MSPNetworks Blog

Technology has come a long way, but so too have the threats which leverage it to their advantage. How have the cyberthreats which target your organization evolved over time, and what can you do to protect yourself?

There Are More Risks Today Than Ever Before

Modern tools such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and the cloud give businesses more options to get their work done, but they also represent additional avenues for hackers to attack. Automation can improve your work processes, for example, but it can also make it easy for phishing attacks and other types of threats to infiltrate your network.

This type of advancement means you need to take action. Here are three questions your organization must consider for its continued security and success.

Consider These Three Questions

Let’s examine some of the first questions you should consider for your business’ cybersecurity:

1. Are the security measures we have in place now enough to protect us from developing threats and risks?
2. Are we putting sufficient time into training our employees to be a security asset, rather than a source of vulnerability?
3. Are we preparing ourselves for the threats that will develop thanks to emerging platforms and new technologies?

What Else Should You Consider?

Furthermore, we have some other considerations your organization should look at to keep your technology safe.

Improve the Way You Seek Out Malware

There will always be the types of threats that are in your face and ready to demand a ransom, but more often than not, malware will sneak around in the background and mimic a legitimate user’s technology habits. You have several ways to combat this, such as automated security solutions and increasing your employees’ security awareness.

There Are More Threat Surfaces to Protect

More technology means better processes (when implemented correctly), but it can also mean more vulnerabilities to threats. Businesses need to take stock of their current risk management strategies to ensure that they are effective, even when implementing new technology, without making your systems too complex or hard to manage.

Improve Awareness at All Levels

Your IT department will likely handle most of the cybersecurity issues with your business, but awareness and adoption starts from the top down. If you don’t take security seriously, nobody else will. Now is the time to make security a priority by showing your team just how important it is.

Let’s Work Together to Protect Your Business

As managed IT providers, we work to protect our clients from the many current and emerging threats out there. By making things as easy as possible for businesses like yours to protect themselves from cyberthreats, we give you the power to take back your workday and focus on profits and more efficiently running your business.

To learn more about how we can help you make this vision a reality, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

Manufacturing products is still a major part of the western economies; and, like other businesses, manufacturers are using information technology to fuel and manage their supply chains and business processes. We’ll take a short look at what IT manufacturers use, and how it helps them forge their business ahead.

The Production Labyrinth

The process of creating products can be quite the maze. If you make the right decisions, operations can go smoothly, but if you take the wrong turns, you could be facing a no-win situation. The use of IT can help navigate the modern manufacturer to a successful end more than it will lead them nowhere, but they need to know where to start.

For the modern manufacturer, IT begins as the supply chain starts, during the process of procurement. In order to produce the product, you plan to sell, you need to procure the resources needed to make that product. Since all these resources tend to come from separate places, and are often made by other manufacturers, getting the resources you need to keep production moving consistently is important for the effectiveness of the operation.

The most cost intensive part of running any manufacturer is the actual production end... largely because of the capital costs of purchasing the machinery needed to manufacture goods coupled with the operational costs (payroll and downtime caused by machinery malfunction and the subsequent maintenance required) add up. As a result, most manufacturers are looking to mitigate wasting capital by instituting some type of IT. With IT comes automation. Enhancements in automation make it possible for businesses to cut their production costs, making them more predictable, and creating a state of efficiency.

Distribution of the finished product is the final step for a manufacturer. If costs in this part of the business get too high, it can put a definite squeeze on the potential of the business and create major problems in its ability to offer products at a low-enough price point where retail businesses and other customers will continue to purchase their products.

Where IT Fits

Fortunately for the small to medium-sized manufacturers, there are now problem-solving technology solutions that can reduce downtime, enhance efficiency, and promote revenue growth. A few of these technologies include:

• Asset Tracking - Using sensors, every product and resource can be tracked to provide efficiency.
• Customer Relationship Management - This software helps a company streamline their customer service. It’s used to manage leads, opportunities, and customers.
• Inventory Management - Manages stock and standardizes and allows for automation in the act of replenishment.
• Supply Chain Management - This software helps a company control their entire supply chain from procurement to distribution.

Enterprise Resource Planning

Each of the processes can be implemented on its own and be of great benefit for the modern manufacturer. If you are looking for an all-in-one solution for your manufacturer’s management, there is a software called Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). An ERP solution allows for each division of a manufacturer to be managed by one single piece of software that not only works to automate parts of the business, it also allows administrators from different departments to know exactly what to expect. Outfitting your organization with an ERP promotes overall business efficiency, getting your products to market faster, creating better revenue generation and enhancing customer satisfaction.

If you are searching for a way to make your manufacturing business more effective at getting products to market, MSPNetworks has some options for you. Call our professional consultants today at (516) 403-9001 to learn more about how an ERP solution can improve your business.

For the small business, being more efficient with resources can make a massive difference. In fact, it can be the difference between organizational sustainability and organizational failure. The bottom line is that, no matter how big or small they are, today’s businesses need to be smarter to compete. As a result, some businesses have begun to utilize data management platforms (DMP) in order to put themselves in a better position to understand their business, their market, and their customers. Let’s take a look at the DMP, and how it works to help businesses like yours be more effective.

Data Management
The first thing you have to understand about data management is that your business creates and receives a lot of data that it can use. The first problem that you’ll see when attempting to set up comprehensive data management is that your data is likely strewn about around your network. There is data on your old servers, on your new servers, in the cloud, and on disks that all could be used to provide you the best look at your business.

To manage this properly, you’ll first want to identify your storage needs. If you can centralize your storage simply, without incurring too much additional cost, you’ll want to try to do that. If you are worried that you will struggle to find the right data storage solutions, or you need help ascertaining where all your data is, you may want to contact an IT professional like MSPNetworks to help you ascertain your options. Either way, once your data is in one place, this more inclusive data management system will allow you to do a lot more.

Data Warehouse
In order to take advantage of a dynamic new business intelligence (BI) platform, or if you are looking to do some high-end business analysis (BA), you will want to consider setting up a data warehouse. The data warehouse is a centralized database that is used by business intelligence software and data analytics software to gain access to all types of departmental data. By warehousing your data, you can then utilize all types of innovative software to crawl the standing data. This is where BI and BA come in.

What is BI and BA?
It is important that you understand that these two terms are not synonymous. In fact, there is a pretty big difference between the two. Business analysis, or BA, is the act and practices a company goes through to to define why the strategies and processes that have been utilized by the company are performing the way they are. If adjustments are required, the business analyst will identify inefficiencies or ineffectiveness and use the data to help predict an outcome and suggest solutions to help an organization optimize that outcome.

Business Intelligence, while also using your organization’s data, looks into what your company is doing and how it is doing it, rather than why the results are the way they are. BI is the act of choosing certain metrics to mine for, and then using all the available data to ascertain how they go about getting the results they do. In this way BI, is a practice that provides answers using data from past and current business performance, rather than potential performance found with a BA approach.

Backup
No matter how you want to forge your organization’s data management plan, we recommend that you have a comprehensive backup and recovery strategy in place. We offer the BDR service, which incrementally backs up files with periodic changes in two places (locally and in the cloud) so that, in the case of a major data loss disaster, you have fast, reliable access to your data.

If you haven’t started utilizing your company’s data to learn more about your business, consider reaching out to one of MSPNetworks’s professional IT consultants. We can provide you with a more detailed description of data management tools, backup, and recovery; and, how they can work to help you build a better business. Call us today at (516) 403-9001.

If you look around your company, there’s a good chance that it has a lot of technology that you completely take for granted. No matter if you run a small retail store, a factory, or a multi-location office, your business needs IT to function properly. Today, we will take a look into several ways your organization can use technology to improve your business.

Customer Service
The relationships you forge with your customers are some of the most rewarding you will build in business; and, unmistakably the most crucial. When businesses fail to support the products and services that they sell, they have a much harder time sustaining positive consumer relationships. There are plenty of technologies that can help a business improve customer service. One such technology is customer relationship management software. Not only does it provide a ticketing system to get customer complaints and concerns in front of decision makers, it also provides several options to help manage support work.

Today, companies are routinely utilizing social media, including social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter to engage with their customers. These platforms in particular give the business the chance to promote their knowledge base, their products, and also hold a public conversation about their products and services. While this may not always work out in the business’ favor, it has proven to be a great outlet for businesses looking to engage in substantive conversations with customers and prospects.

Productivity
In order to be a successful business, revenue needs to flow; and, in order for that to happen productivity has to commence. No matter what your businesses, some value has to be created for you to be doing what you are doing. As a result, companies are looking to make investments in technology that will help build their revenue streams. That’s why you see many of today’s businesses, regardless of their industry or size, using technology to facilitate a boost to their organizational productivity.

One solution that is very useful for any service business is time-tracking software. Typically, this comes as a part of a scheduling solution. Software like this allows managers to assign time for certain tasks, while being able to review how long projects and service delivery takes, providing a way to best monetize the time their employees spend and streamline work processes.

Moreover, many of today’s most useful technology-based solutions for productivity are filled with collaborative options and hosted in the cloud. In utilizing cloud-hosted software solutions, companies are giving their employees the flexibility to do more. Cloud-hosted apps typically are available on any device and are scalable to ensure that the company isn’t paying more than it needs to for the productivity solutions they need.

Finance
It would be an understatement to say that money is a major consideration when it comes to business. Decisions are made every day with the bottom line the major consideration. Technology solutions can help small business owners better manage their finances. They can utilize online invoicing services to help them collect payment and reduce expenses.

The use of software to manage payroll and accounts receivable not only makes those inherently frustrating tasks much easier, they allow them to be handled with care. These are, after all, crucial aspects of your organization’s ability to conduct business. By having software solutions that provide the ability to streamline your organization’s revenue streams and expenses, business simply runs better.

Security
Let’s face it, security is crucial to the sustainability of every single business. Whether it is network security or physical security, if people are free to do other people harm with impunity, there is total chaos. With solutions that include antivirus, firewall, content filtering, and spam blocking, technology can keep the business’ IT safe.

On the other end of things, IT-fueled physical security is a big hit with organizations of all types. With digital cameras, biometric security locks, and more solutions keeping a constant eye (or eyes) out, you can ensure that your workplace, your employees, and your assets are properly protected.

Nowadays, organizations also have to worry about their wireless networks and mobile access. Today there are plenty of solutions aimed at enhancing your business’ mobility, while keeping the increased amount of enemies out of your business’ network and infrastructure.

Growth in the use of technology has been leading the way for quite some time, and, with all the new solutions on the market, this trend doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. Call the technology professionals at MSPNetworks at (516) 403-9001 to talk about getting an assessment to see how you can improve your business through technology.