Sound Computers Blog

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.

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.

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.

Do you have a certain computer replacement strategy in place at your company? Or do you just replace PC’s as they become impossible to use any longer?
It can be difficult to know exactly when you should replace business computers because they may seem fine and have not had a hard drive crash. However, that does not necessarily mean that they are not costing you money.
Lost productivity due to older computers slowing down and increased data security risk can mean bigger costs for your business than the price of a new PC.

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.

In April 2020, about 50% of surveyed businesses had 81% or more of their employees working remotely. That meant buildings were sitting empty while companies were being run completely remotely.
Now that re-openings are occurring around the US, many small and large business owners in Connecticut and the rest of the country are contemplating what it would take to keep their business remote and close their physical office to save money on overhead.

As computers age, they inevitably begin to have problems. They slow down, cause more downtime and can begin to have strange issues like programs getting stuck and requiring a reboot.
Longevity studies of business computers show that PC’s that are older than four years have twice the downtime of three-year old computers. 

The popularity of TikTok has exploded during the pandemic. The social media app that launched in 2016 has people addicted to watching short user video clips edited with effects and music.
The average user spends 52 minutes a day on the app and it is not just kids. Adults have been drawn to the app as well. Even some small businesses have discovered that they can use it for marketing to find new customers.

Anyone dealing with protected health information (PHI) has to comply with HIPAA including doctor offices or nursing homes.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was designed to ensure personal health information is protected from unauthorized disclosure and ensure that patients have access to their own health information. 

One major cybersecurity risk that continues to plague businesses year in and year out is phishing attacks.
Just when a system is put in place to detect them, phishing scammers morph their attacks to try to get around it. For example, when the detection of malicious file attachments by anti-malware programs successfully began blocking a majority of scam emails, attackers switched to including links to malicious websites instead.