Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

There’s a certain trend you see in professional service firms, and it’s a concerning one. While you might be a law professional with loads of expertise in practicing law, you might be held back by your technology choices. It’s not your fault; it’s just becoming increasingly difficult to remain competitive. If you’re interested in scaling your law firm, protecting your clients, and reclaiming precious lost time, consider these four technologies.

Imagine walking through your office and seeing an employee sitting at their desk, staring at their phone for 45 minutes while on the clock. You would step in and say something immediately, right?

Yet, this is exactly what happens every single day in small businesses across the country. It does not look like doing nothing, it looks like a spinning loading icon, a slow VPN connection, or a redundant data entry task.

In the IT world, hoping your backups work is a recipe for disaster. From a pro perspective, a backup that hasn't been tested is just a pile of useless data. We’ve moved past the days of just saving files to a thumb drive; today, it's about business continuity, making sure a company doesn't go bankrupt because a server died or a hacker got in.

If you want to keep a business alive, you need to know these three points.

For most business owners, the question is no longer if a disruption will happen, but when. Whether it's a natural disaster, a major IT failure, or a security breach, every minute your business is down impacts your reputation, your bottom line, and your ability to serve your customers.

A cybersecurity insurance plan sounds great in theory, but how much is it actually protecting you from potential threats? If you suffer a data breach, your business is going to have to suffer through downtime so it can address the problem, all the while you’re filing claims and hoping that your policy will cover the issue that occurred. What happens when you’re denied your claim, and you’re back to square one?

The idea of an audit might strike fear into your heart, but an IT audit is actually a cause for celebration. You’re finally discovering what needs to be done to improve your business, as well as checking to see whether or not compliance regulations are being met. Today, we want to look at three of the common reasons why a business might fail an IT audit and what you can do to ensure the process is a learning experience that makes your business stronger as a result.

An IT project manager might be the most important cog in the machine that is project implementation, and you want to make the best decision possible for the project’s future. We recommend you look for specific qualities that make for an excellent project manager. 

What are these traits, and how do you find them when they matter most? 

Your business has a choice to make with its IT solutions: reactive or proactive. You might be wasting countless dollars on an IT model that works against your best interests, and worse, you might not even realize it until it’s too late. Today, we want to explore this idea that reactive IT actively hinders your business’ growth and operations—and what you can do about it.

When a team works well together, it feels like magic; but, for a myriad of reasons, collaboration can sometimes go off the rails. It takes a lot of effort to get a team to work in harmony, and it's easy for things to go sideways. Here are four ways your collaboration efforts could be heading for trouble.

When you have a business with employees, things tend to get a whole lot more complicated, especially when tracking time for hourly employees. The sad fact is that some individuals are not going to invest their full effort into making sure they’re following operations and procedures as intended. This can bleed into your bottom line. What are you going to do to stop time theft?

Have you ever been met with resistance when you implement a new IT policy or solution? You’re not alone; countless CIOs and business owners experience this issue any time they go to implement an innovative new tool that can have a significant impact on operations. Here’s how you can have a rock-solid approach to taking the friction out of new IT initiatives for your organization.

Downtime is a serious issue for businesses, sometimes to the point of it being a business killer when it’s left unchecked. But what is downtime, and why is it such a problem? Today, we want to help you understand just that, and we’re doing it by calling on the exact opposite of downtime: uptime.

If you had a choice in the matter, would you take your company’s IT into your own hands? Do you have the time, energy, resources, and expertise to handle it all? Probably not—and in situations like this, it’s better to just let someone else, like a managed service provider, handle this task for you.

Today’s medical field depends on technology, whether it’s the front desk that keeps it all organized or the operating room that powers the procedures and practice. 

IT is central to ensuring people receive the care they need. If any practice’s IT is inoperable, you can bet its patients will feel it in more ways than one.

It’s easy to see all the reasons why you should make data regulations and compliance a priority. After all, you want to ensure you don’t violate the trust and security of your customers, as well as the integrity of your operations. If you make even one mistake, it could spell legal trouble for your business, as well as financial losses and loss of reputation.

Do you have someone on your staff who can handle most IT-related issues for your business? If not, we’re sure your organization feels it in more ways than one. The issues that come from not having IT help are only made more frustrating when it comes time to find IT help—particularly if you’re committed to getting a technician on-premises.

Automation makes sense from an operations standpoint, and people see this despite the many who advocate for scaling back to save jobs. For every task that can be completed, however, less than half can be automated. When you consider all the tasks that a human might be responsible for at their job, that number further dwindles, resulting in surprisingly few jobs that can be fully automated by artificial intelligence. Today, we want to look at reasons why you shouldn’t implement automation for certain tasks and why working with humans is still the right call for many.

After a decade of use, many PC users have grown pretty used to working with Windows 10… as one would expect after 10 years of consistency. However, everyone—business users in particular—needs to upgrade to the next iteration, Windows 11, as soon as possible.

Why? There’s one simple reason…

Downtime is a business killer, and if you’re not actively monitoring your network to keep it to a minimum, you’re doing yourself and your business a disservice. Downtime can be defined as any time when your organization is not operating as it’s supposed to, and it must be controlled at all costs. Otherwise, you’ll run into the following three issues that are difficult to deal with.

Have you looked at the forecast lately? Not the weather forecast… the market forecast. You know, the one that shows that proposed tariffs could impact the market—including hardware costs—as early as February 2025.

You know what that means: it’s time to upgrade or purchase new hardware today before the price hikes make it impossible.