Technologies that Small Businesses Should Be Using

As time passes and technology is developed, a lot of the processes that businesses rely on become more efficient and stand to deliver greater benefits to the organizations that use them. These benefits are accessible to businesses of all sizes, including small businesses. Let’s go over a few small business needs, and how technology can assist with them.

Communication

The capability to share information and collaborate with others is crucial to a business’ processes and its overall success. Reflecting on this, it only makes sense that there are more solutions available to small businesses that ever before with this exact goal to motivate them:

• VoIP – As an alternative, cost-effective means of telephony, a Voice over Internet Protocol solution can provide a business with top-tier phone services and features that promote both client contact and internal networking.
• Messaging – From email to short-form communication methods (like instant messages), messaging solutions are the cornerstone of a business’ capability to interact both within itself and with external parties.
• Cloud collaboration – As just one of many applications that cloud technology can be used for, sharing documents and working cooperatively on them is another important facet of a business’ communications.

Security

All aspects of a business’ security, from data protection to infrastructural resilience to unwanted access, are as important to companies and organizations as they ever have been. In order to resist the growing number of threats out there, more means of maintaining this security are now available:

• Access management – Applicable to both your information and your infrastructure, restricting access to resources is one of the central goals of any business’ security strategy. With assorted solutions to see to both, small businesses aren’t left vulnerable due to their size.
• Password management – If users are being appropriately diligent in their password hygiene, they will have a great variety that they are supposed to remember. This can be difficult (which in of itself discourages poor password hygiene) but using a password management solution can help alleviate this difficulty.
• Firewall and antivirus – Why worry about a huge percentage of the threats out there if there are solutions that can be implemented and prevent them? Putting these measures in place and maintaining them over time can eliminate a great many of these threats.

Productivity

As the underlying goal of anything a business does, it may be assumed that any modern solution is (at least indirectly) meant to enable a team to be more productive. However, this standard is much more apparent in some solutions, as compared to others:

• Cloud storage and applications – Returning to the cloud, cloud solutions are available to give your employees access to the data and tools they will need to work productively, even as a part of a remote workforce strategy.
• Remote access – If you prefer to keep your resources on-site to monitor them more closely, remote access tools can still give your team the ability to work productively from home if need be, from a variety of devices.
• Automation – It stands to reason that the fewer steps to a process an employee must worry about, the faster they will be able to accomplish their responsibilities. Automating parts of your processes can help boost efficiency while reducing human error.

As a managed service provider, One Up Solutions Northwest is here to help your business adopt and utilize various technology solutions to resolve your business’ challenges and problems. Give us a call at (503) 278-5011 to find out what we can provide for your benefit today!