You probably know by now that protecting your small business from threats is absolutely essential, and even if you haven’t taken the steps to have an off-site backup or an on-board IT helper, you’ve probably done your best with your resources and installed the free software available to small businesses.

We know that as an SMB, you have a budget – and you have to stretch that budget each and every month to ensure you can keep conducting business. Sometimes this means not upgrading something when you would otherwise do so. Sometimes it means foregoing that business trip you wanted to take and sometimes it means eliminating or severely shrinking the budget you have for security purposes.

There are laptops that are worth more than you pay for them, and there are laptops that are worth just about what you pay for them or a little less. When you buy a cheap laptop, that’s what you expect: a functional, but drab, machine that kind of just gets the job done most of the time.

An environmentally friendly approach to sharing and storing your computer generated documents and other communications, cloud computing can also help you and your business save money and operate much more efficiently and effectively. Every computing need from servers to hardware to software to paper can be adapted by using cloud-based solutions, using less energy, resources and cash while keeping the productivity up and the information flowing.

The mountains of paper your company has generated in the past cost money and time to store and access later. Additional space was leased and filing systems purchased to keep tabs on all that paper.

In recent years, a wide range of applications and technologies has been developed that encourage the digitization of your business’s documents, both historical and going forward.

Most companies that are active on social media are aware of the importance of having a social media manager, a specialist who analyzes and brings their insights and conclusions about the company’s status on social media sites to management. There are obvious metrics and superficial insights that can be gained from a cursory examination of the data generated by social media analytics.

With all the emphasis put on the customer in the global business environment, knowing what your customers want, how they feel about your products or services and what their expressed views are on social media, knowing the nuances of customer terminology is critical to be able to differentiate between a satisfied customer and one who seethes beneath the surface because they believe their views are muted by more popular trends.

Marketing Applications and Software

With the automated options available for businesses, it is no longer necessary for your online marketing plan to be managed manually. Both time and money will be saved if you research, review and choose a package that makes sense for you and your company.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the international effort to incorporate unique identifiers to give household and industrial devices the ability to transfer data over a network and avoid human-to-human or human-to-computer involvement. In other words, the chips included on IoT devices will do all the work.

If you have ever been in a retail store where you are trying to access the Internet (to compare price, for example) and find yourself without Wi-Fi access, you may start to think that there is something the store does not want you to know. What is closer to the truth of the matter is that the company does not see the value of having Wi-Fi in its store, and it goes beyond just the customer.