Is Office 365, Microsoft’s subscription-based Office suite, right for your business? The price is right, but are there any drawbacks? For some businesses, especially those in high-compliance industries like healthcare and finance, Office 365 has shortcomings.
Topics: cloud computing, office 365
If your company is thinking about moving to “the cloud,” there are TONS of options out there. Say you know about the benefits of hosting your IT in the cloud. Now, the hard part—deciding which hosting company to trust with your data, your business’s most important asset. This post covers a few key things to look out for.
One of the hardest parts of moving your business's IT to the cloud is choosing a cloud services provider. How can you decide who to trust with your business's data? Whether this decision is made by an in-house IT director, or a business owner or CFO, the cloud is still new to most businesses and it's hard to know what questions to ask.
These 7 questions go beyond the questions you're probably asking already: What kind of reliability can I expect? How quickly can I expect resolution if there's a problem?. Most cloud providers will be able to give good, truthful answers to those basic questions. Instead, these questions are designed to give you a clearer picture of your data's security. We've also included the red flags to look out for.
Topics: security, cloud computing, cloud services
We’ve all heard the statistics saying that up to 50% of small businesses don’t reopen following a disaster. So, you know how important it is for your business to develop an emergency preparedness program to protect your business and your employees, and to reduce the financial impact of a disaster.
The Small Business Administration has lots of resources to help small businesses prepare for a disaster: http://www.sba.gov/content/disaster-preparedness . Being prepared for a disaster means having a business continuity plan—laying out which mission-critical systems need to be up and running in which order, how employees are going to access those systems, and a timeline for getting back to full capacity.
Last week, we discussed how healthcare providers can improve EHR software performance by making sure you are supporting it with a strong Internet connection and solid hosting. What we didn’t discuss is, what if your hosting provider is unable to provide you with the resources you need for your EHR to run smoothly?
One of the most exciting and useful innovations to come out of the cloud computing revolution is the hosted desktop. Hosted desktops are challenging the idea that every employee needs a fully loaded PC workstation and upending the traditional IT paradigm.
Imagine it’s 11am, everything is humming along at your office when suddenly your network stops working. You can’t get your email to work or access any of your shared files. The server hosting most of your software applications and client files has gone down. No one is able to access them and all work, and your business, grinds to a halt.
What you do next and whether or not you prepared beforehand can mean the difference between a relatively quick fix, or actually losing all that data. While this scenario may be imaginary, the reality of the dangers of data loss is not. Studies show that 70% of small businesses that suffer a major data loss will be out of business within a year.
Technology refreshes are a critical part of staying current and competitive and a key responsibility of any IT department. Traditionally, every three to five years (or two to three for some devices), office hardware is swapped out for newer versions, while software and operating systems replacement schedules vary.
These days, an IT refresh usually means moving applications to the cloud, as more and more businesses adopt cloud-based models for their technology needs. Rather than purchasing new desktop computers in a refresh, more and more businesses are replacing them with hosted desktops.
If you run a small business, you know that you need to cut costs everywhere you can. With software costs adding up from your ERP to your CRM, software is an appealing place to cut the fat. Why pay more for software you can get for free online?
A common mistake of small business owners is assuming that they can “get away with” a free version of antivirus software, like Avast or a free trial of Nortan Antivirus. These are big brand names, so they should do just fine right?
Not so fast.
Medical practices rely on their EHR software for most key day-to-day operations, and nothing is more frustrating then when that software isn’t running smoothly. Performance issues affect everyone, so when it takes five, ten, fifteen seconds to do anything, even just enter notes, something must be done.
The 2014 Technology Survey by Physicians Practice shows that a little over 40% of practices are either dissatisfied or unsure/”in the middle” with their selection of EHR vendor. Other recent surveys, including several by Black Book, indicate that around one quarter of practices are so dissatisfied with their EHR that they are considering making a change.