Navigating Today’s Tech

Navigating todays small business technology can be without a doubt full of challenges. With an industry that has every vendor claiming to have the next best thing for your company large or small, it’s always a good idea to take a step back, focus on the basics and get your bearings before diving into the tech pool. Peak IT Group offers these simple all-around useful suggestions to help navigate the world of legal technology. 

Technology  Should Be Planned  

Good technology costs, but it does not have to be a surprise cost. Develop a budget and plan for your technology needs before you need them. Peak IT Group works with our clients to develop a plan for tech costs over the long term. We do not wait for the server to fail before we know what it will take to replace it. Hard costs are not all that goes into this budget. Additional costs can include business shutdowns for upgrades if needed, consultation and labor cost increases, and increased costs to backup new or expanding platforms may all be part of a good IT budget. Business needs drive technology costs. For example, remote access requirements can vary across teams and even business platforms. Understanding the underlying operational needs that are driving the technology costs can help with creating an accurate technology budget. 

Cyber Security is a Business Function  

Technology being driven by business operations means that cyber security becomes a business function. The days of security planning and implementation being the sole responsibility of the technology team is over. Security is a business function and should involve everyone in the business to some degree. With advances in today’s malware and the perseverance of the malicious hacker comes additional complexity in protecting against it. A solid security approach that incorporates multiple protection points within your network as well as well-designed and mandatory security training is needed. Design the system around protecting your business needs and risks not just the data housed on a server somewhere. Once you have a good security approach in place it is time to educate your entire team on basic cyber security best practices. Budget for an annual cyber security training session for your team. This helps to get them on board with the policies and best practices you have in place.  

When  In  Doubt Back It Up  

With ransomware attacks at an all-time high it is critical that backups be effective and able to give you the recovery times and recovery points you need to maintain your business operations if disaster strikes. Backup and disaster recovery are not just functions of your information technology team. They are more a business decision to choose what your business can be with or without and for how long. Don’t forget items like communications platforms Email is important but so are your phones. There is a lot of mis understanding on how backed up a cloud platform is. A lot of common cloud systems may not be backed up at all unless you set that up and or enable that feature. Some common email systems don’t back up your items unless you pay for it or implement a 3 ^rd  party to do it for you. Are you aware of what is on everyone’s local system? Do you need to back up key employees’ local desktop? All of these are questions you should be thinking about. 

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