i.t.NOW

The Top 7 Questions CEO's should be Asking their IT Team Question 3: Where is our data? Why: COVID did a lot of things. It forced a lot of businesses to very quickly pivot and put solutions in place to enable work from home. A few years have passed and some businesses have moved back to the office, and some haven't. Many of the "in a pinch" solutions that were put in place because of COVID necessity became the new normal for a business. Sometimes users got creative about where they were putting company data. As a result, many organizations ended up with data stored locally across 100 laptops, scattered across various approved and not company approved cloud solutions, stored in web based applications, and stored in servers both in the cloud and on premises. To be able to effectively secure and backup data, and ensure continued unhindered operations, you need to know where your data ended up. Then you need to decide if you want it there or not. More than likely you'll want users to consolidate storage into one or two company approved locations, and then ensure solutions are in place to backup and secure those locations. A deceptively simple question with frequently complicated answers. Asking it is important because it will tell your IT team where to start.

IT solutions for manufacturing are "built different" as the kids would say. We know your world, and can help.

If your company is looking at any kind of mergers and acquisitions in the next while, technology due diligence should be on your list of to-do's. We wrote up some notes why. https://lnkd.in/gN7HsgfP

While we don't recommend such a... permanent reminder to invest in cybersecurity, the message still stands: if you aren't currently investing in the cybersecurity of your business, schedule a free consultation with our team of experts at www.itnow.net!

Throwback Thursday: Anyone else remember playing Oregon Trail on a Commodore 64 green screen? Ah the good old days. Dying of dysentery.

The Top 7 Questions CEO's should be Asking their IT Team Question 2: How quickly could we currently recover from an outage? Why: This again is about determining current risk levels to the organization. If you know that downtime will cost you $7000/hr, and that your current solutions will make it difficult to recover in less than 24 hours from a failure. Is $56000 (assuming 8 hr work day) an acceptable level of loss? If you could spend a few hundred dollars a month for a technical solution that could cut downtime from 24-48 hours to 1-2 hours, would it be worth investing in? This question illuminates any shortcomings in the current disaster recovery solution, and opens the door to investigate alternatives if needed. It may also lead you into interesting strategy discussions about whether the current structure of your data and applications are the correct choice for your business. All important things to talk about.

If you have an IT provider that doesn't respond in a timely manner, it's costing your business money.

Microsoft has made multifactor authentication for Office 365 mandatory. We've been requiring our clients to do it for a while. Here's some of the reasons why. https://lnkd.in/gMJarjnK

At many law firms (especially smaller firms), staffing an IT department is regarded as an unnecessary expense. The thinking goes something like this: lawyering has been around for centuries without employing IT staff, so why change now? The truth is that this practice only leads to employees holding onto their IT issues, which snowballs into a worse customer experience! It's time to find a technology partner who specializes in the law industry: Submit a contact form at www.itnow.net and let's find out if that's us.

Throwback Thursday: Anybody else recognize this beauty? This was the very first home computer my family got when I was around 3 years old. My dad who's an engineer, wrote a program in basic (I believe) that taught me how to read. What was the first home computer you remember having in your house?