C3 Blog

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.

Everything you need to do at one office, you now have to do at three or four. You need to coordinate schedules for who is going to be staffed at which location, plan for what hours each office will be open, and keep every location in sync and running smoothly so you can best serve your patients no matter where they are.

On top of it all, rather than make it easier, sometimes technology makes it even harder. Three office locations means three times as many computers, each with their own desktops, software, and peripherals. If a user saves something directly onto their computer, when they use a computer at a different office, they realize they don’t have the file they need. If everyone relies on the server at the main office, when the main office’s power or internet connection goes down, every other office grinds to a halt as well.

While there may be no magic bullet to make everything about running a multi-office practice easy, there is one solution that can solve all these IT frustrations and make technology a huge help rather a hindrance.

If you’re like most small business owners, you’re probably itching to take advantage of all those wonderful benefits of the cloud you’ve been hearing so much about.

Increased productivity. Cost savings. Scalability.

Don’t have the budget for an IT staff? No problem. Outsource your IT support and services to a hosted IT partner.

While having an IT partner that can take care of all your IT needs with cloud services may sound great, don’t dive headfirst into signing up for cloud services without considering the #1 pushback to using the cloud: what if your internet goes down?

Gmail’s popularity among personal email users is certainly well-earned; it’s easy to use, cleanly designed, and rarely goes offline. (Rarely enough, that is, for personal use.) But as popular and useful as Gmail is, it’s not necessarily the best choice when you need a secure small business email system you can rely on to never go down (we've talked before about how the Google Suite isn't always the best solution). Hosted Exchange is a much more reliable alternative.

Hosted Exchange, as its name implies, is an email system hosted for your small business by a trusted IT partner. Email data is stored on a Microsoft Exchange server maintained by your IT partner and “pushed” to your computer and mobile devices over the Internet.

It’s very common for businesses to host their own Microsoft Exchange-based email in their own datacenters. Up until recently, this was the way almost all businesses—large and small—did email. Imagine transplanting those Exchange-based email servers from your business’s facility to a remote datacenter managed and maintained by an IT partner, and you have Hosted Exchange. Hosted Exchange provides all the benefits of a locally-hosted email system, minus the hassle and expense of keeping it running.

Here are some of the many reasons Hosted Exchange is a good fit for small businesses, especially in comparison to web services like Gmail: