Apex Technology Blog

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There is no question that a small business can benefit from technology, as has been proven time and time again. However, an issue can arise if a business bites off more than it can chew, so to speak, and ultimately creates a spike in costs. A responsible business owner will resist this temptation and prioritize the solutions they need over the ones they want - building profitability and generating capital needed to make other improvements.

In this blog, we’ll examine some of the implementations that can deliver a good return on investment to a small business.

The cloud has proven to be an extremely useful tool for the modern business. Not only does it provide anywhere-anytime access to applications, processing, storage, et al; it also delivers those products as a service, allowing you to budget for recurring costs rather than major upfront ones. This provides your organization with functional, supported, and secure computing environments that eliminate a lot of the support costs that traditional computing environments require. It sounds like a perfect scenario for small and large businesses alike, but things aren’t always what they seem, as a lot of cloud users have found that they have incurred several hidden costs by using cloud platforms. Today, we take a look at these hidden costs.

Data security isn’t a matter to be taken lightly, as too many businesses have found out the hard way. Unfortunately, there are far too many simple ways to correct common security issues - enough that it’s foolish not to do so. We’ll review a few ways to fix security issues, after discussing one of, if not the, most egregious security failings in modern history.

The password isn’t nearly as secure as it used to be. Hackers have begun to take advantage of extremely powerful solutions designed to brute force their way into accounts by using software to rapidly guessing thousands of passwords per second, making it extraordinarily difficult to prepare yourself for them.

What’s the best way to guarantee that passwords aren’t going to be the downfall of your company? A great start is by taking a close look at password best practices and two-factor authentication.

How much does your business rely on technology to keep your organization running forward? As business technology becomes more complex, it’s becoming increasingly popular for organizations to have their own internal IT departments to manage and maintain it. Yet, small businesses don’t often have the necessary funds for such a feat. How can your company afford quality IT service? You can start by pursuing managed IT solutions from a managed service provider.

Despite what detractors say, regulations are in place for good reason. They typically protect individuals from organizational malfeasance. Many of these regulations are actual laws passed by a governing body and cover the entire spectrum of the issue, not just the data involved. The ones that have data protection regulations written into them mostly deal with the handling and protection of sensitive information. For organizations that work in industries covered by these regulations there are very visible costs that go into compliance. Today, we look at the costs incurred by these organizations as a result of these regulations, and how to ascertain how they affect your business.

Profitability is less the measure of being able to turn a profit, and more the measure of how much profit you can make. For the successful small business, the integration of technology can dictate what kind of annual margins you are looking at. For the new company, however, it can be something even more critical: the difference between setting a course for success, or wallowing in failure. Today we analyze the cost difference between hosting your IT in-house, or choosing to host it in the cloud.

The late American author Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.” Written in the 20th century, it has been put in practice by 21st century businesses. As the Internet has grown, the amount of companies expanded, and the amount of data that those companies collect has grown exponentially, especially now that there is a market for such data.

The COVID-19 pandemic took a toll on multiple areas of the American economy, but the shift to remote work opened the door for a veritable bloodbath in the realm of cybersecurity. Despite cybersecurity spending exceeding $126B worldwide, the industry trends in 2020 of accelerated data breaches, phishing attacks, and ransomware attacks is anticipated to lead to more than $6 trillion in damages in 2021. 

As data collection by businesses becomes more prevalent and complex, so too do the legislative and legal policies relating to the protection of that data. This goes for if your business operates in the health industry and has to comply with HIPAA, or you handle large amounts of international clients and need to ensure your data collection methods are compliant with the European Union’s GDPR requirements, or any other number of legal and legislative requirements that might exist for your business at the local, state, federal, and international levels. Ensuring compliance saves your organization money and reputation over time, but can be a daunting and complicated process. 

As managed IT services become popular solutions for small- to medium-sized businesses in handling IT services, there’s a term that gets thrown around with increasing abandon. Businesses with little in-house IT experience might get swept away by the lofty connotations when IT consultants start to extol the benefits of a shift to the Cloud, especially when it comes to data storage. But “the Cloud” remains perhaps one of the most mysterious locations in business today. 

At some point in your career, you’ve likely worked for a company that uses a software solution that seems to be extremely out of date, only a few employees know how it works, and there’s likely a cabinet with a large, well-worn binder full of very complex instructions. This is the curse of legacy software and in complex IT systems, legacy components can often be a major pain point for staff, despite the benefits the software might still be providing to the organization.

How successful can your organization be if your management infrastructure is built around being reactive rather than proactive to business challenges, regardless of the department involved? Modern commerce moves at the speed of the customer’s ability to Google your business and clicks on a link to purchase your services or product. Your organization needs to be able to support that process from website to fulfillment, and the logistics of that? All supported by and made possible through the IT systems you have in place. 

With the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) in 2012, HIPAA privacy requirements relative to patient records were strengthened and expanded. The act required that US physicians and medical practitioners transition from paper records to electronic medical records (EMR) by 2014. 

Workers are challenged by any number of systemic inefficiencies in modern IT infrastructures, especially those rife with Legacy solutions that are difficult to eliminate from the workflow. In the last decade, however, a solution has started to gain traction with organizations, especially those that embrace the increasingly popular managed IT services approach to managing IT infrastructure. One major shift that comes with the embrace of managed IT services is the shift of onsite storage systems and servers to a cloud storage-focused model.

Before managed services and cloud-migrations started to reshape the information technology landscape, the Chief Information Officer was responsible for overseeing an organization’s IT resources and staff. It was considered a back-office role and often seen as existing in the C-suite tier in title only, as they were often working in the trenches alongside staff and in the day-to-day operations.

With cell phones keeping us directly connected with clients and coworkers, private messaging programs pinging in our pockets throughout the day, and other forms of interoffice communication taking up vast portions of our days, it almost feels like email is an unnecessary anomaly, just one more avenue of messaging to manage.

As we collectively take our first tentative steps into 2021, we are all struggling to gauge what the path forward should look like and what the year holds. It’s a challenging economic landscape, to be sure. And while some businesses are being extremely hesitant and cautious, some of you will be better served to be more aggressive in setting yourself up for success in the new year.