Welcome to the First Column IT Tech Blog

You’ll go through various high and low points when you're running your business. That’s just part of the game; the unpredictability comes with running a business. You might lose confidence in your operations and wonder if you’re making the right calls—particularly with business technology. Thankfully, there are ways you can use technology that take a lot of the guesswork out of what the future holds for your business.

Technology is crucial to the success of modern-day business operations, so you must ensure efforts are made to keep your IT in proper working order. A managed service provider, or MSP, can make this a much easier task. Today, we want to discuss some of the common IT challenges businesses encounter and how we can address them.

In today’s world of perpetual security breaches and cyberattacks, it’s no surprise that the greatest response to such threats is to actively prevent them from harming your organization in the first place. One key tool in this effort is an endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution. With endpoint protection on your business’ side, you can leverage a robust and powerful security solution to handle a significant portion of your network security.

How clearly outlined are your IT-related policies and procedures in the workplace? It is difficult at best to manage these expectations alongside your employees, but it’s a necessary task all the same. Today, we want to help your organization walk the fine line between protecting your assets, data, and reputation, and granting your employees permissions to do what they must on your network infrastructure.

Human resources is a critical part of your business, but since it doesn’t generate any actual revenue, there has been a push to cut back on HR spending. In response, many businesses have started using HR automation technology to handle the myriad tasks HR is typically responsible for. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits HR automation can bring to your business. 

When you ask a managed service provider or other technology expert when you should be upgrading your technology, you’ll likely get a pretty nebulous answer like, “it depends.” That’s because there isn’t necessarily a hard or steadfast response to this question, and the answer will change depending on various factors that are inconsistent across businesses.

Automation has been a hot-button issue in business for a while. Lots of businesses are looking to automate several different areas of their operations. In this month’s newsletter, we will go through some of the more common and valuable automation tools that small businesses can take advantage of. 

Budgeting for anything can present challenges, especially when businesses heavily rely on information systems. Securing funds for IT initiatives can be particularly daunting in such organizational landscapes. Despite these hurdles, however, the IT sector continues to build steam, with year-over-year business IT spending reaching its highest levels ever. Let’s go into how your IT budget is pivotal in advancing your organizational technology endeavors.

Healthcare is one channel where data continues to flow in and today’s technology is using some new innovations to keep up with provider demands. AI is one of the most transformative technologies in recent times, but understanding how healthcare benefits from it is important to get the most out of it. Today, we take a look at how AI is being used in healthcare.