Small Businesses Should Be Using These 5 IT Tools

Information technology offers businesses of all sizes significant benefits, very much including small and medium-sized organizations. Let’s go through five modern tools that offer this kind of inclusive utility to the point that we see them as essential for successful business operations today.

Data Backup

Your business’ data is your most valuable asset. This data offers your business essential functionality and utility that simply could not be replicated to scale if it were lost. Therefore, we always recommend that businesses prioritize their disaster recovery planning, including a robust and frequently updated data backup of their entire infrastructure.

Modern data backups are not only more accessible to businesses of every size (largely thanks to another item on this list), they are also far simpler to manage and more effective for it. We recommend that any backups you implement follow what is known as the 3-2-1 Backup Rule: at least three copies of your data should exist, in at least two locations, at least one of which being offsite and cut off from your infrastructure.

Cybersecurity

Did you know that there were over an estimated 30 billion known records breached in Q1 of this year? That’s an insanely high number, especially when Q4 of 2023 saw a tenth of that total.

A data breach isn’t something that a small or even medium-sized organization can just shrug off. First off, there’s the fact that data has presumably been stolen while it was under your care. This alone is sure to impact your business’ reputation… then there’s all the regulatory consequences you might face, the cost of identifying and resolving the vulnerability after the fact, and ensuring that no further trace of any threat exists. In short, you need to do everything you can to prevent these breaches, monitoring your infrastructure to keep watch for any indication of something going wrong.

VoIP Communications

Any business can benefit from saving some costs, and Voice over Internet Protocol telephony is a great means of doing so. Modern telephone systems can operate entirely off the Internet, adding significant utility, accessibility, and value to your business’ phone. With exception to some initial equipment investments (which are largely up to your discretion), the only real cost to VoIP is the price of your Internet service… which you’re already paying anyway.

That’s right… VoIP allows you to take advantage of a more capable phone system, offering more features and accessibility, for less money than a conventional phone line. 

SMBs should be paying attention to opportunities like this.

Cloud

Speaking of cost savings, there’s another significant expense that SMBs now have the opportunity to avoid with the help of technology: data storage.

Storage space is expensive. Not only does the server infrastructure itself cost a lot to procure, powering it isn’t exactly cheap… plus, it takes up a significant amount of space that could potentially be used in other ways that might contribute to your business’ monetization. Traditional filing cabinets are worse, as there’s a much more finite limit on the space you have to keep data, and it’s even harder to keep a backup of this kind of data.

By utilizing the shared storage space of the cloud, however, you can eliminate the need for bulky cabinets or large, expensive server infrastructure in your office… and this is just the start of what the cloud can help you accomplish. The cloud also allows you a variety of other utilities that make doing business easier and more accessible, as well.

Managed IT

Finally, small and medium-sized businesses are just as reliant on technology as the big businesses are. The only real difference is the fact that the big businesses can much more easily afford to maintain internal teams to keep all their technology functioning.

This doesn’t mean that SMBs have to go without, however. Managed IT services exist to help businesses of all sizes keep their technology working for them and their needs. Monitoring a business’ infrastructure can reveal issues that, if left unresolved, could lead to security or operational issues. Plus, a business’ team can always use a resource to turn to for support and assistance with the everyday technical issues they might experience.

As a Managed Service Provider, We Can Deliver All of the Above…and More!

Directive has helped many businesses around Upstate New York fulfill their IT needs, and we’d love to help your organization as well.

Give us a call at 607.433.2200 to get started.