The New Year. It’s a time for reflection and preparation: taking stock of what your business has achieved, what you’d like to do better, and making plans for how to move forward.
As you set your company goals for the year, you’ll undoubtedly think about the technology your business uses every day. After all, every company is a technology company in the modern world. Websites, digital services, applications and the cloud are the backbone of employee collaboration and customer relationships.
In fact, when used strategically, technology can catapult your business forward – helping you discover new efficiencies, leapfrog competitors and build better customer communications.
So, what do you need to do to unleash the potential of technology in your organisation in 2022? Discover our must-know resolutions below.
1. Backup – The Cloud Way!
Scalability is a common challenge for small and medium-sized businesses. As your business expands, you need infrastructure that can grow with you – at your pace and at a sensible cost. This is where cloud computing becomes vital.
Cloud storage and backup are fantastic ways to support your infrastructure needs when used correctly. It works seamlessly, backing up your data anywhere and in real-time. Most cloud solutions also offer flexible, pay-as-you-go options, so you can find a model that’s the right price for you.
The only thing to be wary of with the cloud is misconfigurations. Gartner predicts that, by 2025, 99% of cloud data breaches will be the customer’s fault. When you embrace the cloud, you need to ensure that you’ve got your permissions and access controls set to the highest standard.
2. Embrace Outsourcing
We only need to look at the last ten years to see how much technology has changed the world.
In this fast-paced environment, it’s a case of adapting or being left behind. However, all this adaption and development puts strain on SMB’s in-house IT staff. They can find themselves overwhelmed by an endless number of support requests and calls, leaving them little time to focus on innovation.
Moreover, some SMBs don’t have the capacity to employ a full-time IT department, making it challenging to stay ahead of the curve and ensure adequate cyber security. For these reasons, we encourage you to consider outsourcing some – or all – of your IT function in 2022.
A great IT outsourcing provider will act as an invisible member of your IT team, offering 24/7, proactive support so issues are fixed as they arise. We advise looking for a provider that offers a flat monthly fee to give you predictability in your IT spending.
3. Be Prepared for Whatever Comes Next
The last two years has taught businesses across the world a big lesson. You just never know what’s going to come next. Be it a pandemic, a flood or a cyber-attack, a disruption could be just around the corner.
It’s difficult to prepare for the unknown, but it is possible to boost your company’s resilience. This is where business continuity and incident response come into play. These two terms refer to plans that you can put in place to help you respond to an unexpected incident. Your plan should consider factors like backups, disaster recovery and data protection.
4. Update Your Passwords
Verizon found that over 81% of breaches in 2020 used stolen or weak passwords. Having easy to guess passwords like “password” or re-using the same password for multiple accounts increases the chances of your company being breached.
Many SMBs make the mistake of thinking that they’ll go unnoticed by cybercriminals. But this isn’t true. These days, most businesses access sensitive data – and any amount of such data is attractive to cybercriminals.
To defend against the threat of password compromise, you should put stringent password policies in place. We advise enforcing strict password controls that ensure employees use a mix of characters, special characters and numbers. It would be best if you also mandated employees to change their passwords regularly – and they should have a unique password for each of their accounts.
Of course, we appreciate that all these passwords can be tricky to keep track of. This is why many businesses turn to password managers, which help employees keep track of all their logins.
Move Into 2022 With Confidence!
Connected Platforms provides IT support for Brisbane businesses trust and rely on. We offer high quality managed IT services that will keep you prepared and productive.
Are you needing a cyber security or IT Audit for your business? Please have a chat with our team! Call us today on 1300 866 096 or get in touch online for a free assessment!
