Is Your Business Following These Essential Best Practices Right Now?

Whenever your technology is involved in your business processes, it is important that you abide by best practices to see the most effective results. Let’s run through the most effective practices that you should reinforce in your operations.

Emphasize Security

Security obviously needs to be present on this list, as it seems that it’s been a long time since we’ve gone a week without news of yet another cyber incursion. Data is the modern-day salt, or oil… an immensely valuable resource that there is high demand for to sustain everyday life. The difference is that someone trying to steal your data or attack your operations doesn’t need to be present to do it.

This makes it all the more important that your business has sufficient IT protections in place to keep threats out, with your entire team kept apprised of the importance of security diligence and how to report any issues they spot. As remote work proves to be a lasting innovation, these defenses and practices will only be more important to have at the ready.

Adopt Cloud Options

Speaking of remote work, it is just one way that utilizing cloud-based solutions can deliver considerable benefits to your business and its operations. From simplified access to data and the solutions used to process and utilize it, to the collaborative benefits that these cloud-based solutions offer, to the many advantages of having a copy of your data stored separately from your business’ infrastructure in terms of your business continuity preparations, the cloud has a lot to offer the modern business.

As a result, you can enjoy a wide variety of capabilities with little-to-no maintenance needs on your end, all for a budgetable fee.

Automate What You Can

Here’s the holy grail of productivity solutions: why spend time working on something when it can be done automatically, much quicker, and more accurately? Automation enables businesses to take many rote responsibilities off of their human resources and instead set their computing resources to complete them.

While the term “automation” has unfortunately been associated with ideas like downsizing and replacing workers with machines in the past, it is important to think about it in terms of what it is actually supposed to do: free up your employees to accomplish more worthwhile things, the menial jobs that once took up their time now seen to on their behalf. If you think about it, automation is really the antithesis of downsizing… you’re basically adding non-human resources to your workforce.

Communicate

Whenever you stream something over the Internet, you are using bandwidth, whether that “something” is the latest original series from your favorite streaming service or placing a call over a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone. As you might imagine, the office will have a great number of Internet-based processes happening simultaneously at any given time, meaning that bandwidth will be a valuable resource.

Unfortunately, it also means that the bandwidth-demanding communication apps that businesses favor today may be flaky without action from you. You’ll want to work with an IT provider (like us) to ensure that sufficient bandwidth is available for your collaborative efforts.

Don’t Sacrifice Quality for Costs’ Sake

Finally, we come to the big sticking point for many businesses… making sure they are getting the most value for their investment into their technology.

There’s no sugar-coating it: IT solutions can be expensive, particularly if new hardware is required or external resources need to be brought in to provide their particular expertise. Plus, it’s no secret that the ongoing hardware shortages throughout the electronics industry have wreaked havoc with the market. This all makes it key that your business has the means to shave down its costs without also shaving away any quality. Identifying inefficiencies and redundancies is a good first step.

As the best option for Oregon businesses’ IT needs, we’re here to help you accomplish all this and more. Call (503) 278-5011 today to find out how we can assist you with your technology needs to allow your business to excel.