Welcome to the first of what I hope will become a monthly “Tech Tips & Bits” column. This section is dedicated to helping your small business use cost-effective technology solutions to improve efficiency, avoid costly headaches, and grow.
Technology doesn’t need to be expensive. Let’s take a look at some of the basic ways your small business can help set itself up for technology success:
Have Two Monitors
Make sure that you and your employees have a dual monitor setup. I’ve seen many employees struggle over the years because they only have a single screen to view information. The efficiency improvement of having two screens typically pays for itself quickly.
Use a Business Email Service
Don’t use a free, personal email address for business, even if you’re a sole proprietor. Having a .com email address with your domain name not only looks more professional, but can provide important security benefits if done properly. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are the two most popular business email providers, and neither of them are expensive. Each user should have their own email address.
Enable 2FA
No matter what services you use, if they provide the option, make sure 2FA (two factor authentication) is enabled. This is especially important for email accounts, and other highly sensitive services which you might use throughout the course of business.
Security
As a first step, make sure every computer you and your employees use has next-generation antivirus (NGAV), which is updated regularly. There’s much more to security than having a proper NGAV, and that’s why I say this is a first step. Employee behavior is important, as well. Can you and your employees identify a genuine email from a phishing attempt? We’ll detail this more in a future article.
Data Backup
Your data should be backed up automatically off-site, to the cloud, not just an external hard drive which you might remember to drag files over to every few months. The business email services I mentioned aren’t technically data backup services, but they do make it easier to store some of your data in the cloud. If you use 365 or Workspace, you can even back up those services with a third-party service. Data backup can be a more complex topic, but cost-effective solutions exist for this.
We’ve only scratched the surface here, and will take a deeper dive into specific topics in the future. Thanks for reading, and if you have any specific questions or topics you’d like covered, don’t hesitate to contact me or my Effingham County-based team.
Glen Montgomery is the CEO of RepowerIT in Guyton.
