WatchPoint Solutions Blog

You want the money you invest into your business technology to come back in the form of productivity and value, but how often would you say this is true for your business? If the answer is “less than I’d like,” then you might need to reexamine your IT spending and adjust it in a way that makes a difference for your business’ needs and goals. Today, we’ll examine what your infrastructure is trying to tell you and how you can make better spending decisions to make the most of your budget.

Your IT infrastructure is just like your car; it’s easy to put off maintenance when everything is going well, but the second your dashboard lights up, you know your wallet is in for a hurtin’. You don’t need this kind of stress in your life—for both your car and your IT—and the solution is simpler than you might think.

Small businesses put a lot of effort into building their companies. Over the years, you’ve cultivated relationships with customers and vendors, built innovative new products and solutions, and collected vast amounts of data.

What would you do if it all of a sudden vanished—poof—into thin air?

Starting or running a business without buckets of cash is tough. Every dollar has to work hard, and tech decisions can feel overwhelming. Do you usually go with the cheapest thing? Do you think you have a choice? The good news is you don’t need deep pockets to make smart tech choices; you just need a strategy.

If you’re an entrepreneur trying to build your business without bleeding money, today’s blog will be a must-read.

Crises happen. Whether it’s a natural disaster, a cyberattack, or just plain human error, unexpected problems can throw your business off track. The best way to handle them? Be prepared. Let’s go over what a solid crisis plan looks like and how you can protect your business when things go sideways.

Downtime is a business killer, and if you’re not actively monitoring your network to keep it to a minimum, you’re doing yourself and your business a disservice. Downtime can be defined as any time when your organization is not operating as it’s supposed to, and it must be controlled at all costs. Otherwise, you’ll run into the following three issues that are difficult to deal with.

Water is often used as a cooling agent for hardware solutions, including gaming PCs, data centers, and other powerful hardware systems. A business can use similar cooling methods for its entire building. In fact, Microsoft wants to implement a similar style of cooling for its data centers.

In project management, there is a framework called the “iron triangle” that helps you balance the costs, time, and quality of your project’s outcome. While this term is most frequently used to showcase how each of these variables impact the others, it can also be helpful to illustrate why it’s helpful to have someone else work with your IT. You can strategically implement outsourced IT services to make maintaining this delicate balance between cost, time, and quality more palatable.

One of the most important decisions you’ll make for your business is how it manages communications. These days, you have advanced tools that can help you do more with less. Today, we’re covering one of those tools—Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)—and how you can leverage its powerful telephony capabilities to level up your business game.

Technology is important to almost every organization nowadays. Still, depending on their situation, they may run into problems acquiring the technology that truly allows them to get over the hump and be as efficient as they possibly can be. Let’s take a look at three ways you can stretch your IT budget.

Businesses need a way to manage and maintain their technology, and if they don’t have internal IT departments, they might resort to outsourcing their IT outright. However, even businesses with technology professionals can benefit from working with a managed service provider. This approach, called co-managed IT, presents opportunities for considerable benefit.

While you’re reflecting over the past year of business, it’s time to also consider what your future will consist of from an operational perspective. By reducing the organizational clutter on your network, you might find that you’re paying for and hosting a lot of applications that are completely unnecessary—something that needlessly strains your bottom line.

The Right to Repair movement has evolved from a simple idea into a full-fledged campaign, with numerous states enacting measures to enhance the rights of consumers and businesses who use various technologies daily. Let's take a moment to assess the current status of this movement and explore what it means for businesses.

Businesses are increasingly reliant on technology, and effectively managing IT support costs has become crucial. With approximately three to six percent of a company's revenue allocated to technology expenses, exceeding the monthly budget can have adverse repercussions on the ability to allocate funds elsewhere.

Printing has been a major part of most businesses for a long time. It’s how ideas were shared for decades. The past couple, however, have seen the need for printed resources go way down, but that often doesn’t stop businesses from wasting useful capital on unnecessary printing. This month, we thought we’d give you three tips to help you reduce your printing costs, month after month.

Right to Repair has grown from a simple philosophy to a legitimate movement, with numerous states legislating measures to boost the rights of the consumers and businesses who ultimately pay for and use different pieces of technology every day. Let’s take a few moments to evaluate where the movement stands currently, as well as review what the right to repair would mean for businesses.

While the cloud has long been touted as a cost-effective catch-all for a business’s needs, it needs to be said that this isn’t always the reality…specifically, the cost-effective part. Some circumstances can lead to the cost of the cloud being too expensive for a business to wisely invest in it for its needs. Let’s talk about how the value that can be gained from the cloud can be gauged, and how this data can help you.

The IoT—the Internet of Things—has proven itself to be valuable to various industries in equally varied ways. This value comes from the increased insights into the business’ utilities and how cost controls can be implemented to improve the management thereof. Let’s discuss how this works.

Artificial intelligence has gone through several developments in recent years, and with these developments come many concerned workers who think they might be out of a job as a result. With AI now moving into more practical and usable mediums, like writing, these fears are only reinforced and perpetuated by the Turing Test, which can measure the intelligence of a computer.

Businesses have been taking advantage of the cloud for some time now, and nine out of ten businesses operating today are using the cloud’s capabilities in some way or another. We feel confident enough to say that the future will certainly involve cloud hosting. Let’s look at some of the statistics and business trends to see how far the cloud has come, and how you could be taking advantage of it if you aren’t already.