The IT Experts

Financial Records and Tax Information

It’s fun to make money with business, but it’s less fun keeping track of it all.

Your business needs to maintain financial records if it wants to stay profitable. This involves keeping track of expenses such as payroll, hardware and software purchases, operational costs, and so on. If you don’t have these details, then filing your taxes becomes a lot more challenging, and the government is not going to accept a cyberattack or a natural disaster as an excuse for not being able to file.

Therefore, it makes absolute sense that you should prioritize maintenance of your financial records with a data backup.

Employee Information (Personal, Financial, and Health Insurance)

How much valuable data does your business store… particularly in your human resources department?

Employees submit a lot of data to your business just to remain on the payroll, including dates of birth, Social Security numbers, bank routing information, and other important data. A hacker can make great use of this either through their own hacking attacks or selling the data on the black market to the highest bidder. This is one reason why scams and phishing attacks target businesses; they know the value of the data, and your status as a small business doesn’t diminish that value.

Ensure that all data stored for your business is securely backed up and compliant with all relevant regulations.

Client Contact and Financial Records

Your customers trust you with a lot of data—including financial information and contact information.

If your business loses even a little bit of its client data due to a hardware failure or hacking attack, it could be catastrophic. You might end up losing track of services or payments, potential leads or current clients, and financial records that help you get paid for the work you do. It’s frustrating (and silly) to rebuild your client records from the ground up, so take measures to ensure this isn’t necessary.

Furthermore, financial records that are protected and governed by regulations such as PCI mandate that your customer records are backed up, so make sure you’re meeting these requirements… or else.

This is just the beginning, though. We haven’t even mentioned other crucial data, like vendor contact information, stakeholder information, and intellectual property. Your business can lose so much, so make sure that you take measures to protect its data at all costs.

KB Technologies knows how to protect the important assets your business holds dear. To learn more about how to properly back up and protect your data, contact us at (954) 834-2800.

Your Productivity Will Plummet

Downtime is sure to bring your business’ productivity to a grinding halt.

Any time your team cannot access the resources they need to do their jobs, you’re experiencing downtime. This could be the Internet not working, data being inaccessible, or even something as simple as slow hardware or technology hiccups. It all gets in the way of your team performing to your expectations.

And when your team can’t do their work effectively, it reflects in the business as a whole.

Your Reliability Will Take a Hit

If you provide services to your customers, imagine how they feel when they can’t access those services.

You probably don’t have to imagine this feeling because you’ve experienced it yourself in your own life. Think about the anger and frustration you have whenever your Internet goes down at home, or when you try to access Netflix only to have the app spit back an error message. These are the same feelings your customers go through when you experience downtime, and it’s not great for your reputation.

When your reliability suffers, you’ll find it’s harder to both attract new clients and retain those you have.

Your Costs Will Increase

What happens when work isn’t getting done, your customers are getting fed up, and you’re constantly putting out fires?

It’s simple: your costs increase. It’s what happens when you waste time, money, and energy dealing with issues that could easily be prevented with monitoring and contingencies. And if things get really bad, you could be looking at the costs of purchasing hardware–not something you want to do in this economy.

If you want to ensure your business is staying profitable, keeping downtime in check should be a priority, not an afterthought.

Get your downtime under control with network monitoring services from KB Technologies. We can keep tabs on your infrastructure and make sure it’s running as efficiently as possible. Call us at (954) 834-2800 to learn more.

The Telephone System

Let’s get right into it. Typically every business has a telephone system. Whether you have a single phone or you need a solution that provides your team with dedicated numbers over multiple locations, using the telephone is a big part of doing business. With that in mind, your telephone system needs to be able to support the rest of your business’ communicative efforts. 

The traditional telephone service is still around, and even though they’ve had to drastically change their fee structure, they still operate basically the same way. Many businesses have switched over to a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) platform that works through their Internet connection. This allows them to remove one vendor, but they often simply use the VoIP system through their ISP, which doesn’t offer the functionality, scalability, and flexibility of a dedicated hosted VoIP provider that offers some really interesting and innovative features that can really help any organization that has employees that aren’t necessarily at their desk all the time. If you are looking to unify your business communications, a VoIP solution is at the center of the strategy.

Email

Another popular communication platform for any business is email. There’s a lot you can do with your email system. Not only can you typically integrate all of your other mission-critical systems with your email system, you can also easily scale an email system to your needs without much effort. A lot of businesses use productivity suites that offer email with the product. The most popular are Google Workspace (Gmail) and Microsoft 365 (Outlook). This removes the need to host and manage an email server and it works in unison with the other collaboration apps that are offered by the platform, but we’ll get there in a minute. 

Since email is the most targeted system by hackers and scammers, it can be problematic. Today’s email platforms offer a lot of options to help keep unauthorized users out of email accounts. Options like integrated spam and phishing filters, built-in encryption, and two-factor authentication can work to mitigate some threats, there needs to be a strategic training system in place to teach your users how to spot potential scams, as well as systems to test them properly. Email is a great tool that can build some serious efficiency into your processes, but it can also be the conduit outside entities use to breach the walls of your network and wreak havoc on your network and infrastructure. 

Conferencing

For many workers, the fact that you can have a multi-person, multi-location, virtual meeting on your phone is really cool. Younger employees may not find it all that impressive, but for many workers, it’s a technological marvel. With the mobile state of business nowadays, video conferences are part of the normal way of doing business. Like email, many organizations will use the solution that comes with their productivity suite, but you should find the one that has the cost, functionality, and features you require to meet your needs. Not all video conferencing solutions are the same and the ability to integrate your conferencing software with other applications you depend on can really have some value. 

Messaging

Obviously, messaging is a crucial part of person-to-person communications, even if it is considered kind of unprofessional in a lot of business settings. Since so many people don’t always like to answer their phone when they are on the move, however, messaging is an acceptable and practical option; especially for teammates. With so many options out there offering all types of promises about their messaging applications, it’s hard to whittle it down. If your team is depending on text messaging for work purposes, you definitely want to provide them with a platform with one, centrally managed option for their workplace messaging.

This is where you have to make a decision about what interface works best for your business. Do you choose an app that offers end-to-end encryption to keep data secure or do you depend on the option provided by your productivity suite? Many businesses wrestle with messaging, because a lot of times, it is a non-essential feature of your VoIP system, collaboration platform, or productivity suite, but you will be surprised how important some of the information sent in one-off messages can be to your business. 

Collaboration

This brings us, finally, to the collaboration aspect of your digital workplace. Today, there are powerful applications that offer all types of features to improve your organizational management and collaboration. These applications often work with all of your chosen communications to make the process of collaboration that much easier. They offer person-to-person chats as well as custom chat options so that you build a whole system to manage data, access, scheduling, and communications without a lot of hassle. If your team struggles with communication, and it’s holding your business back, a collaboration app can transform your business.

The ability for any team to easily work together without massive headaches will make any business better and software can help that become a reality. Beyond the collaboration app, many of today’s productivity tools offer collaborative options that can speed up turnaround times and make it easier for people to quickly and easily complete tasks that not too long ago would take two or three times as long. 

Mobile

Today, employees need to be able to do anything they can do at their workstation on their smartphone. Developers once struggled with the creation of mobile apps that matched the features of a PC, but since mobile productivity is a priority given the immense amount of people that use smartphones for nearly everything they do, you need to have a plan in place to integrate your users’ favorite device into your business communications strategy. Obviously, it’s a great communications tool as it is the ultimate platform people rely on to call, message, meet, and email one another. 

Getting people to use it for work is worth a try. Many VoIP platforms offer a mobile app that allows users to access their work calls right from their mobile device, adding value to an already robust platform. Aside from that, most business communications apps can be easily deployed on devices. Android offers a whole work profile that admins can use to separate work apps from personal apps, while admins can set up a container on an iPhone that allows them to manage work apps on user devices.

Unifying Communications

You often hear about unified communications (UC) and wonder how it works. Basically, a UC system runs all of the communications platforms you choose for your business through a central application that provides users (and administrators) a way to consolidate communications into one application.  If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you’ve no doubt heard about a password manager, which centralizes all your passwords in one place. Communications are a little more complex than passwords, but it’s the same general principle. 

Not only does a UC system allow users to connect seamlessly across the different platforms of your communications tools, it allows them to quickly switch between them. This makes the whole communications process more efficient and can really enhance the speed of your collaborative efforts. UC platforms also integrate with many CRM or other management applications to make workflows much smoother.

Communications is About People, Not Technology

There are some very basic elements to creating a good communications platform. That is no guarantee that your business will be good at communications, however. It comes down to your employees understanding and using the communications solutions you choose. No matter what tools you choose to deploy, you need to have a thorough training program in place on how to effectively use them. You should always take a little time and train your people on your expectations for communication regardless if you have a single phone line or a completely unified communications system.

If you would like to talk to one of our IT experts about your business’ communications and how you can improve your whole business with these enhanced communications, give the IT professionals at KB Technologies a call about it today at (954) 834-2800.