The general saying these days is that the economy is in a bad shape, things are tight and it is becoming increasingly difficult to make payroll. For small business owners, this is evident in the rate at which employees are being laid off, or having their hours reduced. The danger in all this is that cost cutting may be taken to such an extreme level that it is bound to affect productivity in the long run. I remember working very hard to convince a friend of mine to be careful about laying off too many good employees. “Why?” he asked, and my response was, what are you going to do if the work starts coming in and you do not have experienced people to get it out the door efficiently and profitably?
Small Business
Benefits of Using Managed Services
The rapid growth in online commerce and the way we interact has great significance for small business owners since it affects our ability to collaborate online, work remotely and engage in transactions with several parties even on a global scale. The underlying glue that makes all this work however, is confidence. We are able to do all the wonderful things with technology because we allowed ourselves to believe that our information will be protected and that the risks of foul play are minimized.
This expansion in connectivity creates new opportunities for businesses of all sizes, but especially for small business owners. At the same time, the new frontiers bring along a new set of vulnerabilities and threats like phishing, pharming, identity theft, data leakage and unmanaged endpoints. Recent research shows that about 63 percent of businesses are going to experience some form of information loss and regulatory breach which will lead to damage to reputation and loss of revenue, partners and customers.
Small businesses have to find ways to maximize current technologies and must do so in a cost effective manner. As is often the case, many small businesses have little Information Technology experience and cannot afford to maintain a full-time IT department because it is just too expensive, time-consuming and in many instances flat-out inefficient.
Understanding Windows Permissions
Microsoft Windows is arguably the most widely used server system for small businesses. In terms of file storage, most small business environments use Windows. In this article, we will explore how Windows implements permissions on file systems. To safeguard against data theft, it is important that small business owners have an idea or understanding of … Read more
Automation and Small Business Owners
Small business owners are usually forced by budget constraints to do every thing they can to save cost. In order to save on software licensing costs,for example, a small business owner may install the free version of a critical application like a firewall or anti-virus on the business computers. The task of updating these applications then falls on each user to run periodic system scans and updates.
One thing that is not common in small business environments is process automation. Most processes are manually carried out. What we have to realize is that as hard as we try, at some point, somebody forgets to run a system scan or the backup program. Occasionally, someone could accidentally turn off or stop a backup application before the process is completed.
Why Small Business Server?
In most of my blog posts and business consultations, I do not hide the fact that I encourage small business owners to consider the offerings from Open Source vendors over the solutions provided by proprietary products from Microsoft etc. However, I am also a realist and recognize that there are just a group of business … Read more