If you truly want to run your business effectively, it all starts with understanding how its costs break down. If you are armed with this knowledge, you can make better decisions about solution procurement and operations management. Let’s examine how you can cut costs without harming your business in the process.
You’ve no doubt noticed that innovation is motoring ahead and a lot of businesses are now implementing technology to help build efficient, reliable processes to improve business operations and customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, many companies hang on to outdated methods for evaluating and implementing technology and it results in substantial lost value. Today, we will go through a few ways you can get the value your business needs from its technology decisions.
We’ve looked at the best phones (flagships), we’ve looked at some of the most innovative devices, but what happens if you don’t have $1,000+ to buy a smartphone? Many of the main manufacturers spend a lot of their marketing budgets highlighting their most expensive devices, so a lot of people don’t know that there are some very capable smartphones that don’t come with four-figure price tags. Let’s take a look at some phones that people can get that won’t empty their wallets.
Remember that blender you got last holiday season that you let collect dust in the closet for a month? Maybe you decided to open it to view the instruction manual, then put it away since you would never, ever, actually use it. The only thing is, now that you actually want to use the manual, you can’t find it. Thankfully, the Internet, once again, is here to save the day, in the form of the online electronic manual.
Fact: There’s a shortage in the IT skills market. Yet, businesses now have more opportunity than ever to make up for this shortage. A simple solution is to outsource your IT services to a managed service provider. You might find that it’s a great way to save time and revenue on a department that’s becoming increasingly difficult to hire for. Here are three reasons why outsourced IT services can resolve the shortage of IT talent.
Qualified, Trained Professionals
When you’re looking for someone to lead your IT department, you want someone who has both the technological know-how and the skills to ensure they can provide a return-on-investment for your business. This often means that you want someone who has been around the block a time or two--someone who has plenty of experience, perhaps even certifications, and can offer ways to improve your IT management strategies. You don’t want to hire some hack to take care of your mission-critical technology. Also, some regions are landlocked in terms of talent available, and you may feel the need to give someone who is perhaps unqualified for the position the benefit of the doubt.
Instead, you can outsource the responsibility of an IT department to a managed service provider. Since most problems can be resolved remotely, you don’t necessarily need an on-site IT department, and you can instead invest in a relationship with a tried-and-true provider like The Connection, Inc.
Fewer Salaries to Pay
If you were to hire an internal IT department, you would have to add several salaries to your payroll and budget--not necessarily a cost that a small business can easily absorb. Of course, you could also have your employees be responsible for the upkeep of their technology, but this isn’t advisable, as they won’t have the formal or hands-on training required to prevent major catastrophe.
To resolve this issue, outsourced IT takes your IT expenses and consolidates them into a month-by-month service agreement, in which you only pay the specified amount for services rendered. This frees up the funds that you would use on a salary for more variable use on other aspects of your business.
Less Time Wasted on IT Troubles
A major cause for concern when dealing with IT troubles is that a ton of time and resources goes into resolving them. If you don’t have an internal IT department, this means that your office could be thrown into chaos by an unexpected IT complication. Even if your team is responsible for ensuring that your IT is managed properly, they could waste all sorts of time and resources on it, when they should instead be focused on their jobs--which certainly shouldn’t consist of managing your technology solutions.
Outsourcing eliminates the frustration that you’d undoubtedly feel if your organization were to manage its own technology. By having others handle your solutions, your team saves time that is better spent on other initiatives. These initiatives should be aimed at improving your organization’s operations and bringing new, exciting projects to the table.
Do you have any questions or concerns about outsourced IT support? If so, reach out to us at (732) 291-5938. We’d be happy to discuss what we can offer your business.
Cloud computing has taken the business world by storm, fulfilling so many needs and simplifying as many processes. If you’ve been on the fence about incorporating the cloud into your IT infrastructure, you should know a few of these benefits to help you make your choice.
Cost Efficiency
Let’s face it, when you’re running a business, cost is a factor in every decision you have to make. Leveraging the cloud for any of a variety of purposes can help you to trim some expenses and make some others stretch a little further. A cloud setup provides the ability to scale your resources to match your needs, ensuring that you aren’t paying for more than you need. This simplifies your budget, and may help free up some capital to invest in other business needs.
Multiple Purposes
While the cloud is most famously associated with storage, it has the capability to serve your business in other ways as well. For instance, the cloud can host your software solutions for you as a part of a Software as a Service agreement. In these cases, any time there are improvements made and a new version is available, your solutions will be upgraded immediately.
Alternatively, the cloud can be used to facilitate a backup and disaster recovery strategy. By housing a backup of your data in an offsite cloud environment, it will be safe should some calamity damage your in-house infrastructure. In these cases, you can even virtualize your systems and run them directly from the cloud to preserve productivity while the office is repaired.
Finally, we return to storage, as it relates to the collaborative benefits to be had with the cloud. By storing business files and data in the cloud, you and your employees can share access and work together to achieve your shared company goals--whether or not you’re anywhere near each other.
Security
Your data is undeniably precious to your business, and as a result, it must be protected from threats from all sides, both external cyber crime and internal user error. Using the cloud permits you to keep your most sensitive data accessible on a need-to-know basis, and allows you to wipe a device in the hands of someone who doesn’t need to know, if need be.
If you want to use the cloud to accomplish these things, reach out to The Connection, Inc at (732) 291-5938.
The business community has embraced Voice over Internet Protocol as the accepted standard for exceptional communications. While there are countless benefits to using VoIP as your chosen communications tool, you might be surprised at how much can be done with them. In fact, you might even overlook some of the best features about VoIP!
As you company grows, you will need to invest a good deal of the revenue that you take in to keep operations from falling into complacency. In order to get a good idea what investments would be most advantageous, doing a proactive ROI analysis of project you plan to undertake can put your business in a position to be able to properly anticipate every aspect of a successful project. Let’s take a look at the variables of an ROI analysis.
The first thing you will want to do is gather the receipts and create a detailed cost analysis of the project, breaking the costs down into separate categories. The category breakdown will be advantageous when you start to assess the different costs, and how those investments make a huge difference when trying to determine the viability of a project.
To configure this, you will want to start with the single-project costs. These include:
Once the costs have been firmly reported, it is time to start looking at the potential benefits of the proposed projects.
Since we are only looking at calculating the ROI of a particular investment, we should talk about how your IT investments may benefit your company. They include:
The equation to calculate the return on investment for your technology is the same as it would be for any other investment:
All you need to do is take your total benefit (calculated by subtracting your costs from your ultimate gains) and divide it by your total costs. This gives you a simple metric that makes your benefits easy to understand, and thereby enables you to make comparisons much more easily.
You should also keep a few other qualifications in mind as you plan your next IT investments.
The Connection, Inc can help you decide what your best moves are concerning your information technology. Reach out to us at (732) 291-5938 to learn more.
Accountants are asked a lot of questions. You’d expect as much as they manage a lot of organizational money, and can give small business owners and executives straight-forward advice about whether or not investments make sense for a company. With the recent increase in technology use for small businesses, accountants have been fielding more than financial queries, they’ve been directly asked about whether a business should implement technology. Today, we are going to explain why, regardless of the answer, your accountant is the wrong person to ask.
Sometimes technology can be seen as a cash cow. By implementing the right technology a business can get more out of less, creating revenue while cutting costs. This profitability is exactly what every business is looking for. When you ask your accountant about IT, however, you are getting their perspective on a specific set of software that they use for their day-to-day responsibilities, not necessarily your own. Therefore, the only people you should rely on for dedicated IT support is… well, dedicated IT support from trained and certified technicians. Failing to adhere to this steadfast rule could result in unforeseen consequences.
Part of the problem comes from how crucial technology is for just about any business in today’s market. To keep operations going, a business needs its technology to work, but if it’s not, then you run the risk of efficiency, productivity, and success being much more difficult to achieve.
Now, let’s say you hire someone to put up some shelving in your office. They will bring the needed tools to get the job done. One of these will inevitably be an electric screwdriver, which is much faster and more efficient than a manual one.
Your business is similar in this regard, as it could probably get things done without technology, but only by sacrificing a considerable amount of productivity and efficiency. Depending on how your organization functions, you might find yourself unable to get work done at all without any technology at your disposal. It’s like running out of charge in your electric screwdriver, or bringing a box of nails rather than screws to the worksite.
If it was someone you hired that made this mistake, naturally you would be upset; however, you shouldn’t simply Google search the issue at hand and take the suggested actions at face value. Whenever you turn to someone who isn’t an IT expert for technology support, you risk encountering misinformation, which can further harm your productivity and put your business at risk.
This makes the having trustworthy IT resources all the more important. The Connection, Inc can provide your business with the technology support and management needed to optimize your business’ operations. You can be confident that we will keep your business technology in proper working order, resolving issues and actively preventing them from becoming bigger problems. We can accomplish this remotely so that your in-house team will experience minimal distraction, and as long as you provide your employees with contact information for us, you’ll never have to rely on search engine queries for technology maintenance ever again.
To learn more about our services, reach out to us at (732) 291-5938.
When looking to cut costs in the workplace, one of the best places to start looking is at your printing costs. While paper documents were once incredibly important for businesses (they still serve a function), no one can deny that they take up a considerable amount of space in the workplace, as well as take up precious assets that could be better spent elsewhere. What’s the best way to minimize the resources you spend on printing?
Mobile technology is allowing businesses to make great strides in the way that they conduct their operations, but one of the key reasons why it has been so helpful is that it decreases their costs considerably. Thanks to developments in the way that mobile technology works, it can be fit into pretty much any business model, all the while improving your return on investment for your expensive technology solutions.
In terms of cost reduction, the most notable one comes from always being connected to the office. Without the need to be on-site, mobile computing give a business’ employees all of the tools needed to perform their daily duties from wherever they happen to be--whether it’s at the coffee shop down the road or a hotel while away on a business conference. Mobile devices break down barriers in the quest for profitability, making them great investments. One great example is a Chromebook. While it isn’t as powerful out of the box as a full-fledged workstation, it has the potential to be just as great of a solution with the proper support as long as you stick to certain software titles.
Mobile devices also present a challenge when it comes to security, though. When more devices have access to data of a sensitive nature, it’s placed at more risk of being exposed to potentially dangerous entities. Therefore, you need to take measures to ensure that it’s secure; otherwise, you could be placing the future of your entire business at risk. Preventative solutions are of the utmost importance and can be the end-all-be-all for keeping hackers and user errors from sabotaging your chances of success.
For example, mobile device management can be a critical way to shore up weaknesses in your mobile device strategy. Mobile device management contains several solutions that allow your organization to take action against common scenarios involving the management of mobile devices. If you lose a device, you should be able to easily (and remotely) wipe any data that’s found on it so that it can’t be accessed by those who find it. This means that your organization doesn’t have to worry as much if a device is ever lost or stolen.
Another aspect of a mobile device management solution is whitelisting and blacklisting applications, which keeps your employees accountable and responsible with which mobile applications are downloaded to their devices. You can keep employees from downloading time-wasting or malicious apps so that you don’t have to worry about them throwing away their workday on Facebook and Twitter. Furthermore, the devices will remain as secure as can be, relieving some of the stress that can come from whether or not your employees are downloading unnecessary or dangerous apps on devices intended for business.
User control is a great way to control risk associated with mobile devices. Simply put, if your employees don’t need access to a certain kind of data, then they shouldn’t be able to access it, period. For example, your average employee doesn’t need access to payroll information or other sensitive data. Giving their accounts access puts it at risk if they ever lose their device or install some kind of malware that gives access to this data to unsavory characters.
Another great solution for keeping data safe is to deploy a Virtual Private Network (VPN). The VPN sets up a virtual encrypted tunnel between your network and your staff’s devices, inherently creating a much more secure data transfer situation than would be typical over normal networking means.
By taking better care of your devices from a security standpoint, you eliminate the costs associated with potential data leaks and other issues. Furthermore, you allow for increased productivity for all employees involved, giving them the option to work more hours remotely or off-site. It’s the ideal way to connect all of your business’s employees without putting your organization at risk.
Does your organization need a mobile device management solution, or are you having trouble integrating mobile devices into your everyday workflow? The Connection, Inc has an answer for that. To learn more, reach out to us at (732) 291-5938.
By now, business owners are well aware of the many ways cloud computing can benefit their organization, such as providing increased mobility and flexibility. Despite the tantalizing list of benefits the cloud presents, some business owners may still be hesitant to switch to the cloud due to one major factor: the perceived lack of cost savings. Well, thanks to a recent study by John Burke, analyst and CIO of Nemertes Research, there’s new evidence showing how hosting workloads in the cloud is more cost-effective than the alternative, hosting operations on-premise.
Your business relies on technology to keep operations moving, but your technology relies on you to stay functional. While many small businesses will choose to forsake an in-house IT department in favor of a self-service model, this is a costly maintenance practice that could put your IT in jeopardy. Instead, your organization should invest in our managed IT services, which have the possibility to show your business an entirely new way of managing technology assets.
Instead of taking a break-fix approach to IT, managed technology services take preventative measures to keep problems from escalating into major disasters. Here are three ways that managed IT services can help your business.
Cost Savings
One of the biggest ways you can save on your IT is by implementing managed services. Due to the way managed services work, you get a service for a monthly fee. Now, compare this to the usual way of managing technology. When your technology breaks, instead of reaching out to a company that can diagnose and fix your problems for a steep cost, a managed service provider can administer the care needed as per your service level agreement.
Furthermore, the majority of problems can be prevented through careful maintenance and management, which is something that a break-fix IT provider won’t tell you. After all, they profit from your technology consistently breaking down. Managed IT providers want to save your business money through preventative maintenance. This means minimal hardware replacements, as you’ll only need to replace technology that’s in danger of an imminent failure.
Less Wasted Time
Chances are that you don’t have an internal IT department, and even if you do, it’s probably buried in work that nobody has time to get to. When there’s too much work that needs to get done, it’s easy to accidentally cut corners in order to guarantee that something of critical importance doesn’t go unanswered. One of the most frequent cut corners could include the administration of patches and security updates, which are crucial if you want to keep your business safe from online threats.
Managed IT services give your administration or internal IT department a break from constant technology maintenance. Instead, the responsibility is outsourced to an MSP whose sole responsibility is the upkeep of your technology solutions. This lets you stay focused on operations without worrying about your technology.
Peace of Mind
We mentioned that some companies leave the management of technology up to their employees, but we failed to mention how dangerous this can be. When you have untrained employees working with complex machines like workstations or servers, the chances of user error skyrocket. This can lead to downtime and other problems that could hinder the productivity of your organization.
The biggest benefit of managed IT services is that you know for sure that your technology is being handled by professional, proven technicians. This virtually eliminates the possibility of user error stemming from large technology revamps or maintenance projects. When a project is done right the first time, everyone benefits--especially your bottom line.
If your business wants to cut down on the amount of expenses and save on capital costs, managed services are the way to go. The Connection, Inc can provide a number of managed services designed specifically for your business. To learn more, give us a call at (732) 291-5938.
Putting together an IT budget is an exceptionally tricky procedure. Every year presents unique technical challenges that need to be addressed, but the slightest miscalculation can be detrimental to an IT budget. Here are five tips to give your organization some breathing room when it comes to planning out next year’s IT expenses.
Major retailers are having a rough time of it these days concerning the security of their customer's financial information. Last December, Target was hit with malware that compromised 40 million customer credit and debit card accounts, and recently, Home Depot was hit with the same malware. What's a connoisseur of mass-produced boxed goods to do?
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