Tip of the Week: Optimizing Your Business’ Technology in Three Ways

 Businesses cannot run without technology. This relationship has only grown more complicated and complex over time, and with so many businesses depending on their technology in ways never before seen, you’ll have to understand just how great of an impact your technology has on the way your organization runs. Here are three ways you can implement the right tools to see increased success.

Invest in Mobility

Businesses are not confined to the office the way they used to be. Any place can become your office with the right mobile technology solutions. Depending on the circumstances, you might encounter times when it is actually preferable to work in one location over another, like if you are sick with a viral disease. Naturally, it makes sense that you should take steps toward providing everyone with the tools they need in a mobile-friendly environment like the cloud.

Be Intentional with Your Network Design

Hardwired networks do provide benefits, but again, so too does a Wi-Fi connection. In order to get the most value out of your Internet connection, you’ll have to be strategic with which devices use your hardwired connection versus your wireless connection. How far will your wireless travel, and which devices need to maintain constant uptime with little room for error? Focusing on these issues now will save you a lot of time when you have to reexamine your infrastructure later on, after your business has grown a bit.

Accept Help from Experts

Chances are that even with an internal IT department, there is plenty of work to go around. An internal department might even be overwhelmed or overworked to get everything done, leading to, well, things just not getting done. Considering the plethora of tasks that must be accomplished, ranging from monitoring a network, securing it, providing assistance to your staff, and implementing new solutions, it’s no wonder that even a dedicated IT department could get burnt out or overlook tasks.

Instead of overworking your staff, you can instead turn to Net It On, LLC and outsource some of these responsibilities, making everyone’s lives easier. In fact, an MSP can be just as effective as an internal IT department, particularly if you don’t have an internal team to supplement. Regardless, however, we are sure that your business can benefit from having more IT professionals around.

The Evolution of Internet Speeds

 With the Internet cementing itself as one of the best tools to get work done, it’s easy to forget just how sluggish it used to be back when it first became available for use. Internet speeds have undergone some dramatic shifts over the years, so let’s remember the good old days when it took ages to do just about anything with it.

Internet speeds are measured in megabits. 1,000 kilobits (technically 1,024 KB) is equivalent to 1 megabit and 1,000 megabits (technically 1,024 MB) is equivalent to 1 gigabit. Keep these numbers in mind as we discuss Internet speeds and their development over the years.

Dial Up

Can you believe that it’s only been about 25 years since the Internet became widely accessible in offices and homes? It was first introduced to the mass market through the use of dial up Internet, which used the phone line to connect. In the 1990s, people would have one telephone line for both the telephone and the computer. If an individual wanted to connect to the Internet, they would be charged for long distance—even if the “call” was to the next village or city over.

Around 2000, the average modem was 56 KB/s with an uninterrupted signal. A one-megabyte image would take about 20 seconds to download. This snail’s-pace speed by today’s standards was enough to make instant messaging and email possible, but other media-based activities would take days or weeks to transmit across the connection.

DSL

“High-speed” Internet became popular as we moved into the 2000s. DSL, or Digital Subscriber Line, utilized cable connections, allowing ISPs to transmit data at much faster speeds compared to dial up. The bandwidth of a cable was able to transfer much more data compared to the traditional telephone wire. In fact, DSL was so revolutionary that it still makes up the vast majority of connections you’ll find out there. A DSL connection is capable of delivering speeds of up to 100 MB/s, but realistically, it is more likely to be around the 5 MB-to-20 MB/s range.

This large increase in speed allows for much more in terms of the work you can do. Cloud-hosted email, for example, can be utilized with these speeds, along with music streaming and website browsing. Around 2010, when DSL became widely available, there was a huge burst of application development utilizing the speeds—a new trend which is still happening to this day. Even video streaming, in the grand scheme of things, is quite new, but it wouldn’t have been possible without the inception of DSL connections.

Fiber Optic

Of course, there is also the fiber optic cable option, which is what many of today’s fastest Internet speeds utilize. Fiber optic uses light to transmit data, and is therefore much faster than DSL connections. DSL cable systems lose speed and performance the farther the signal must go, but with fiber optic, Internet speeds and bandwidth are exponentially better. Fiber optic is capable of speeds of up to tens of gigabits per second. Absolutely wild stuff.

Mobile computing has only further changed this fact, as people rely more on Wi-Fi signals than ever before. Otherwise people would be exceeding their data caps more frequently. Fiber has given people access to much faster connections—connections that systems and businesses rely on to function. It’s made working from home easier and more efficient, online schooling and telehealth more accessible, real-time data collection much simpler, and communication and collaboration more reliable.

If you’re curious about your current Internet speeds (and you should be), you can use free Internet speed test applications, like the one found at https://www.speedtest.net/. This should give you a decent enough look at your Internet speed

You Can’t Outsource Everything: 3 Parts of Your Business that Need to Remain In-House

 Businesses today have more options than ever before for their needs. With so many vendors available outside your typical in-house office environment, you can get most of the services you need via outsourcing. That said, there are certain processes you shouldn’t outsource, even if you think it might be a good idea.

Administration

You shouldn’t be outsourcing the jobs of people who run the company, and we can say this with confidence for a couple of reasons. For one, why should employees follow the vision of someone who doesn’t even work in your office? Furthermore, what real vested interest do third-party administrators have in your success? Outsourcing project implementation is one thing, but outsourcing the administrative infrastructure of your business is another entirely, and not a good idea.

Onboarding and Offboarding

Some businesses outsource their human resources functions, which is perfectly reasonable, as there can be a lot of value from doing so. That said, you shouldn’t have all of the functions of a human resources team be handled by a third party. You’ll want to ensure that talent acquisition in particular, as well as letting go of people, is handled in-house. This is because you want to ensure that you get and keep the right talent for your company, which is something that an outsourced human resources department will have trouble keeping up with.

Product Development

Your products and services are the core reasons your organization is in business. Why should you continue to work with others to help them? Whoever is in charge of developing your offerings needs to have an intimate knowledge of your consumers, as well as your company’s values. You can’t expect any third-party provider to know these things, and you shouldn’t need to.

Outsourcing opens up plenty of opportunities to improve operations for your business, including outsourcing some or all of your IT operations to a provider.

 Email is crucial to the success of any business, but it also might contain sensitive information that is meant for the eyes of your organization—and its clients—only. Most modern email platforms give you tools you need to secure your email solution, so let’s go over how you might enable these features and what they look like.

For the purposes of this blog, we’ll use Gmail and Microsoft Outlook as the main examples. Of course, you can rely on us if you have further questions about your IT security, or IT solutions in general.

How to Secure Emails in Gmail

There are a couple of options at your disposal for Gmail. For example, you can seal an email using a password that is delivered to a designated phone number. This is Confidential Mode, and it’s one way you can guarantee that the message is only readable by the intended recipient. Furthermore, they cannot copy, forward, download, or print the message.

Here are the steps you need to take, outlined below:

• Open Gmail and start a new message by clicking Compose
• You’ll find a small lock icon at the bottom of the message window. Clicking it will activate Confidential Mode.
• You can then set an expiration date for your message, with the options One day, One week, One month, Three months, or Five years.
• You can then protect your encrypted message via an SMS Passcode, where you set the access code and can have it sent directly to the recipient’s mobile device. If you skip the password option by selecting No Passcode, recipients will only be able to view the message, not download or copy from it.

This process applies to each of the attachments on the email, so you can really get a lot of value from this protection.

Businesses using a paid Google Workspace account can also use encryption (S/MIME, or Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) to protect their emails. This is because they are hosted on a dedicated email server and you can implement such advanced features.

How to Secure Emails in Outlook

Outlook also comes with a feature to protect your emails, but it’s called Open Message Encryption. It’s something you can access through any email provider, and it can help to protect your messages from interception or being forwarded and/or printed by the recipient. It’s also quite simple to implement.

In the Outlook Web App:

• Start a new message by clicking the New message button.
• Click the Encrypt button you’ll find in the message window.
• Above the To button, you’ll see the option to Change permissions. Select it.
• You’ll be able to select the appropriate level of permissions for that message.
• Complete your message, and click Send.

In the Outlook Desktop App:

• Navigate to the Home tab and select New Email.
• A message window will appear. Click into the Options tab.
• Click into Permissions, and select the appropriate permissions to apply to the message.
• Complete your message, and click Send.

Will Blockchain Technology Improve Security?

 The blockchain is a technology that has really taken off in the past couple of years, with many people asking if the same technology behind cryptocurrencies can be applied to other uses and applications. Let’s consider how the blockchain might be used outside of cryptocurrency and in various industries—particularly for security—in the future.

What is the Blockchain?

Also known as distributed ledger technology, the blockchain is a way of sharing data via peer-to-peer networks and computer systems. This might encompass thousands of computers in total, all working to share data to each other. The really interesting part, however, is that each process or transaction amongst these computers is recorded in a ledger. This effectively builds a decentralized and trustworthy chain of records.

This is important for security, as you can’t go back to change one record without changing every single other record following it.

Decentralization is Key Here for Security

The basic idea is this: many organizations use centralized servers, so hackers have one easy target to strike to bring down an infrastructure through, say, a Distributed Denial of Service attack.

If the theoretical defender were to be using blockchain technology for security, however, the attack would not be so easy to pull off. Instead of targeting one server, the attacker would now have to target the entire blockchain to pull off the same attack. Otherwise, the rest of the blockchain would reject the attack, seeing there would be a change in one of the attacked nodes and rejecting that change in kind.

This might be a bit of an oversimplification, but it doesn’t need to be a complex description in order to see the value in this kind of innovation.

Tip of the Week: Five Simple Steps Towards a More Productive Business

If asked, most business owners would likely rank “improving productivity” as one of their overall business goals—and for obvious reasons. Often less obvious, however, is how to go about accomplishing this particular goal. Here, we’ve put together five different but equally effective ways to do so.

Include Wellness Initiatives in Your Benefits It should come as no surprise that any person’s productivity is going to be intrinsically tied to their overall state of being. Do they feel healthy? Are they stressed? Research has shown that the answers to these questions are directly tied to workplace performance, and it probably won’t shock you to hear that the better off your employees are, the more your business tends to benefit from it. Therefore, any investment that you make into the overall well-being of your team can be considered, at least tangentially, an investment back into your business. Consider adding support for fitness programs and other holistic health activities into your benefits package if at all possible, and try to shape your company culture to focus more on your team’s well-being. Simplify, Simplify, Simplify What do your current business goals and objectives look like? What strategies do you have in place to accomplish these goals and objectives? While everyone loves it when a plan comes together, making that plan too convoluted only makes it less attainable. When establishing business goals on any scale, you really do want to keep it simple. A straightforward plan with clear and achievable benchmarks established makes it far easier to not only communicate this goal, but determine the benchmarks and tasks that need to be met and fulfilled in order to accomplish it. A good way to do this is to follow the SMART goal format: Specific – What exactly is it that you want to achieve or accomplish? Measurable – Which metrics will determine your success? Attainable – Is the goal or benchmark you’re setting something that can realistically be accomplished? Relevant – Why is it that this goal is important to the greater mission or purpose you are striving towards? Timely – When specifically should this goal be accomplished? Following this format will help you to make simpler, and critically, more effective goals for your team to strive for. Streamline Notorious Time Wasters On a related note, we all know that there are certain things in the office that eat up time—and sometimes, these things don’t necessarily need to be involved when there are alternatives available. Does a conversation really require a full meeting, or could it be conveyed perfectly well through an email, or even an instant message? Has a certain process grown to be too clunky to actually be of any value? Identifying these kinds of time sinks and reevaluating your approach can help nurture more opportunities to accomplish other things. Likewise, it is important to strike a balance in your company culture. While the type of casual conversation associated with the water cooler is important (some might argue, critical) for team morale and collaboration, it is important not to overcorrect and have camaraderie turn into commotion. The same goes for activities like personal social media usage during work hours. Limiting these potential distractions to a reasonable, healthy level can help keep employees more engaged while actively working. Invest Time in Evaluating Your Goals Back on the subject of your business’ goals, you don’t want yours to go stale. Circumstances change all the time. Your goals might have to do the same in response. Make sure you are taking the time every so often to examine your progress towards accomplishing the benchmarks you’ve set and making tweaks to account for the situation you are in at a given time. Let’s say you had set a goal—ideally, using the SMART method described above—that pertained to a certain project, but the team member who was leading the charge suddenly had to go on leave. How will you adapt your process to account for this change, and how will this impact the goal you’ve set? Checking in and reconsidering what is reasonable will help you be more productive by simply maintaining your team’s motivation. Discourage Hustle Culture Hustle culture may sound like something to strive for to reach maximum productivity, but the opposite is often true. “Rise and grind,””work hard, play hard,””your goals don’t care how you feel,” and other mantras like them don’t always inspire productivity the way they can inspire workplace burnout and disconnection. Want to know what can inspire and enable productivity? Things like a healthy work/life balance, breaks, and vacation time. It all ties back to the wellness aspects we discussed earlier. A well-rested and refreshed worker is a worker who can usually accomplish more than one who is, to use another maxim, “burning the candle at both ends.”

Tip of the Week: Mellow Out When Things Aren’t Going Your Way

There is a lot made of the importance of productivity when it comes to running a business. Of course, without a consistent output, revenue growth is impossible. As a result, many workers expect the same kind of effort that they give. When they don’t see that effort, tensions can get high and they can get stressed out pretty easily. Today, we will go through a couple of tips that will help you maintain composure when your job delivers more stress than you’d like.

Stress is a Ruiner One of the problems with stress is that it clouds rational judgment. When people get stressed out at work it can severely hinder their work performance because they aren’t focused on the job at hand, but on the stressors. Work isn’t always a cakewalk, especially if you are stressed out. Before we give you a couple of tips on how to cope, let’s identify some of the most common reasons people are stressed out at work: Too much work No available upward mobility Unclear instructions Unreasonable demands Frustrating work environment Financial or personal problems Regardless of what the problem is, the more stressed out a person is, the worse his/her performance will be. Let’s take a look at three things you can do to reduce workplace stress: Keep Track of Your Stressors It doesn’t matter if that guy at the desk near you is a slob and his desk looks like your kitchen after you cook a three-course meal or you simply didn’t get enough sleep and are grouchy, you need to identify what is bothering you and when it does. One thing you can do is track these stressors in a work journal. By recording your thoughts, feelings, and notes about your work environment, you will be able to better identify the problems and create healthy responses for them. Establish Boundaries It is more difficult than ever for people to create boundaries between their work life and their home life; especially if they work from home. If one part of your life is creating stress, it is best to keep it away from the other part. Create and stick to rules governing when you can and can’t work. For example, if you are habitually checking work notifications at times when you should be relaxing or focusing on family or other important things, you need to set a rule that you aren’t allowed to look at your work notifications at these defined times. Communicate Most bosses don’t ask what their role is: it is to make sure their people are productive. This is not to say that most people want to push their subordinates to the limit of their sanity. If you explain your problem to your manager, there is a good chance that they will do something to help you better manage your business tasks. No one wants burnt out employees, so having a frank conversation about your situation can go a long way toward reducing your stress. While work isn’t always going to be easy, it doesn’t have to be so hard that you are tearing your hair out. Companies that choose to outsource some of their responsibilities have a tendency to see better productivity and efficiency than those that do everything in-house. The IT professionals at Net It On, LLC provide a lot of value with our managed IT services and can help you have a more efficient and effective workplace culture