SMART Blog

We recently started to pick apart the concept of procrastination as a means of understanding it better, and potentially, getting better at not doing it. Last time, we touched on a few ways that procrastination can potentially manifest, so it only made sense to us that we would continue pulling that thread and try to help you identify how you tend to procrastinate more specifically.

You’re probably familiar with the concept of a mission statement, particularly in terms of your business as a whole. Did you know, however, that you don’t need to stop there? You can—and we’d argue, should—establish more specific organizational missions for your different departments. Let’s consider how you can benefit from creating a mission for your IT team to uphold throughout its operations, and how you might go about doing so.

When your technology gets older it has a tendency to get less effective. This can be a major roadblock to organizational productivity, and have devastating effects on your business. These include major downtime events and overwhelming inefficiency. Let’s take a look at some ways that you know that it’s time to focus on reinvestment. 

“Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.” It’s timeless advice, as well as some of the easiest and most tempting advice to ignore. Procrastination is one of those things that we all assume we understand, but we wanted to take a bit of time to explore it in greater detail…and figure out how we can all work to resist it.

We tend to focus most of our attention on how to maintain your business’ technology over time. This only makes sense—we are a managed service provider, after all—but that being said, your IT is not the only element that needs to be properly taken care of. It is just as important that you and your team members are physically able to focus on work…something a desk job doesn’t always help.

Google continues to build its Workspace platform up with new and innovative tools that can help businesses be more successful and efficient. One such tool is a new solution being offered to select businesses using work or school platforms of Google Workspace: custom building blocks.

Compliance is a critical element of many businesses’ requirements, with pretty severe penalties as a consequence if the prescribed standards are not met. Even more importantly, most compliance requirements and regulations are put in place for the welfare of not only the business, but its clientele as well. This makes it critical to know which apply to your business, and how to meet them fully.

Information technology is a constantly changing industry, with practices shifting all the time. As a result, anyone you have working on your company’s IT should be actively seeking out various certifications to confirm that they are keeping up on modern trends and standards. To help you accomplish this, we’ve put together a brief list of valuable IT certifications that your IT personnel—whether they’re in-house employees or outsourced professionals—should have.

While it is important that your business implement comprehensive network protections, there are plenty of simple ways that your business’ cybersecurity could potentially fail. This could easily cost you heavily in your available capital, financial and social alike.

Each year, we take some time and take a look at the most interesting new smartphones that are being released. Over the past few years, fewer companies are making smartphones and throughout the whole industry, innovation has seemed to slow. Whether this is a result of rigid market dynamics, supply shortages, or the extraordinary costs it takes to manufacture and source components, it has taken some of the largest technology companies in the world—such as Amazon, LG, and HTC—out of the market and presented limited opportunities for other global technology leaders such as Microsoft, Sony, and Nokia. 

In good times and bad, profitability is the priority for most businesses out there. Having said that, this priority is typically a challenging one to achieve, but did you know that there are a few different ways that investing in a relationship with a managed service provider can help increase your productivity—and as a result, your overall profitability?

AI—artificial intelligence—has been a hot topic as of late, with it seemingly being used for any purpose you can imagine nowadays. Unfortunately, this has also included cybercrime.

However, just as AI can be a weapon for cybercriminals to use, it can also be a shield to help protect your business from threats. For instance, in phishing prevention.

Every office has that one person that doesn’t seem to care that they are working in a room with other people. You know the type: They have day-old food on their desk. There are papers and other unnecessary items strewn about the desktop. Things are sticky and smell strange. The funny part is they seem comfortable with that mess. They may be the only one that is. In this week’s blog, we discuss the benefits of keeping your workspace clean.

When it comes to security, one often overlooked tool is the virtual private network, or VPN. We recommend that all businesses use a VPN to keep remote and hybrid workers from inadvertently putting your business’ data at risk while out of the office. Let’s go over why a VPN is so effective, as well as what you should look for in a business-grade VPN tool.

So, at this point, we’ve talked about what productivity is, how it can be measured, and how to protect it from what could potentially impact it negatively. To bring this brief series to a close, let’s talk about the things you can do to maximize it as much as possible for your business’ benefit.

Have you ever struggled with storage space on your Android device? For individuals who have, we bet that downloading applications that you ultimately don’t end up using very often is a major culprit here. To help you clear up storage space on your device, Android will receive an auto-archiving feature that can save you significant amounts of storage space by archiving your unused applications.

Your business depends on its bandwidth and its Internet connection to remain productive, part of which means ensuring that you have a reliable and stable wireless connection. How can you set up your network so that it is optimal and efficient? We have some thoughts on the matter and want to share them with you.

Data backup always sounds like a simple process, but if you truly want to rely on your backup, it needs to be absolutely infallible. That is the objective behind an IT appliance known as the BDR, which stands for Backup and Disaster Recovery.

Businesses cannot afford to grow complacent with their network security, as it could make a significant difference between falling prey to an attack and remaining secure. The process of securing a network must be looked at holistically, from top to bottom. This idea of enterprise security is not new, but even a small business needs to keep it in mind, and these solutions are more accessible than you might think.

One major aspect of your business’ security is how well your team is trained to preserve it. Let’s go over some of the aspects that you need to be sure you address as you educate your team.