When it comes to your business IT or cybersecurity, there always seems to be some time in the future do it in. Until suddenly, there isn’t.
NOW is the time to make things happen. Make your business New Years’ Resolutions for 2021 ones which won’t take much time now, but will protect you, save you money, and keep your company productivelong into the future.
Business New Years’ Resolutions
1) Do the basics to protect your business
It’s time to get your Cyber Essentials in place if you haven’t already. These are the kinds of things business owners kick themselves for not doing when things go wrong later on:
- MFA – Multi-Factor Authentication is the fancy technical term for log-ins which call for more than one piece of identifying information. This could mean your team receives a text or email to reply to in addition to needing to know their password. If you don’t have this, you need it.
- Data backup – backing up your data and knowing what to do in the event of disaster is something else which is easy to put off. It’s also easy – and a huge misstep – to rely on an antiquated system that a well-meaning friend set up for you back in the early 2000s.
- Email backup and hardening – for obvious reasons, backing up your emails is a sensible step for any business to take. Email hardening is the process of making it more difficult for people to send fake emails from your domain name. Hardening also has the handy added benefit of reducing the chances your emails will be marked as spam. You’ll want to do both of these – we wrote a whole book on why.
2) Save money on sustainable systems
Cheaper now is almost always more expensive in the long-run.
When you were starting out, it might have seemed like a good idea to get a tech-savvy friend or relative to set you up a barely functional website with email hosted by Yahoo. Perhaps it seemed like a real money-saver to store your data on a bunch of hard drives rather than get someone to set you up on SharePoint.
But old-school systems like these aren’t sustainable. You might save something by using them initially. Maybe. In the long-term though, you’re looking at the constant danger of security breaches, lost data and all the costs they can bring.
You’re also potentially looking at a lot of lost custom from a website Google doesn’t like and won’t find. Or be missing out on productivity because you’re using antiquated systems.
Get set up with affordable, sustainable systems now and you will save in the long-run.
3) Communicate and collaborate with your team properly
2020 has dragged the idea of working from home kicking and screaming from the “pleasant option” box to the “absolute necessity” tray.
If you’ve got to do this, one of your New Years’ business resolutions should be to do it right. This means using tools like Microsoft Teams (download our guide to Teams from HERE), SharePoint and other platforms. All of which have been designed to make collaborating and communicating with your team at a distance secure, stress-free and easy.
4) Look forward and plan for growth
Have you already spoken with your IT partner about the direction you want your company to grow in? Will the business systems you have today still be able to support you where you plan to be in a few months or a few years?
Another excellent resolution to make is to plan for the future. Your IT partner can be a major source of forward-planning assistance. They will be able to advise you on how to set up now to prepare for the future.
Download our free guide that describes the 5 key areas you must include in your IT strategy for 2021 from HERE.
5) Save time (and money) on smaller tasks
Automating smaller tasks is one of the best ways to boost the productivity of your entire team. A smart set-up and using the right collaboration tools will let you do this.
For example, Microsoft365 can do a whole bunch of stuff for you – especially if you’re using add-ins. There’s no need for your team to waste time creating their own signatures, for instance. Microsoft365 can create company-wide exclaimer cloud signatures.
You can also do things like store your files within those collaboration systems. This ensures everyone is working on the same copy and no file ever gets lost again.
And that’s just the start. Don’t make this year the same as last year as far as your business’s cybersecurity and productivity are concerned. This New Year is the time to start saving time and money with your tech and protecting your business for the future.
Not sure what’s working well and which areas of your business to address this year?
Set-up an obligation-free meeting with our director Gildas Jones. Follow this link to book a meeting via his calendar.
Join the nearly 1000 businesses in Bristol and the UK who trust Dial A Geek to make their tech work for them.
We’ll help you assess your business and figure out what specific resolutions – targeting all of those red areas – you need to take action on in 2021.
ALL ARTICLES