Meeting with your IT provider soon? Here are 5 questions you MUST ask

As a managed IT service provider ourselves, we strongly encourage every business owner to meet with the person and/or business who provides their IT support services at MINIMUM annually (and here are our five reasons why if you’re curious).

If you already have that annual meeting on the books or are thinking about scheduling it soon to prepare your business for 2025 and beyond, it’s a good idea to go with a few questions that will help you determine if the services you’re receiving are meeting your business’s needs and goals.

Technology Planning for 2025: Five Items to Focus on to Grow Your Business in the New Year

It’s November and 2025 is just two short months away, we don’t know about you but for us it felt like 2024 flew by and in that time technology planning for our clients has already changed.

For example, 2025 will bring the end-of-life date for Windows 10 which is still dominating the market share of Windows devices at 65%. We have also more clients in introducing AI into their business next year, including taking advantage of Microsoft’s Co-Pilot which works in tandem with their existing Microsoft subscriptions (you can see our latest blog on AI here).

Beyond AI or replacing hardware, what are five ways you can grow your business with technology in 2025? Here’s our suggestions:

Implement a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System
A CRM platform (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot or Keap) helps centralize customer interactions, sales data, and service requests, providing valuable insights into customer preferences and buying behavior.

5 Ways to Think Like a Hacker to Protect Your Business

As you’re going about your day-to-day activities online, thinking of how a hacker might take advantage of even mundane aspects of your routine probably doesn’t enter into the equation.

We all sign on to work for the day, check our emails, maybe post an update on social media and chat with our colleagues before getting into the grind of our daily activities.

If AI implementation is important to your business’s 2025 goals, you will want to watch the AI chipset market closely

With Project Strawberry (the newest iteration of ChatGPT which is touted to boost it’s reasoning capabilities amongst other new features) on the horizon and more and more businesses taking advantage of AI tools such as Microsoft Co-Pilot and Google Gemini, the AI train doesn’t look like it will be slowing down anytime soon.

Is the cloud still your best option or would an on-premises server be the smarter way to go? 5 facts to consider about both

Originally touted as the wave of the future “the cloud”, which is nebulous phrasing that basically means putting your data anywhere besides your direct location, is often seen as the solution for corralling data into one central online location that’s managed by someone else (IE cloud providers).

However, rising costs of data storage and uncertainty surrounding data security and availability in the wake of ever-increasing data breach threats has meant more businesses are seriously considering their options when it comes to the best strategy for data storage in their business.

The 7 most common network issues and how to fix them

“The internet is down” is a phrase no one enjoys hearing. Beyond the disruption to your day, troubleshooting network issues is also a notoriously frustrating experience. Questions like why is it down, is it us or our service provider, when will it come back up? are common place in this universally shared experience.