A recent study uncovered that 99 percent of CEOs think technology is integral to the success of their company, yet 43 percent believe their company aligns technology to business outcomes.
Seems to be a disconnect somewhere. Technology does provide opportunities to drive efficiencies and reduce costs. As corporate America advances more environmental initiatives to reduce its carbon footprint, there are affordable and simple ways to leverage technology to accomplish its goals. Something as simple as a technology energy assessment could produce cost-saving suggestions. Today, automated tools that monitor desktops and notebooks connected to the network and turn them off at the end of the day, can provide real energy savings. Consolidation and virtualization at the server and desktop levels can provide efficient systems that use less power for heating and cooling. Consolidating and managing your copy/print/fax environment can reduce power consumption and supplies.
Let’s take a look at some of the new and emerging technology solutions that CEOs and owners should be looking at in 2010.
Disaster recovery and business continuity planning: There are truly affordable solutions for business of all sizes. We have all seen the statistics on the number of businesses that survive a fire, flood, or other natural disaster without a well-developed disaster recovery or business continuity plan. That plan can be the difference between survival or failure.
New backup storage solutions: Replacing expensive and unreliable tape backup systems with new storage appliances not only backs up your critical data on site, but also replicates data to remote data warehouses providing protection from a local disaster destroying the primary site.
Unified communications: These new solutions provide all of the features you expect from a phone system plus e-mail, calendaring, instant messaging, presence, unified conferencing, mobility and call center functionality.
Virtualization: Server virtualization is becoming more common place while virtualization and consolidation is just starting to happen at the desktop level.
Cloud computing: Rather than owning your own mail servers and dealing with the maintenance requirements, you could enable cloud computing and pay for the service, instead of owning the infrastructure yourself.
Printer and copier convergence: These new machines provide the functionality of printers, copiers, scanners and fax machines in a single product.
Storage: By 2011, the amount of data stored will almost triple to 1,600 exabytes. New iSCSI (copper-based) storage solutions are providing high value at lower costs.
Security: Owners are dealing with concerns as compliance training for their employees, network access policies, compliance reporting, e-mail encryption, e-mail archiving, Web content filtering, intrusion detection, intrusion prevention, anti-virus, and firewalls to protect the network edge. The regulatory landscape is complicated with compliance requirements.
Some of the following technology solutions will help businesses deal with the regulatory alphabet soup, as well as provide increased productivity and cost savings.
Password security: This is the easiest way to protect your company data. Encourage your users to follow best practices for password protection. Always use “strong” passwords. Keep passwords a secret. If passwords must be written down on a piece of paper, store the paper in a secure place and destroy it when it is no longer needed. Never share passwords with anyone. Use different passwords for all user accounts. Change passwords immediately if they have been compromised. Be careful where passwords are saved on computers. Some dialogue boxes, such as those for remote access and other telephone connections present an option to save or remember a password. Selecting this option poses a potential security threat.
Build strong passwords: Make passwords at least eight characters in length that contain alpha, numbers and special characters. Think of a sentence that you will remember and turn it sentence into a password. Add complexity to your password or pass phrase by mixing upper and lowercase letters and numbers. Introduce intentional misspellings. Substitute special characters, using symbols that look like letters, combine words, or replace letters with numbers to make the password complex. Biometrics such as fingerprint readers and retinal scanners are making the use of strong passwords more manageable. Biometrics are available and affordable today on notebooks and desktops and can be retrofitted for older devices.
As you can see, there are many issues business owners need to be on top of outside of running their business. Taking the time to align your technology resources with your business goals will be worth it in the long run. Seeking local, expert advice will help you focus in on the areas your business needs to concentrate on and can help you develop a road map for success.
Mike Brogan is president of Erb’s Technology Solutions in Cedar Rapids. He can be reached at (319) 364-5159.
