How do you know when it is time to change IT providers? Do you wait until some unforeseen disaster? Until you find out all their best techs have left? Until your competitors are moving past you due to higher levels of tech enabled productivity?

Changing IT providers is right up there with finding a new accounting or legal group to work with.

The bad guys are real, especially on the Internet.  In fact, the bad guys of the Internet are worse  than those in real life.  At least you can SEE the ones in real life and defend yourself or flee.  The baddies of the Internet come into your house, sit on all the furniture, make a mess, and steal your stuff….all while you are in the kitchen hanging out unaware!

No amount of security will stop them from attempting to break in and nothing is foolproof.

Email was not designed with security as a requirement. In fact, all "security" that involves email was bolted on after the fact. Here are four areas that were bolted on that should be part of your secure email basics.

Utilize MFA, for real

We have beat on this drum for over five years now, and people are still not using it.

The remote work shift puts the management of devices, applications, and data front and center in the security discussion. The firewall, local Active Directory, and VPN solutions typically don't scale or take into account the vast number of variables when users want to work from any device at any time.

Collaboration is the act of working with someone to produce or create something. In today's workplace the words "in real time" need to be added to this. Sending emails back and forth is not collaboration, and it is certainly not productive! When working remotely it is critical to standardize on a collaboration application across your organization.

The impact of technology in urgent and primary care clinics can make provider's patient encounters better, or a frustrating exercise in attempting to get everything put into the EHR correctly! Ideally the technology sits in the background and is seamlessly integrated with the clinic workflows.

Business communication is and will continue to be based on direct human interaction. The massive switch to online video conferencing has confirmed this during the COVID-19 situation. Voice is also a critical communication tool that is often taken for granted or not properly planned for.

No matter how good your technology plan was going into 2020, it is time to recalibrate it. The business environment has permanently changed and will not be going back to "how it was" with or without COVID-19. Thousands of workers shifted to #wfh for the first time, and guess what? They were MORE productive than they have ever been.

Data loss is something we all know happens but many don't like to talk about. We all assume it won't happen to us if we just look after our devices but the reality is that it could happen to anyone, at any time. Whether hacking takes place or we accidentally damage our devices there's a chance we're unable to recover the data we had stored in these devices.

There are many features of Microsoft 365 that some users don't know exists as part of their subscription. In fact, a lot of individuals with access to this plan are aware it includes all Office applications, Microsoft Teams, and OneDrive, but not much else.