In this day and age, if you’re not using technology to give your business an edge, it’s well past time to consider the advantages of tech. Truth be told, technology should work for you. It should be like a valuable member of your team, contributing to your success, and helping you compete. Review the following checklist to find out if it’s doing that for you. Does your technology support your daily business operations, and provide you with the security you need in our connected world? Here’s how to know for certain:
- Your data is recoverable. Completely. If something happened, whether a natural disaster, a physical theft, or a cyber threat such as ransomware, could you recover your data? Would it be complete? How recent would the backups be? If you’ve answered yes so far, can you also answer yes to this: Are you testing your backups regularly?
- You can recover from a disaster within one hour. If you needed to recover your data, how long would it take?
- Can you confidently say that your system is up and running 99.99% of the time? Whenever you have a downtime, whether it’s planned or unplanned, due to software or hardware, or because of an issue out of your control, you lose money. Your employees lose productivity. You could be losing business, whether it’s e-commerce, or receiving donations as a nonprofit. You don’t want to pay for the cost of downtime when you shouldn’t have to.
- Your on-premise equipment gives you what you need. Whether it’s desktops and laptops, phones, or servers, is your business hardware meeting your needs or is it slow and outdated?
- Your data is secure and monitored 24/7 year round. Dealing with a breach is easier the sooner you catch it. Could you catch it?
- Your system is scalable and flexible to meet the needs of your business. If you experienced rapid growth, could you quickly adjust your technology to meet the changing requirements?
- You only pay for the essentials that your business needs. You don’t have excessive subscriptions to services, or expensive extra hardware like phone systems, because you have services tailored exactly to what you need and use.
- You have a secure connection from anywhere and at anytime. And you can provide that to others, whether they’re at a satellite office or part of a remote workforce.
How did you do? Could you say yes to all eight? If you had any “No’s”, consider working with a team of professionals who can help oversee your IT.