and well in the workplace.
• Management constantly has them under a microscope.
• They have to deal with managers who are incompetent.
• There’s just too much work to do.

Now, put in a list like this, these don’t look too great, and you may want to shrug them off and assume that they aren’t happening in your company… they almost certainly are.

Having said that, I want you to think back to when you once worked for someone else. How did you feel going in every day? Now look at that list again - some of those line items may have helped motivate you to go into business for yourself.

Let’s face it - entrepreneurship isn’t something that people are really “born to do”...it is a decision that people make, usually after paying their dues and working for other people and seeing ways that they would do things differently (or in their minds, better). Some staff members love working for certain people, and other staff members don’t, occasionally acting on it.

The point of all this: people are people, and as such, there is no single equation for dealing with employees well.

This means that, no matter what you do and what style of management you use, not all employees are going to be a good fit at your company. This means that, along the line, someone was going to feel displeased about their work situation.

Remember, while you should still be doing everything you can to make the work environment as amiable as possible for your employees, some just aren’t going to be a good fit, and may need to be addressed in other ways.

Is It Ethical to Monitor Your Employees? Or... Legal?

At the end of the day, it is important that you realize while payroll can be your greatest investment, it can also be your worst. This means that you need to keep track of how your employees are performing and spending their time in the office, which leads you to the prospect of actually tracking your employees in the workplace.

This opens up a few more questions, starting with the data you are actually collecting. What is it that you are trying to track? Should you keep it simple, monitoring attendance or the number of hours an employee actually spends in the office? Are there different performance indicators that you like to keep updated metrics concerning? Do you want to monitor keystrokes, making sure that they are working diligently throughout the day, or their browsing histories to make sure they aren’t putting your company in jeopardy by visiting sites they shouldn’t be?

This is where things can get a little murky as far as business ethics are concerned. How much do you really need to know, and how much will you collect as collateral data?

As it stands today, employee monitoring software is in high demand, the market growing as more businesses decide to protect themselves against theft by an employee. The consensus seems to be swaying toward the opinion that you can’t trust your employees not to take advantage of you, either by stealing data and other resources, or dishonestly reporting their time.

There is also a lot of license given to businesses in terms of what can legally be done to protect their own assets, especially where an employee’s privacy is concerned. Courts have ruled in some cases that a company can track an employee’s behavior after they have left the confines of the office. Consider the permissions that a user needs to agree to in order to access work-related files on a personal device. There is little to stop the employer from also going through private messages with that access.

So yes, it is currently legal to monitor your employees, which means the decision really falls to you and your conscience. Of course, this may change, or it could just as likely stay the same. Privacy is a contentious subject these days, with no clear indication of how things will turn out when (and if) it is ever settled.

Mindfully Monitoring Employees

One of the hallmarks of employee monitoring is the fact that the monitoring itself is kept about as hidden as the behaviors it is meant to catch. Whether you’re keeping an eye on your surveillance footage, web activity, internal correspondence, or keystrokes, the person being monitored traditionally would only find out if they were told… which isn’t something that companies have traditionally done, either.

I would urge you to actually break from tradition here.

Ethics aside for a moment, it just makes more practical sense to inform your users how their activity is to be monitored. Not only will this transparency help you build and maintain trust amongst your users, but it can also help keep issues from developing in the first place. Think about it - what happens when people realize there’s a patrol car on the highway? They immediately check the speedometer and correct their speed. Transparency has a great way of acting as a deterrent in that way.

You also want to consider the kind of metrics you’re actually collecting before you evaluate your employees based on them. Do the metrics line up with how the employee provides value to the business, and/or the actual value they deliver? Look at it this way - when you’re looking to buy an appliance, like a toaster, you won’t find out how well the toast is browned by measuring the length of the power supply cord. Metrics can be useful tools, but only where they practically apply.

Finally, don’t give up on your employees too quickly. If your monitoring picks up on one of your staff members having a tough time, try addressing the situation as your first option. Sudden downturns in employee productivity are usually caused by something, and that something might be fixable. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t terminate an employee if you need to, just to consider alternatives before diving into the hiring process again and losing what may still be a valuable resource.

What are your feelings on employee monitoring, and using these kinds of solutions? Share your thoughts in the comments section, and check back in with our blog to learn more about optimizing and securing your business’ technology.

“Unknown Hack”

On May 8, 2019, almost a year to the day after the first transaction was made, an Amazon spokesperson claimed that the company had completed investigating the compromised accounts, and had been the victim of an “extensive” fraud. The extent of the fraud was large enough where two banking companies, Barclays and Prepay Technologies (who is a partial subsidiary of Mastercard) are caught up in the crime.

Ultimately, Amazon neglected to disclose the true scope of the hack, but a report by Bloomberg indicated that over one billion dollars were dispersed to merchants in 2018 via Amazon Capital Services U.K. While there is currently no figure provided by the company, if large portions of that money was subverted, it could rank as one of the largest hacks in the history of online commerce, and certainly the biggest fraud that has involved Amazon. 

Amazon, which has a business model built to be largely automated, has done a remarkable job of keeping personally identifiable information from being hacked over the years, but in today’s threat-persistent culture, even the most secure companies can have situations happen to them that jeopardize their ability to complete financial and information transactions, regardless of how much they invest in cybersecurity.

Phishing Attacks

Just because this article mentions a major fraud involving the world’s largest online retailer in no way means that hackers have moved on from trying to hack small businesses. Small businesses face the majority of hacking attacks, mainly because they have the least amount of security to thwart. In fact, if Amazon can fall victim to phishing attacks, it’s not a stretch to believe that your company is susceptible. With millions of phishing messages sent every day, many of which target small businesses, having a strategy to educate your staff is extremely important.

The best way to go about doing that is to be proactive. Getting your staff to understand that they are on the front lines of a never-ending cyberwar and what they need to learn in order to keep themselves, and your organization free from the serious risks that come from falling victim of phishing attacks. Some things you can prioritize:

• Annual education and training - Have a comprehensive plan in place to educate new and current staff that is updated and required annually.
• Having strong passwords - Since phishing is a form of social engineering, the hackers on the other end of the phishing attack are simply looking for access. Having strong passwords will keep them out much longer than weak ones. 
• Avoid shadow IT - Make it clear that all software has to pass through IT first, before it is downloaded onto a workstation. It may seem inefficient at first, but the company will be better off vetting a software solution before it gains access to your organization’s network.
• Provide cloud storage - When people are constantly on the move and have a lot of responsibilities, they will often upload their work into their personal cloud-based file storage. This can be risky behavior, even if the employee’s motives are solid. Keep your company’s data hosted on its own infrastructure.

With these four tips you can go a long way toward protecting your business, and your staff, from the detrimental characteristics of a phishing attack.

If you need help with your organization’s cybersecurity, or if you simply want some help outlining a strategy to use, contact the IT professionals at Coleman Technologies today at (604) 513-9428.

Your company’s culture is its identity - the impression that your company leaves when someone makes contact. As such, there are assorted reasons that it pays to create an engaging and inclusive company culture.

Draws in Talent

Let me ask you this: would you rather work someplace that had a reputation of nurturing incoming talent and ensuring that this talent had the resources and access that they needed to succeed in their position, or someplace notorious for leaving new employees to fend for themselves, providing minimal direction when direction is necessary to successfully complete a task? My money is on the first option.

One of the biggest benefits to creating a positive culture in the workplace is that more people will want to make it their place of work. This gives you a wider pool of talent from which to select the best candidates, creating a stronger business.

Of course, attracting this talent is one thing, having it stick around is quite another.

Retains Talent and Reduces Turnover

As long as your company culture matches its reputation, the individuals who accept your offer of employment are less likely to leave, barring any personal circumstances that force them to. This is important, as the sudden loss of an employee can have assorted impacts on your business. These impacts can include dropped processes, missed opportunities, and the costs associated with finding, hiring, and onboarding someone to replace the lost employee.

Of course, you don’t have to worry so much about these impacts if your employees aren’t motivated to leave. This is where having a positive company culture is so valuable - you can better avoid the significant costs of losing an employee, continuing to benefit from their skills in the workplace. Research conducted by Gallup indicated that only 37 percent of employees engaged with their work were actively seeking new employment opportunities, compared to a staggering (albeit understandable) 73 percent of those who had disengaged from their work.

Columbia University conducted research as well, and their results followed in the same vein. According to their results, organizations with strong company cultures saw turnover rates of 13.9 percent. 13.9 percent, compared to the 48.4 percent turnover rates at companies with poor company culture.

Boosts Productivity

A happy employee is a productive employee, which translates to direct benefits for your business if your employees remain satisfied. The right company culture can motivate your employees significantly.  The same Gallup research referenced above demonstrated that engaged employees saw productivity boosts of 21 percent. Another study, by IBM-owned Kenexa, suggested that organizations with an engaged workforce were able to bring in twice the income as an organization without these levels of engagement.

Reduces Employee Burnout

There are many reasons that an employee can experience some level of burnout, whether their schedules are overpacked or their hours are simply too long to be sustainable. However, a negative company culture is often overlooked as the root cause of an employee becoming disengaged with their work.

While employee burnout may seem like more of the employee’s problem at first consideration, there are some very real consequences that a business will need to deal with. For instance, employee burnout has been linked to an estimated 49 percent increase in workplace accidents, and a 60 percent increase in errors.

Stressed out employees are a liability to your company, but helping them to reduce that stress with a better company culture can turn these liabilities into true assets.

Better Attendance

Speaking of assets, your employees aren’t going to be very good ones if they are never in the office. A Harvard Business Review study reported an increase in employee absenteeism of 37 percent among disengaged employees. Naturally, if your employees aren’t completing their responsibilities due to this absenteeism, it is going to have an impact on both your business’ success and internal morale.

However, a more positive company culture encourages your employees to report to work, and as discussed above, leads to improved productivity while they’re there.

Is Company Culture Really So Important?

Based on the outcomes discussed above, it is pretty clear that the better your company culture is, the more effectively your business will be able to operate. So, how can you improve yours?

One way is to give your team the tools they need to complete their tasks more easily than they could with outdated and insufficient IT solutions - and the efficiency boost that new IT solutions will bring can free up some time to develop your company culture even more. Coleman Technologies can help to make sure that you are using the tools that are best suited for your company’s (and by extension, your employees’) needs. Give us a call at (604) 513-9428 to learn more.

The first thing you need to remember is that, while your unhappy customer or client may not be correct, they are always right. What does this mean? Simple - even if they misinterpreted what they were entitled to through your services, you have the obligation to make them happy. This is not to say that you kowtow to every demand a customer makes, regardless of how ludicrous it is… you just need to make sure they stay happy.

How can you do this? It all boils down to communication.

How to Communicate With an Unhappy Client

Chances are, you’re going to find out that a client was unhappy by reading a review that they leave somewhere online - perhaps on Facebook, or on Google, or on a third-party review website. What they will have to say may upset you. That’s fine. Nobody likes to hear that there is something wrong with one of their endeavors. You have every right to be a little upset - just don’t let that upset seep into your conversation with your unhappy client.

After all, in their eyes, they have every right to be upset as well.

Therefore, once you’ve regained a cooler composure, you need to respond directly and politely to the negative review. While this initial interaction should be public, offer to continue your conversation in a less public way, in an offline forum. If the reviewer accepts, try to come to a mutually beneficial compromise with them. This will help to insulate you from a rash decision.

This brings up another important point - while you may really want to, you should never just remove a negative review. Not only will that make it look like you are hiding something (not good), it also squanders the opportunity to make lemonade out of your reviewer’s lemons. Again, try to make whatever issue your reviewer had right, and ask them to revise their review once things have been settled. If you play your cards right, the result could be a much better review, describing the care you put into fixing their issue.

Reviews Can Be Good, Too!

Whenever they are, you have another opportunity to embrace by responding to them.

I can almost hear you now: “Wait, if a reviewer is happy, doesn’t that mean I’ve done what I had to do?”

In a way, yes. If someone is willing to leave a positive review of your services, you clearly were able to strike a chord with them. However, while responding to a negative review could be somewhat accurately seen as damage control, responding to a positive review has a very different motivation to it.

Look at it this way: anyone who is willing to take the time out of their day to speak highly of you online is an invaluable ally to have. Positive reviews and negative reviews are very different things, especially in that people are generally more inclined to leave negative feedback if they have the opportunity.

Reflecting on this, it only makes sense to take the time and respond to positive reviews as well. A positive review is more or less a confirmation of a successful onboarding process - to keep these contacts engaged, you need to continue communicating with them beyond the point that their invoice is settled.

Are you happy with our services or our content? If so, we’d love to hear about it. Leave us a review or drop us a line in the comments!

Collection Concerns
Data collection is one of the current big concerns in technology. With another newsworthy data breach practically every other day, companies that accumulate data for seemingly little reason effectively put their clients and customers at a greater risk of having this data stolen. Reflecting upon this, it is no wonder that 75 percent of consumers are concerned about brands keeping track of their browsing habits.

Facebook has been the focus of some negative attention in past months thanks to these concerns. In addition to the Cambridge Analytica situation, Facebook has adopted artificial intelligence technologies to analyze their users. This analysis is used to predict future behaviors, these insights being sold to advertisers. While this brings up many legitimate concerns about data privacy, it also introduces a different topic: the need for a code of ethics surrounding the use of collected data, as well as how much data is collected.

Why This Is a Real Issue
It should come as no surprise that businesses and individuals have different priorities, and that these different priorities shape their ethics in different ways. Likewise, the primary purpose of any business is to generate revenue through profit. Therefore, it only makes sense that a business as a unit would have the motivation to collect as much data as they can - after all, the more data available, the more insights that could be presumably be gleaned, and the more successful the business would be… in theory.

However, as mentioned above, many businesses seem to collect as much data as they can just so they can have it. This is not a great approach for them to take for a few reasons. Most obviously, because it just enables more data to be compromised if a breach was to occur.

Without the guidance of a code of ethics leading your business decisions, the likelihood of risking your clients’ data for the sake of advancement - be it more insight, improved automation and artificial intelligence, or another business goal - becomes much higher.

Enforcing Ethics
In order to create a workplace that is in alignment with your determined ethics, you need to make sure of two things. One, that you clearly establish and share them within your business so that your employees are on the same page as you are, and two, that you stand by these ethics.

To accomplish this, learning your company’s ethics should be a part of an employee’s onboarding process, with a written document leaving no questions as to what will and won’t be tolerated. Then, you need to make sure that you not only listen when ethical violations are reported, but also allow those reporting them to remain anonymous.

What would be the most important aspect of your policy for employees to follow? Share it in the comments!

Customer Service
Your customers are one of your most valuable assets, so it’s natural that you want to build a powerful bond with them. If you can’t support the products you sell to them, you’ll have a difficult time keeping your business in good standing with both current and prospective clients. Technology can help you maintain this positive relationship through the use of a ticketing system to handle customer complaints and concerns, and it also makes it easy to handle support for various services you might offer.

Social media and social networking in general provides businesses with more direct ways of interacting with consumers. Sites like Facebook and Twitter essentially offer a platform to promote a brand and knowledge base. Of course, this advantage can quickly become a detriment if it’s not managed properly, as you’re (again) dealing directly with customers--if they aren’t satisfied by your interaction, they’re more likely to share it and complicate public relations.

Productivity
To be successful as a business, you have to accrue money somehow. This is where productivity comes in--technology helps by enabling workers to get more done throughout the workday, building more value for your organization in the long run. For example, time-tracking software can help with task scheduling, giving employees the opportunity to accomplish more during the time they spend in the office. Moreover, you’ll be able to assign a monetary value to the time your employees spend on various tasks and streamline their work processes.

Many of today’s most helpful technology solutions come with built-in productivity solutions that allow for collaboration through the cloud. These cloud-hosted applications provide flexibility to workers so they can communicate in the way most efficient for them. Since these solutions are flexible and scalable, your business can adjust them as needed.

Finance
Money is a big part of why you’re in business, but you can’t do anything without funding of your own. You have a bottom line to keep in mind, after all. Technology can help businesses better manage their finances through online invoicing services to collect payments and reduce paper expenses. If you use software to manage payroll and other accounts, you’ll be able to handle them easily and more efficiently. If you can streamline these processes at all, your business can run much better and you’ll be better off in the long run.

Security
Security plays a critical role in the sustainability of your business, both on your network and in your physical office. You can’t let workers or other entities waltz around your network and your office uninhibited, as the opportunity to cause major damage is practically omnipresent in today’s business world. You need to implement not only network security solutions such as antivirus, firewall, content filtering, and spam blocking technology, but physical security solutions like security cameras, biometric security locks, and other measures as well. Doing so ensures the protection of all your business’ assets, whether it’s from a hacker or a careless employee.

A lot goes into making a business successful, and technology plays a large role in doing so. How does your business use technology? Coleman Technologies can help you get started thinking about the future for your organization. To learn more, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.

Innovation
Before we tell you how innovation may hurt your business, we’ll talk a little bit about how it is absolutely essential. Business is, for most companies, a very human endeavor. Humans that do the same thing day-in and day-out, don’t take all that long to get proficient at it. This proficiency, if not tested can soon turn into complacency, but if it is tested too much, it can turn into productivity-sapping frustration. Innovation is the process of renewal. Taking something that has worked, and making it work even better.

A constant need for renewal fuels the technology industry. Take, for example, a legacy computing system. A business can still utilize it because it knows what to expect. It’s been using the applications and the software for quite a while. Since it creates no new problems, and the management of it is routine, it works for your business, until it begins to cause other problems.

How could it be then, that this kind of unquestionable efficiency is actually hurting your business?

Well, the answer is pretty standard. With solutions available that take less capital to maintain, are available on newer technologies, and enhance your workers’ ability to be collaborative/productive, the expectation would be that embracing new technology systems will actually cost the business less than maintaining and supporting a legacy system. The legacy system will eventually be untenable because it will be so expensive to maintain, or, it will lose effectiveness. Either reason suggests innovation is an inevitability.

Innovation Betrayal
We’ve already established how serious business owners (and other decisions makers) need to be innovative in their procurement and deployment of business-class solutions to get more out of their business investments. What happens when the innovations they choose do the opposite? What if everything they’ve been told by industry leaders, by mentors, and by their vendors turned out to be completely ineffective?

What if by innovating some of their IT, waste and inefficiency spiked? What if the end result of a dedication to accepting new hardware and other solutions is that capital, that could be spent elsewhere (or, to maintain systems that worked properly for some time), is completely wasted? How can you justify taking capital from a functioning system and leaving your staff with a shiny, new system that doesn’t deliver the same effective computing platform (or operational effectiveness) that their old system did?

We all know that supporting a legacy computing platform is not just costly, it is risky. With the thousands of threats out there just looking to feast on unprotected, network-attached systems, upgrading to more secure systems that don’t need as much diligent oversight should likely be a priority of every business.

How do you make these two concepts play nice? One way is to virtualize. In the past, legacy applications were a major problem for IT administrators, but nowadays, there are solutions that make legacy application virtualization not only possible, but efficient. That way, you’ll be able to maintain the use of your legacy applications, but host them on a public or private cloud platform. This presents any organization with several benefits that include:

• Better for continuity
• Cost reduction
• Improved security
• Easier software licensing
• Boosts in accessibility

It may seem ironic that, by using some of today’s most dynamic technologies, you won’t have to move off of your old software systems, but that is the case. To virtualize your data, your applications, and any other part of your business’ computing systems the IT professionals at Coleman Technologies can help. Our technicians can provide you with the information and resources you need to successfully move your locally-hosted applications to the cloud, whether you choose to host that locally or not.

Customer Relationships
Another way that businesses have improved the way they do business through innovation is by overhauling the way that they handle their customer relationships. If your business has found success by pressing the flesh and getting out and having face-to-face relationships with customers and prospects, you shouldn’t change that now. However, today there are solutions that can make those face-to-face relationships more valuable.

By integrating technology solutions designed to help you better manage your customer relationships, you can subsidize those face-to-face relationships with automated correspondence and other services designed to promote enhancement to your organization’s sales and support. One solution is called Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

A CRM integrates all facets of your business together with one piece of software, not only improving customer relations, but also streamlining processes for sales, productivity, and support. By having all the information your team needs in one simple-to-use solution, they can produce more, provide better support, and collaborate better than ever before.

Another technology that is working to improve customer relationships is social media. There are dozens of different social media sites for a business to consider, but depending on the industry your business services, you may be able to get away with minimizing your social media presence and still have it work to enhance your relationships with customers and prospects. The major social networks like Facebook and Twitter can be of great benefit for businesses to promote their brand and interact with customers.

At Coleman Technologies, we help businesses just like yours do more with the use of technology. Our managed IT services work to proactively manage your business’ IT to ensure that you are experiencing the technology in the way it is designed to be experienced; and, that your company gets the most out of it. For more information about how Coleman Technologies can help you improve your business, call us today at (604) 513-9428.

Be Prepared to Lose Power
Electricity is perhaps the most important part of using technology in the workplace, as without it, the devices that empower your business’ operations just won’t function. In some cases, you might suddenly lose power, leading to data loss and other disaster scenarios that could strike your business down if you’re not prepared for them. With progress grinding to a halt, downtime will ensue, creating a considerable loss for your business.

Even if you’re not losing power, an excessive amount of it can create a surge, damaging the infrastructure itself and harming the individual components that make it up. It’s ultimately in your best interest to take measures against these events, as you made an investment that needs a substantial return. Surge protectors can be helpful to prevent excessive power from crippling these important machines, but in some cases, you’ll want a more powerful solution. An uninterruptible power supply, or UPS device, can help your servers, workstations, and other important technology shut down properly in the event of a power outage or surge, giving you the ability to minimize damage done.

Maintain a Steady Internet Connection
The Internet is an invaluable tool that can help your business succeed, and the Internet plays a larger role in its functionality than it ever has before. A lack of Internet ultimately becomes downtime for many organizations, as they depend on the Internet for various services and communications. More often than not, there’s nothing you can do about a lack of Internet if it comes from your service provider. To keep this kind of downtime from sinking operations, many businesses have implemented backup Internet connections, just in case they ever have to use it. This comes with a downside--you’ll have to maintain that connection--but it will likely be worth the investment if you ever need it.

Place Boundaries on Your Staff
Even the best employees are known to make mistakes from time-to-time. While you can trust them for the most part, nobody is perfect, nor should you expect them to be. Some might even try to implement their own solutions with the intention of making their jobs easier and more efficient. This is called shadow IT, and it can be dangerous. You have no way of knowing whether it’s putting your business at risk. You can implement measures to ensure that your employees aren’t downloading unauthorized applications through the use of administrator and user privileges. If you limit what your users can do with their machines, then you have less to worry about.

Coleman Technologies can help your business ensure managing IT doesn’t become a hassle. To learn more, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.