Data Net Blog

When it comes to smaller and medium sized businesses, anything that distracts from the day to day concerns about bringing in revenue tends to fall by the wayside. With that in mind, we have put together a list of seven things that a small business needs to prioritize if you want to keep your business up and running. Remember, a cyber attack on your data security could be the biggest threat to your revenues that you face, even more serious than a recession or a pandemic

Looking for a few ways to quickly protect your data and IT infrastructure from cybercriminals? Here are two great places to start. The first is so obvious that almost everyone overlooks it, especially in smaller companies where there is little time for proactive training on any topic.

Make no mistake, you want your business to grow. There is no better sign that you are resonating with customers and providing the value you set out to deliver. Unfortunately, for a lot of companies, they simply aren’t prepared when their product or service takes off and it ends up ruining what could be a very good thing. Today, we’ll take a look at three actions you can take to keep your business humming along when it sees extraordinary growth. 

Like most small business owners, unless you hit the lottery and started capitalizing your business all by yourself, you probably have some key shareholders who serve on your Board of Directors. You may also be finding that they are increasingly concerned about strategies to assess risk management. Most small businesses tend to overlook risk management issues—they usually just don’t have the time. Every minute is spent building the businesses and making sales. Operations and sales consume 120 percent of a small business owner’s time. In this e-guide, we’ll do a quick run-through of some topics that you may wish to address with your board as you collaborate to protect your business from cybercrime, as well as other negative events.

When people talk about the growth of technology in business, no small part of that is what the Internet of Things makes possible. From cost control, to automated scheduling, to helping build operational efficiency, the IoT can present a lot of interesting benefits for a business if you strategically implement systems designed to use the data created by smart devices. Let’s take a look at some of the ways IoT works for small businesses.

For small business owners, it may seem your daily energy is caught up with just keeping the doors open and revenues coming in. However, unless you were very fortunate when you started up, you have a board of directors; most likely initial investors whose focus is on the long-term success of the company and on strategies for future growth. Part of their concern will be threats and risks to the present business. A particular concern may be the risks to the business in the case of a cyber-attack. Small businesses are just as vulnerable to cyber attacks as large companies. However, they are far less likely to have the resources to recover.

We’ve been talking about social media as a good way to market if you're a small business. Facebook , in particular, can be useful not just as a marketing tool, but as a platform that can serve as your website. If you don’t have a website, Facebook offers a way to have a “faux” website. It can provide basic information about your goods and services, and it can be easily updated. Unlike a website, it takes no web skills to change the content of your Facebook page. So at the very least, this is a pretty safe way to get into the shallower waters of social media. It is important to remember to update your Facebook page. Leaving it to get stale doesn't send a good message. If you don’t care enough to keep it up to date what does that say about how you run the rest of your business?

Last week, we wrote about how patience plays a big role in people’s ability to be productive and efficient. This week we want to explore a few ways to help the people in your organization to become more patient. We all know people in our lives that seem like they could definitely take a chill pill. If that is you, using these four suggestions can help you be more patient in situations that demand it. 

Entrepreneurship is extremely frightening to a lot of people, and that’s probably why a lot of people make the choice to work for others. If you think about it, a lot can go wrong; a lot more than can go right. Today, we thought we’d highlight how business owners are able to get through all of the problems to forge ahead and create successful companies.

People can be very productive. They can also be pretty terrible at being productive. The staff that can find consistency in their productivity typically results in a pretty successful business. Obviously, people have all types of suggestions on how to improve staff productivity, individual productivity, and a lot of it is just hitting on the same stuff. There is one variable, however, that is found in a lot of productive people: Patience. 

Wasting money is a major problem regardless of the kind of business you run. Technology can do a lot to stretch your dollars, but it can also be the cause of waste. This week, we thought we’d identify three ways that your business could be wasting significant money on your IT. 

There are many proponents of the four-day workweek, so many to the point where it is actively being implemented to determine if it is as successful of a strategy as it is in theory. You might be surprised to hear that it is, in fact, a successful business model, and there are studies to back it up.

It’s not uncommon for an employee to hold a second job outside of your office, whether it’s a side gig that they are trying to turn into a passion project or a side hustle just to make ends meet or put away a little extra money every month. Workers holding multiple jobs is certainly not unheard of—if anything it’s more common than ever, thanks to the remote work surge. How does this phenomenon impact your organization?

When trying to determine if a certain piece of technology should be replaced or just taken away entirely, you should first ask yourself if the technology affects your products or services in any discernible way. If the technology is something that helps with productivity and efficiency to aid in the production or delivery of said product or service, then it’s worth investing in.

There are a few different types of stress that may be present in your business right now, either or both of which could be causing no small amount of distress to your team members and disruption to your processes. Let’s explore the sources of these stresses—digital/workplace friction and interpersonal friction—and what can be done to help resolve them.

There are literally thousands of pieces of technology available that accomplish something positive for your business. Whether they are communications tools that help your team collaborate and build a better client-support system, gadgets and software to help streamline your team’s ability to get work done, or devices to help advance the company’s mobile strategies, considering what you can do with innovative new technologies is a responsibility of a forward-looking executive or small business owner.

Now that many of us have been working remotely for the past 18 months, what are your thoughts on the concept of a remote or hybrid office? Have your opinions changed at all, or are you still clinging to your previously conceived notions of what it would be like? It does not help that some major companies, like Microsoft, are sending out mixed signals on their own experiences with remote work. What can we learn from these experiences?

Instant messaging is a solution that has picked up in the business world, and for good reason. While email allows for more passive communication, instant messaging allows for more instantaneous communication, similar to a phone call in its urgency. But are you using instant messaging in the proper way?

Technology is one of those parts of your operational infrastructure that plays a massive role, even if you don’t realize it. In fact, you’ve been using all of the standard fare for business technology, such as computers, server units, and networking components for quite some time. All technology must eventually be replaced though, so it’s critical that your company has an established approach to make this happen in the most seamless and least stressful way possible.

Let’s face it: with so (so) many streaming platforms now available for us to binge a trendy show or revisit a favorite movie on, technology and entertainment have become inexorably linked. When you really think about it, the technology that makes these streaming services possible is truly impressive. Let’s go over this technology together.