As business communications become more efficient and streamlined, many companies are gravitating toward UCaaS or Unified Communications as a Service to meet their needs. Unified communications combine a variety of enterprise communications channels like voice, video, team messaging, voicemail, personal messaging, and content sharing.
If you own a small business, there's a good chance you try and handle your IT issues or maybe use a teammate with techie knowledge when problems come up. But, managed IT services can be more beneficial than you imagine. Managed IT services refer to using a third party to take care of your information technology services.
Keeping your network secure is no longer a “nice-to-have” service, or even a service you invest in but know is unlikely to be truly tested. Even the smallest of firms are now targets of malicious attacks that seek to get your valuable data, shut down your website, or otherwise damage your network.
Unified communications is a strategy that has been quickly adopted by larger companies, and it has many benefits for small and medium-sized firms too. Unified communications means having one system that encompasses all of the different ways that people in your firm communicate with other people, sometimes only inside of your firm, but sometimes with your customers, vendors, and other business contacts as well.
When it seems like the largest businesses in your industry are outpacing you, you’re likely to feel the lag in IT as well. It can be challenging to manage your own IT services as a small or medium-sized business. But managed IT services can help you keep up, and stay up-to-date, even if you do not have the in-house talent or resources, or time to build out your own internal IT department.
As the world becomes more reliant on digital technology, data gathered and stored on servers becomes more valuable. Because of this, like anything that holds value, data centers become juicier targets of malicious intent. For example, there’s a rise in cybercriminals using malware that allows them to keep data hostage for ransom, essentially paralyzing the business until the crooks are paid off.
If cybersecurity threats weren’t already enough of a headache, resistant cybersecurity threats are more significant problems. Whenever a weakness in a digital system is discovered, patches are released to secure it. But just like in modern medicine, sometimes a cure for a virus doesn’t work as intended or can lead to other problems.
According to the Microsoft Security Intelligence team, Office 365 customers have reportedly been receiving phishing emails meant to fool them into giving OAuth permissions to a fraudulent app, which then allows hackers to take control of customer email accounts.