One Up Solutions Northwest Blog

How often does your business find that it’s struggling with new technology implementation, either on the software side of the house or on the hardware side? Have you considered that the cloud provides powerful solutions to your business’ woes in the form of virtualization? With the right resources at your disposal, you can use virtualization to create incredible opportunities to improve operations for your business and make it more secure and flexible in the process.

The cloud has become a go-to resource when businesses are trying to find and consistently depend on digital tools that otherwise would be out of their price range. One cloud issue that isn’t often mentioned in the course of choosing computing resources is cloud waste. Cloud waste refers to the inefficient or unnecessary consumption of cloud computing resources, leading to higher costs without delivering corresponding value. This month, we will look at some of the impacts of cloud waste and how to avoid it as much as possible. 

The modern workplace wouldn’t exist as it does without the advent of wireless Internet or Wi-Fi. Understanding how your wireless router works can be incredibly helpful for any business owner, and it can help you get even more out of your wireless connection. Today, we want to share some information about wireless routers that can help you use them more effectively.

There’s no denying that running a successful business comes with its fair share of costs, and many would argue that some of these costs are anything but fair. As such, it makes sense to try and minimize your operating expenses by any sustainable means. Let’s go over one such cost-saving measure you can implement—Bring Your Own Device policies—and address how to do so without shortchanging your business’ security in the process.

We spend a lot of time working with the technology that businesses rely on, including the laptop workstations used by just about everyone in many organizations today. As such, we wanted to share some of our insights so that you know what qualities you should look for when you’re ready to acquire some additional devices for your business.

The keyboard that you may very well have used to access this blog is, in a word, gross. While we aren’t going to go into too much detail about what makes keyboards so grimy, we did want to outline how you can easily clean up your keyboard every so often, just to make sure that it’s A: more hygienic, and B: less likely to malfunction at some point.

Even though the modern workplace tends to be PC-centric, Apple has had a major impact on technology and computing. It’s undeniable that Apple is pretty consistent with producing sleek, high-end hardware and efficient operating systems. Apple’s former CEO, Steve Jobs, was known to be a visionary and a perfectionist. That’s what makes this story even weirder.

While we typically focus on how various technologies can be used in business applications as a way to boost a small or medium-sized organization’s capabilities, we occasionally come across a topic that is just undeniably cool (and that we can bring back around to business concerns, to boot). We recently heard about the development of a flexible new wearable that uses AI to monitor the health of the wearer that we wanted to discuss with you.

In all aspects of society, upgrades and updates have become part of life. For instance, consider how often you’re prompted to update your software—and how often some people may ignore these prompts, assuming that everything will be just fine.

As you might imagine, this is not the mindset that will allow your business to advance. Instead, it’s important that you can identify when your technology is no longer helping and is instead holding you back so that you can implement that which will help your business advance.

With businesses actively searching for ways to cut costs in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, one place a lot of businesses are considering cutting is their printing initiatives. Today, there are several new solutions that can provide businesses options without having to rely on printed materials. If your business is one that cannot, however, you should know just how much your printer is costing your business. In today’s blog, we’ll review how you can calculate this investment.

The server is the heart and brain of a business’ computing infrastructure. So much so that a failure can cause catastrophic effects on your business. If you are at a point where you are thinking about adding a server to your infrastructure, or replacing one that is a little long in the tooth, you now have less of a dilemma than you may have had previously. This doesn’t mean that it is not a serious decision, but today you have options on how you want to go about deploying your new server. This month, we thought we would go over some of the pros and cons that come with adding new infrastructure and whether purchasing a new server outright is the right decision for your business.

Businesses often struggle with the hardware side of running a business, whether it is finding the right solutions or taking care of them. Hardware like server units, workstations, and networking components are what keep your business functioning, and without it, you don’t have much of a business. How can you make sure that your organization is addressing this important aspect of running a business? How can you keep hardware from breaking your budget? We recommend starting with a network audit.

Today’s technology provides businesses with more options than they’ve ever had, including where they want to host their critical infrastructures. This decision will often boil down to between an onsite hardware implementation or utilizing the cloud. Let’s consider the differences that your decision needs to reflect.

As your employees go about their workdays, it is important that they do so with the resources they’ll need to remain optimally productive… and that these resources are in the best condition for them to do so. While this is often an overlooked consideration, this means that their computer needs to be clean and fully functional. Let’s go over a few best practices to follow when it comes to keeping a workstation clean enough to work optimally.

How many times have you gone to the store and bought something that you already had? Unfortunately, this happens all the time, but fortunately it’s usually a half gallon of milk or a loaf of bread. When it happens in your business, it can be much more expensive. Today, we will advocate for an inventory strategy that will keep you from spending wads of cash on redundant investments. 

For the individual, it is exciting when you open the box that your new computer comes in. For a business, however, it can cause a bunch of problems. Sure, a hardware refresh can be an exciting time for a business, especially if it has been necessary for a while. One problem, however, is that some new hardware comes with unwanted software. Let’s take a look at what we mean.

Small Businesses don’t always have the computing or financial resources--or the need--to purchase a server. Lots of small companies will have a few workstations connected together through a wired or wireless Local Area Network (LAN), but when your business gets to a point where it needs more effective means of collaboration, running that LAN through a server can produce quite a few benefits. Today, we will look at why a server-based LAN is an improvement and what your company’s server options are.