Coleman Technologies Blog

One of the most asked questions we get is “How can you help us save money?” It’s the priority for anyone looking to outsource anything. So, naturally it has to be one of the first questions answered. In today’s blog, we’ll go through three ways that our brand of managed IT services functions to save our clients money.

Avoiding Downtime

One of the best ways we can save any organization money is to keep their operations functioning efficiently. We do this in many ways. First, we assess your business to find if you can make any immediate improvements to keep your business’ technology running more effectively. That includes replacing hardware, software, and strategies, and adding tools that will make your business more efficient. The more efficient your technology runs, the more you can get done. This productivity boost will increase revenue and bring more money into the organization.

After that, we use our state-of-the-art tools and organizational technology acumen to ensure that all the technology you do run is working. Every system on your network has a purpose, and if any of them go down—even for a few minutes—it can cost your business a lot in terms of money and negative reputation. Our monitoring platform keeps a finger on the pulse of your business’ IT, ensuring optimal uptime around the clock.

Finally, cyberattacks and other disasters can put a lot of pressure on your business. That’s why it’s important to do what you can to have a strategy to ensure continuity should you be unfortunate enough to have to deal with a cyberattack directly. Our comprehensive service can help in multiple ways. First, we can ensure all of your organization’s data is backed up so that should you need to restore your data, it is available. Second, we can outfit your network with all the tools available to keep your business secure. We also can recommend an end-user training platform that effectively gets your staff to be a proactive part of your ongoing cybersecurity strategy.

Keeping Your Eyes on the Prize

Very few entrepreneurs are IT experts. Hiring an in-house IT team can be extremely rewarding, but getting top talent can be difficult and expensive. Most businesses have found that outsourcing their IT management is a cost-effective alternative that covers all of their IT needs and allows them to shift focus to other matters crucial to the success of their business. 

Vendor relationships are crucial for every business, but they can command a lot of time. The last thing any business owner needs is more demands on their time. We manage compliance, acquisitions, and just about any situation with your technology vendors, taking another time-consuming task off your plate.

Things change fast in business; sometimes, you fear the worst when outsourcing such a critical part of your business to an outside vendor. We offer a comprehensive ticketing system that allows us to schedule our team to remediate any technology concerns you have quickly. We also feature a number of valuable support options that make it easy to handle any technology issue your business could have.

If you would like to have a conversation about how our services are well-positioned to save your business and how we can tailor a service plan to your business, give us a call today at (604) 513-9428.

With remote work remaining popular, employees can benefit from flexibility and work-life balance, but at the cost of certain challenges on the business side. The big one is security, as your network ends up spread out across multiple locations rather than siloed in-house. Here are three rules you should consider when planning out how to approach remote work.

Protect Your At-Home Wi-Fi

Security at home is non-negotiable for the remote worker.

If you haven’t already equipped your wireless network with a strong password, you should do so immediately. Additionally, you should change the default name and password if you haven’t done so already, as manufacturers will share this information online in case users need to find it. Be sure that your wireless network is also using the latest Wi-Fi security protocol—if this sounds foreign to you, just let us know and we’ll be happy to explain it to you.

This next solution helps to protect data while it’s moving to and from your network.

Implement a Virtual Private Network

With a VPN, you can keep your data secure even on an unsecured wireless network, making it valuable for a remote or traveling employee.

A VPN creates a secure, encrypted tunnel connecting your business’ infrastructure to the employee’s device. If a hacker tries to steal or monitor data while it travels along the network, they’ll see an encrypted bundle of data. A VPN is a solid tool that can help your business conduct operations from anywhere, even in places like airports and coffee shops where you cannot guarantee the safety of the wireless network.

Managing Mobile Devices

With so many devices accessing your network, it becomes important that you have a way to manage them.

Since you have smartphones, laptops, desktops, tablets, and other devices accessing your network, you’ll want a comprehensive way to manage them all and keep tabs on them. First, you’ll want to keep software updated, including their operating systems and antivirus/antimalware tools. You’ll also want to keep their password updated and ensure they have implemented multi-factor authentication to protect against theft or account stealing.

Don’t let security hold you back from remote possibilities. Learn more by calling us today at (604) 513-9428.

It doesn’t matter if your workplace is your typical office space or if it is remote. There will always be factors that can contribute to burnout. These struggles are not exclusive to the location of the office, and if left unchecked they can impact work performance, productivity, mental health, and so on. It’s important that you have coping mechanisms and strategies in place to address burnout before it becomes too severe to counter.

Let’s go over some of the ways you can encourage employees to prioritize their own mental health to reduce burnout from the workplace.

Minimizing Burnout

Here are some strategies you can use to keep burnout at bay.

Stop, Take a Breath, and Focus

If enough pressure builds up, you’re going to break, no matter how strong-willed you are. You need a break every once in a while. It’s important that you make your breaks as impactful as possible by taking a moment to clear your mind of all the clutter and take slow, deep breaths. Once you’re ready, you can get back to work.

Encourage Communications Across Departments

People rely on others to help them get their jobs done, so you should be prepared to ask for help from other departments or other people at your company to handle tasks as needed. You shouldn’t isolate yourself and your tasks from others who might help you get things done in a more efficient or stress-free way.

Be sure to establish clear lines of communication with other departments so when the time comes for collaboration, you’ll know exactly who to talk to and when. Collaboration lightens the workload for all, and it can reduce burnout in spades.

Consider Low-Pressure Hobbies

Some people bring their work home with them, so to speak, when they use their personal time and space to work or worry about work. This kind of stress can wear people down over time and create burnout.

We recommend that all employees have hobbies and interests outside of the workplace so they can get their mind off things when they need to. This will help to mitigate burnout and help them do things they enjoy.

Implement Procedures to Help with Stress

One of the best things you can do for your workplace is to implement procedures that take the stress out of work. You can streamline processes by automating them and reducing the margin for error, allowing employees to invest that time in better, less stressful and more meaningful work, thereby reducing stress further.

Combat Burnout Before You Get Burned

If you keep your team engaged in their work, burnout will eventually become a factor, so take steps now to keep it in check. Coleman Technologies can help you in this effort by making sure that technology struggles don’t exacerbate the problem. To learn more, call us at (604) 513-9428.

As we’re in the midst of Q3 of 2023, common wisdom says that now is about the time that small businesses should be planning their budgets for the next fiscal year. As such, if you haven’t already done so, it’s time to give managed IT services some serious consideration.

Let’s review what it is that makes managed services so budget-friendly.

First, Managed Services are Designed to Be Inherently Scalable 

One great way to eat through your IT budget is to invest in more than your business needs—maintaining more subscriptions to various services than your staffing requires, for instance. A managed service provider can help you avoid this kind of overinvestment by ensuring that you have precisely the resources you need, working with your vendors firsthand to ensure that you are limiting your overspending, and even negotiating better deals for your business. 

Second, Managed Services are Very Inclusive, in Terms of Their Offerings

By virtue of their business model, a managed service provider is motivated to fulfill as many needs as possible. In addition to offering you comprehensive remote and in-person support as circumstances demand, most managed service providers will interface with your vendors on your behalf, taking advantage of the combined needs of their entire client base to get special deals… passing the savings on to you.

That’s not all, either. Many MSPs will work with you to develop a roadmap for your technology to follow as your needs change and your company ideally grows, helping you grow your business without spending capital on unnecessary investments.

Third, Managed Services are Convenient, Which Adds Value

Time, as they say, is money. The longer any number of your team is prevented from working at their highest level of productivity, the more money you’re watching go down the drain. This is what makes the all-hours accessibility of your MSP so invaluable. You have the comfort of knowing that your network is being watched at all hours, allowing you to focus more of your work time on other tasks, and your personal time on your own rest and recuperation.

Plus, managed services allow your team members to quickly and conveniently access IT assistance whenever it may be needed, to any degree. This means that your team will no longer need to wait around for assistance when they need it—they’ll have a trusted provider waiting in the wings to help.

Fourth, Managed Services are Proactive, Which Helps Eliminate Additional Spending

Which sounds like a better way for your team to spend their time: constantly calling support for assistance with frustrating little issues, or simply getting their work done without issues interfering with their productivity? Hopefully, you answered with the second option, which is precisely what the proactive nature of an MSP’s services help to facilitate.

The better your technology is maintained, the longer it will ultimately last and assist your business, with fewer repair costs and not needing replacement nearly as often. When all is said and done, paying a consistent and predictable cost to keep your IT working will always be simpler to budget than crossing your fingers and paying as issues arise.

If It Wasn’t Already Clear, We Recommend that You Consider What Managed Services Could Do for Your Budget

We’re more than happy to answer any questions you may have about our services, too, and how they could prove to be a more friendly option where your operational costs are concerned. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at (604) 513-9428 to learn more.

Across the board, modern businesses rely on no small amount of technology to support their operations, making it key that you, one, have the technology your operations require, and two, have the means to keep this technology operational. Fortunately, managed services help you by providing both. Let’s review what managed services are, and how they work.

Managed Services are the Next Level of Outsourced IT Support

Traditionally, a business seeking assistance with its technology would either have to rely on any internal team members to fulfill their needs, or turn to an external provider to do so by coming in to service their equipment. Nowadays, there’s a third option.

Managed services shift the focus of IT maintenance away from repair and instead focus on mediation, working proactively to prevent issues whenever possible through modern remote monitoring and maintenance activities. As a result, the downtime that was inherently a part of the other methods can be largely avoided.

For a predictable monthly fee, you’ll have an entire team keeping an eye on your business’ technology, catching issues and spotting signs of impending threats before they manifest. This translates to increased productivity and employee efficacy.

A managed service provider also assists a business in its future technology planning, considering where its technology currently stands and designing a strategy focused on improvement and growth over time.

In a Very Real Way, This Makes Managed Services an Easy Way of Expanding Your Business’ Capabilities

To be honest, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what managed services can do for your business, and we’d love to have the opportunity to discuss it with you in more detail. Please give us a call at (604) 513-9428 to learn more about the benefits of a managed service agreement.

When times get tough, businesses are pretty quick to start cutting costs wherever they can…and frequently, the business’ IT is the first thing to hit the chopping block.

While we contend that IT is the last thing you want to cut back on when times are tough, you may not have a choice. Therefore, we wanted to take a few moments to explore how you can resist some of these cuts—and if not, what you need to prioritize.

Let’s begin with why you should avoid cutting your IT spending if you can help it.

Let Me Ask You This: Would You Fire Your Most Effective Employee if You Were Downsizing?

Cutting your IT spending is effectively doing just that—for modern businesses, IT can often be seen as another employee, and one who accomplishes a considerable amount for your business each and every day. If you were to really take a deep dive into the benefits that your IT provides to your business, we’d be willing to bet that your IT does a lot more than you might have considered without taking that deep dive.

Therefore, if you “fire” your business’ technology by cutting down on its budget, you’re quite literally hindering one of your most effective business resources. So, what do you do if you have no choice but to downsize your IT budget?

How to Downsize Your Budget without Hurting Your IT

First, you need to properly identify which IT metrics should be focused on, as there is a huge difference between suspending a potential technology after a failed stress test and suspending a reliable and proven function that provides measurable value. Otherwise, you could potentially create what is called a false economy—perceived savings that result in higher costs later on.

It’s also important to acknowledge that some costs simply should not be cut, like technology refreshes. While it may be tempting to do so, the relative value that these investments bring make them too valuable to sacrifice.

If You Need to Minimize Your Budget While Still Getting the Most Value, Consider Managed IT Services

I know, I know… the advice for trimming a budget being to add another service may sound crazy, but there are a few ways that working with an MSP can prove to be a great cost-saving investment.

First of all, you need to consider that signing on with a managed service provider is effectively the equivalent of hiring an entire IT department for a predictable monthly cost. An MSP also gives you easy access to better deals from vendors and more advanced IT tools that allow you to accomplish more with less. Cloud-delivered services, virtualized tools and software, and remote-enabling technologies can all have a positive impact on your expenses.

My team and I would love to discuss this with you further, so if you need assistance in streamlining your IT to better fit your available budget, please give Coleman Technologies a call at (604) 513-9428.

Stuff happens, and this stuff can often be bad. That’s an inescapable part of life, especially if you’re trying to run a successful business. That said, the consequences of this bad stuff can usually be minimized—if not mitigated entirely—when you have a proper disaster recovery strategy.

Let’s review what goes into preparing this kind of strategy in the most effective way and what makes it so crucial.

Why Do Businesses Need a Disaster Recovery Plan?

Isn’t the idea to avoid disasters?

While yes, it is always preferable for things to go smoothly, we said it above… stuff happens. This stuff can come in all shapes and sizes, too.

• Weather events can interfere with your operations and potentially lead to infrastructure damage.
• Fires, floods, and other mishaps can also damage your infrastructure.
• Cyberattacks and bugs can render your technology inaccessible.
• Power or Internet outages can prevent many processes from being accomplished.
• Health events can prevent people from coming to the office.

If you’ll take note, none of these are particularly predictable events, and there’s a limit to how much you can do to prevent some of them. This means you ultimately need to be prepared to deal with any of them efficiently and effectively—and, should something happen regardless of your preparations, to have a means of bouncing back into action.

That is the purpose of your disaster recovery plan. It allows you to react swiftly and appropriately in response to any event that could cause business disruption and downtime. As an additional bonus, it can help make these recovery processes less expensive. This is a real benefit when you’re also contending with the compounding costs of downtime.

Plus, many business compliance standards require such preparations to be in place, so designing a disaster recovery plan can assist you in meeting your business’ essential benchmarks.

What Does a Comprehensive Disaster Recovery Strategy Require?

Implementing a disaster recovery strategy requires several steps. First, your business must account for every potential risk it may face, conducting a risk assessment to evaluate the likelihood of each and then determining each risk's business impact.

Other key metrics to consider include your recovery time objective, which is how long your business can sustain downtime but still be able to recover, and your recovery point objective, which establishes how much data your business could theoretically lose before it fails (which informs you how far back you should go when saving backups).

We can assist your business in doing all this and more, helping them stay secure and productive even in the face of disaster. To learn more about disaster recovery and overall business continuity, give us a call at (604) 513-9428.

We will always reinforce how critical it is for everyone in any workplace to have a grasp of cybersecurity best practices, regardless of their role or responsibilities. However, based on a survey conducted by UK-based cybersecurity firm Ramsac, this baseline is not being met by a long shot.

Why do we say this? Simple: this survey revealed that one in three adults failed a cybersecurity test designed for 11-year-olds.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Let’s consider what this suggests about the state of modern business cybersecurity.

Ramsac’s Results Speak Volumes

The survey that Ramsac administered was simple enough: before an IT website could be accessed, a user—in this case, decision-makers in their organizations and fields—needed to answer five basic cybersecurity questions.

Again, these were questions designed for 11-year-olds to answer successfully.

What the Results Revealed

There were some troubling trends brought to light in the responses.

Malware seemed to trip up the most people, with 15 percent answering incorrectly. Phishing bamboozled 13 percent of respondents, and 21 percent did not know how to protect themselves against these scams (which, as a reminder, are among the most common attacks out there). General cybersecurity awareness was slightly better, with just under seven percent missing these questions.

How to Increase Your Business’ Security

While there are tons of tools and technologies to help boost your protection, you can make a big difference relatively quickly in a few simple ways.

Apply Updates

Updates are frequently created to resolve existing security issues. Keeping your technology updated will help keep you safer from vulnerabilities.

Team Training

One of your biggest security challenges will always be the people you have working for and with you. Training them and evaluating their preparedness to detect threats will help reduce the issues you ultimately face.

Endorse Communication

Encourage your team to speak up if they have any questions or concerns, particularly when security may be impacted. Asking the right questions at the right moment could be the difference between security and a breach.

Cybersecurity is Everyone’s Responsibility

We can help you protect your business from threats of all kinds, implementing many of the above tools to your advantage. Learn more by calling (604) 513-9428.

If there’s one thing that helps businesses establish consistent policies and strategy, it’s a good framework. You can use a framework for anything, including network security. Today, we want to walk you through the cybersecurity protection standards as they are outlined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology so you can better protect your business.

The NIST framework has five parts: identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover.

Identify Threats

You can’t protect against a threat you don’t understand, period.

Businesses must first identify threats and how they might strike against various assets and resources. For example, you need to understand the hardware and software that keeps your business running, as well as how the supply chain impacts acquiring these resources. Furthermore, your business needs to adhere to regulatory guidelines, and you must take steps to ensure that your supply chain is not interrupted by potential threats.

It might not seem useful to know in the context of cybersecurity, but knowing what you need to protect, as well as what you are protecting against, helps you determine risk and the appropriate steps forward.

Protect Against Threats

Now that you know what your cybersecurity situation demands, you can implement the following preventative solutions:

• Access controls help minimize the risk of unauthorized access to your data and infrastructure.
• Similarly, data security helps keep critical information available to those needing it while maintaining its confidentiality otherwise.
• Establishing regular and proactive maintenance practices to ensure all updates are in place and devices experience optimal uptime.
• Training staff as appropriate based on their level of permission.

We’ll add our two cents to the conversation by recommending something not on the radar of the NIST—business continuity—as it’s important to know your business' bare minimum operating standards.

Detect Threats

It’s not a question of if you get targeted by cyberattacks, but when.

While you can protect your business as much as you want, sooner or later, you’re going to have to be ready to handle an attack aimed right at your business. The solutions you implement should be able to send you warning signs and alerts so you can take action in the moment. Furthermore, these alerts help you ensure that your solutions are actually working as they should be.

If you don’t detect threats as they target your business, you’re asking for trouble.

Respond to Threats

The goal of cybersecurity is to catch, detect, and respond to threats so they have a minimal impact on your operations.

Naturally, this is a high-stress event, so you want to have an iron-clad policy to turn to just for situations like these. Not only do you need to mitigate the issue in question, but you also need to be ready to respond to the many other residual threats and the problems they might invite. Throughout the entire process, you’ll want to remain in touch with anyone who might be impacted, such as customers, vendors, or employees, as well as your local law enforcement.

Following an attack, you’ll want to take a look at your network and collect as much information on the attack as possible, as arming yourself with this knowledge can help you better protect it in the future.

Recover from Threats

The challenge continues long after you’ve eliminated threats as you work to recover from the incident.

For one, you need to get your interrupted services back in operating order with the help of a business continuity plan. You’ll want to have clear, actionable steps in place that you can follow to get your company back on track following a cybersecurity incident. Be intentional about using this backup strategy to recover your critical systems, then improve them so that another issue doesn’t occur later down the line.

Keep your stakeholders informed of the recovery process, too, as your customers, staff, and other partners will want to know how it’s going.

Take Your Security Seriously

Five steps might seem like a lot, but this should serve to showcase just how important this is to your business’ longevity.

Rather than react to a cybersecurity crisis, you should have solid strategies and systems in place beforehand. This will help to ensure you’re not caught unawares. Keep in mind that you have trusted IT resources at Coleman Technologies whom you can rely on for any and all security needs.

To learn more, call us today at (604) 513-9428.

Mindset is important regardless of what someone is doing, but it plays an especially important part in the workplace. This only becomes more true when that workplace is distributed, and work is actually done in the worker’s home.

Let’s go into the kind of perspective you want to encourage in your team as they utilize remote work.

A Positive and Resilient Mindset will Help Your Team and Company Alike

Just a few years ago, the University of Zurich released a study wherein the attitude people had going into remote work had measurable impacts on the outcomes they experienced. Specifically, the researchers were attempting to measure how much impact a more black-and-white viewpoint on whether or not an individual can be successful while working remotely has on their productivity.

As it turns out, there’s a very strong correlation between whether or not people feel remote work is an inherent capability or an acquired skill and their ability to work remotely. By polling 113 knowledge-based workers each week over a period of five weeks, the study showed that the perspective each worker had regarding remote work had a direct impact on their productivity. 

In essence, a worker’s attitude toward remote work served as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Similarly, it is important to remember that—while a lot of remote work can be done to benefit the employee—a lot of remote work may be done out of necessity. Just look at the events of a few years ago for a prime example of such circumstances. In these cases, it is important that your team is also able to be resilient in the face of these matters. Not only does resilience make it easier to respond to these stressors, but it also makes it easier for us to solve problems, work with others, and be productive in various situations.

You Want to Foster Positive Remote Work Habits in Your Team

Resilience and positivity are soft skills you want your employees to have. So, how can you help them develop them?

Build Trust

This is really a two-way street. You and your employees need to mutually trust each other not to take advantage of the situation—you need to trust them not to slack off, and they need to trust you not to blur the line between work and home and expect more of them as a result.

To create this trust, your expectations and goals must be communicated clearly, and you need to understand how your employee expects remote work to play out.

Enable Your Team to Work

If you want your employees to work successfully, they will have to trust that the tools you have provided them will be there for them. We’ve all felt the frustration that comes from trying to accomplish things with tools that aren’t doing the job we need them to do. Just like your remote workers need you to support them, they also need you to support the technology they rely on.

Encourage Communication

We’ve all seen the value that communication offers businesses and the employees that make them up in the office, so it should come as no surprise that communication needs to be equally prioritized in a distributed workplace. It can be too easy for remote employees to be forgotten or isolated, especially if it isn’t an organization-wide thing. Both you and your employees need to take the initiative to reach out and involve everyone in the workplace.

We’re Here to Help

We mentioned that your team needs to be able to rely on their technology, regardless of where they are working. If this is a hurdle to you fully utilizing remote work and enjoying its benefits, Coleman Technologies is here to help. Our managed services allow us to ensure a business’ technology is operational and optimized for its needs, regardless of whether it is being used in the office, remotely, or in a hybrid environment. We can even help you manage that aspect.

Give us a call to learn more at (604) 513-9428.

Happy New Year! It’s officially that time when we all make resolutions meant to help improve ourselves, so why not include your business? Better yet, why not make business resolutions that you’re more likely to keep?

Let’s explore some of the ways that you can design your business’ resolutions to maximize the likelihood that you’ll keep them and benefit from them in the long term.

Design Your Goals Intelligently

“Work smarter, not harder.” It’s solid advice, and especially could show its utility as you try to make changes in the new calendar year. Are your processes clear, and crucially, are the outcomes they are designed to reach optimized for success?

This is where something known as SMART goals are useful. The SMART goals framework is a formula by which the most effective goals can be created, because these goals are designed to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. What is it that you intend to accomplish, by exact guidelines, and is possible to accomplish in a set time that will ultimately benefit your business?

By framing all of your goals in this way, you can prime yourself and your team to accomplish them more effectively.

Involve Your Team

Speaking of your team, you may want to commit some focus to bringing your team more into the fold as you strategize your goals. This will help you create goals that ensure that they remain engaged and comfortable while they work.

One way to do this is to promote the idea of shared responsibility in the workplace. Try to create resolutions that everyone can take part in, working together to collaboratively accomplish a goal. For your part, you should also resolve to readily provide employees with opportunities for professional growth and development. The more your team is able to do, the more your business can do… and the more engaged your team members will be, especially when there’s a clear path for them to improve.

It also benefits you and your business to provide your team with various wellness benefits and work/life balance-based perks. Providing opportunities to your team will make them more likely to stick around and enjoy them.

Break Down Your Goals into Steps

So, you’ve figured out a goal.

Now what?

While having a goal is an important part of improving your business, it’s only going to get you so far without a strategy that helps you progress toward that goal. Analyzing your objectives and determining how to accomplish them will make it easier to do so.

Try subdividing some of these larger tasks into their smaller parts, making an overwhelming prospect much more manageable and approachable. This also makes it easier to adjust different parts of your plan to improve the outcome that results from it.

Keep Track of Your Progress

On the topic of adjusting your strategies over time, it is much easier to do so when you have historical data to rely on. Make sure that you are keeping records that describe the progress you’ve made and the challenges you’ve encountered. Having this information will put you in a better position to improve your overall performance. Plus, it enables you to keep up your team’s motivation by celebrating the successes this data brings to light.

It also helps to seek out feedback from various parties in order to get the benefit of numerous perspectives. One person’s role—for instance, your own—may not give you a critical insight that strongly impacts the end result of your efforts. Crowdsourcing viewpoints from your team can give you a fuller, more accurate picture of whatever it is you are trying to accomplish, allowing you to more effectively make any changes or improvements.

Use Technology that Supports Your Goals

When you consider that Coleman Technologies is one of the most dedicated managed service providers in British Columbia, it was only a matter of time before we referred to your business’ IT. However, that doesn’t make it any less true that utilizing the right technology makes it far easier to accomplish your objectives, including those related to your New Year’s resolution.

You wouldn’t use a hammer to measure how big a piece of furniture was any more than you would use a tape measure to set some nails. The same goes for the information technology that your business puts to use—matching its purpose to the objective you’re trying to meet will make your job (and by extension, your life) much simpler.

We Can Empower Your Business Resolutions with Our IT Services

Let’s face it: New Year’s resolutions are hard to stick to. Fortunately, you don’t have to commit to your business’ new strategies without help. Coleman Technologies can be there to provide the IT services and solutions that can help with all of the steps we mentioned here, as well as any others your business may require. Give us a call at (604) 513-9428 to learn more.

Remote work has seen unprecedented adoption in the past few years. While we’re all for the benefits that this trend brings, it is critical that any business that embraces remote or hybrid work does so securely.

Let’s discuss a few measures that your business can and should implement to achieve this security.

How to Secure Your Remote Operations

Let’s review some of the most key safeguards that anyone working remotely should have in place.

Use a Virtual Private Network

Which sounds like the more secure option to you: your organization’s protected and monitored network infrastructure, or your second-favorite coffee shop’s GENERIC-5G network, with password coffeebeans247 scrawled on a chalkboard for its patrons to use?

If you answered the latter, please give us a call right now, because we need to have a serious talk about cybersecurity. 

Of course a properly maintained network is going to be more secure, but what happens if you need to get some work done while you’re waiting on and/or sipping your macchiato? The smart answer is to use a VPN, which encrypts your connection and shields its contents from spying eyes, while allowing your team members to safely access the materials you’ve saved on your network.

The use of a VPN should be enforced wherever a remote worker happens to be operating from, whether that’s at home, away on a business trip, or if taking a working lunch at a cafe.

Only Use Approved, Secure Devices and Software

On a related note, it is important that wherever your team members might be operating from, they are using the right tools to do so. Unapproved technology being used for business purposes without IT’s knowledge or approval—given the ominous designation of shadow IT—brings a variety of issues with it. Not only do you not have any form of control over the device or the data stored on it, there are compliance issues to be considered. 

The same goes for software. If your team members aren’t using the software that you’ve designated they use, instead seeking out alternatives online and downloading potentially dangerous data packets, you are vulnerable to some serious issues and compliance concerns.

This makes it paramount that you provide your team with access and support for the exact tools you want them to use.

Maintain Your Equipment and Software

It’s also critical that the tools your team members are using are kept in proper working order, as this will not only make them more efficient, but more secure as well.

Your remote workers will need to have devices that are remotely monitored for threats and other issues, helping ensure that they remain secure even while they aren’t in the office under your watchful eye. The same goes for the software that gives these devices some direction—threats are actively being developed to undermine it, so it is important that you are just as diligent in keeping these devices up to date. We can use the same remote monitoring and maintenance software we use to manage your in-office devices to ensure your remote team is properly equipped.

Establish Basic Security Standards

We’ll never stop talking about how important it is for businesses to maintain their cybersecurity protections, and this importance is in no way diminished by remote work practices. More than ever, you need to ensure that your team is maintaining the cybersecurity standards you expect them to. Reinforce that they’re to abide by best practices—keeping an eye out for phishing, using secure passwords with multi-factor authentication, and others—and hold them to that expectation.

We’re Here to Help Businesses Operate Effectively and Securely, Regardless of Where Their Team Members are Working.

Give us a call at (604) 513-9428 to learn more about how we can assist you in making the most of your business’ technology.

For all the benefits that remote work offers, it does come with some challenges. Fortunately, there are different strategies that can be applied to help overcome them. Let’s break down something called structured problem solving, and how equipping your team members appropriately can help you with it.

What is Structured Problem-Solving?

Many business problems can seem large and unassailable—but I know I don’t need to tell you this. However, when something becomes so nebulous that it doesn’t seem to be approachable, it can be paralyzing. Again, you quite probably already know this.

Structured problem-solving is a technique that can help you address these issues. Basically, by dividing the massive problem into its core parts, it makes a complex conundrum far simpler to handle in a sustainable way.

One widely-implemented method to help improve existing processes is known as DMAIC—short for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control. This is a solid approach to take when problems are, as we’ve said, complex.

How Does DMAIC Work?

• Define which process it is that you are experiencing issues with, where your opportunities for improvement lie, and what goals you want to reach.
• Measure how well your process is performing.
• Analyze the process to identify where the shortcomings are.
• Improve upon the shortcomings by resolving what causes them.
• Control the newly devised process to ensure performance is maintained.

That’s pretty much it—and by applying this process to each variable, structured problem-solving can more or less be used to optimize any business process that you carry out.

One of Remote Work’s Biggest Problems: Communication

It’s not a secret that there’s a divide, both literal and figurative, between your in-house employees and those that are working remotely. When in the office, communications are almost laughably easy. Businesses will have multiple communication tools available, sure, but there’s also the fact that if two people in the office really needed to communicate, they could also just step aside and have a conversation.

Your remote employees don’t have that luxury. This creates an issue. So, following DMARC in this case, we can define the problem as the lack of communication that is shared between your employees. Likewise, we can define our goal as improving communication practices between employees in different locations. From there, we can measure how frequently your employees are communicating amongst the office as compared to in-house and remote.

Next, we should analyze where exactly this process—in this case, workplace communication—is failing. Are your employees up to speed on the tools available to them? Have you expressed the importance of maintaining communication between all coworkers, not just the ones in the office?

Once we’ve compiled this information, we come up with how to solve our challenges and put efforts in place to do so. Let’s say that we elect to hold training sessions to better introduce the team to the tools at their disposal, so there’s no longer ignorance to blame for a lack of communication. Our job is not done, however, as we then need to maintain some control over this revised process. Perhaps we then implement regular refresher training sessions to reinforce these behaviors over time…and that may or may not be enough to solve the communication issues. If so, great, and if not, the process repeats.

We Can Help Solve Problems on Your Behalf

There are bound to be enough issues in your business—in any business—for you to solve that removing any from your purview is sure to be beneficial. Working with us will remove your IT from the list of things you need to worry about, whether or not your team is working in-house, remotely, or a blend of the two. Give us a call at (604) 513-9428 to learn more about what we can do to simplify your daily processes through improved IT.

Today, IT is important for many things. It's not just a small part of a company… but how deeply is IT woven into modern workplace culture? Let's delve into how technology and culture coalesce in today's businesses.

Workplace IT Reliance Intertwines with Company Culture

The symbiotic relationship between workplace culture and IT is impossible to deny. Nowadays, most businesses heavily rely on IT in the workplace.

A company's culture affects how it uses technology. Technology can also impact a company's culture.

IT solutions help people communicate, work together, and get more done, which is important for a successful and happy work environment.

Communication and Collaboration

Nowadays, more people are working from home or traveling while working. As a result, teams need to use technology to stay connected. Video conferencing, instant messaging, project management tools, and cloud-based collaboration platforms have become normal workday processes. This technology helps companies improve their operations, even when employees are in different locations.

Similarly, workplace culture has changed due to how connected everything is now. Smart companies focus more on being flexible, responding quickly, and using technology to its fullest degree. This is especially true in terms of keeping coworkers more connected.

Productivity and Efficiency

Technology helps people communicate better and work faster. For businesses striving to remain competitive, the appropriate tools are crucial. 

IT solutions can do the boring work for businesses, so your team can spend more time on new ideas and planning. This breeds a culture that rewards creativity and problem-solving rather than one that is bogged down by repetitive work.

The Role of IT in Employee Engagement

A strong workplace culture engages and motivates its employees. Using technology to make work more fun and interesting can help employees become more involved and happy. 

Employees can become more engaged and improve the organization's culture by participating in games, using customized training programs, and receiving rewards. All of this can be done using technology.

Challenges and Considerations

Using IT has benefits, but making it a natural part of how people work can also be hard.

Security, privacy, and access issues can impact a company's use of technology. Businesses must address these concerns thoughtfully to maintain a positive culture.

Balancing Tech and Human Touch

IT is necessary in today's workplaces, but combining technology with human interaction is also important. Relying too much on technology at work can make people feel lonely and hurt their personal relationships. Companies must ensure that their technology helps people work together and support each other.

After all, technology is necessary for work. It helps us talk with each other and work together. It also keeps employees interested and involved. Businesses need to use IT to support their employees and create a culture that values technology and personal growth.

Coleman Technologies is here to help. Our managed IT services are designed to minimize the friction that IT issues cause and support your team’s collaboration capabilities. Give us a call at (604) 513-9428 to learn more.

One of the biggest arguments for remote work is that it poses environmental benefits, but how much truth is there to this statement? Today, we want to dive into the details and see if there is actually a solid benefit to working remotely—for the environment, at least. The answer might surprise you.

Remote Work Doesn’t Completely Eliminate Carbon Emissions

Remote work does remove the commute, and you’d think that this is enough to move the needle toward a more environmentally friendly working solution, but the answer isn’t that clear. There are other factors which also play into carbon emissions, more than gas mileage. There are numbers that could sway your opinion in either direction. On one hand, a look at April 2020’s emissions showed that they were reduced by about 17% worldwide compared to the prior year, but as you might imagine, those numbers have come up once again, even with people still working remotely.

Here are some other challenges which can complicate whether or not remote work is a more environmentally friendly approach.

Electricity

Even when your employees are working remotely, they are consuming electricity—just not from your office. In fact, their combined homes will likely use more electricity compared to your office. And how exactly is this energy being generated, anyway? Is it an environmentally friendly and sustainable way, or are the providers relying on fossil fuels? You can see how the answer gets a little murkier.

HVAC

The same thing can be said about heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. How much energy is being used to keep homes warm, cool, and ventilated, and how are these solutions being delivered? It’s easier for your business to control the office’s thermostat and impact the environment from one location compared to your workforce doing so from several different places.

Greater Hardware Needs

Laptops and mobile-friendly solutions are great for making your business more mobile, but if you haven’t already equipped your team with this technology, then you will have to procure it for them before the big shift to remote work. This means that there will be more waste created as a result of more technology being introduced to the world through the manufacturing process. And, of course, you can’t forget about e-waste, which is a big problem in its own right.

We don’t want to say that remote work is bad by any means, but whether it’s bad for the environment is actually up for debate, and the issue is not as clear-cut as you might think at first glance.

It’s Not All Doom and Gloom for Remote Work

There are plenty of great reasons to implement a remote work policy, but just understand that your primary one is probably not going to be to save the environment. A remote or hybrid work strategy can actually be remarkably effective, provided you have thought the whole thing through. Coleman Technologies can help you with this step. To learn more, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.

We hate to be the bad guy, but we’re certain that you cannot multitask nearly as well as you think you can. Multitasking is just not how the human brain works, and whether or not you believe in the psychology of it, we think you stand to benefit by outsourcing some of the tasks on your plate to a managed service provider.

Managed services are effective to help you spend less time on your IT and more time on your actual job duties and responsibilities.

The Proof is in the Proverbial Pudding

To put things in perspective, only about 2.5% of people can effectively multitask, so it’s highly unlikely that you are in the minority who can do so without compromising the quality of your work.

What you think is multitasking is really just your brain switching gears over and over, and the more complicated these tasks are, the less effective it is at switching between them. Your performance is sure to suffer if you can’t keep up.

How This Shows Up in the Workplace

It’s difficult at best to do multiple tasks at the same time, so let’s take a look at some of the tasks that might be pulling you away from your important work:

• Managing employees to ensure they are reaching your organizational and operational goals.
• Managing the public face of the company, including how you appear to the community, clients, and vendors.
• Ensuring compliance with laws and regulations.
• Managing the sales and marketing efforts of your organization.

Notice how we haven’t even mentioned IT on that list yet; it’s a whole other beast to tackle.

Managed IT Removes Some of the Burden on Your Business

Really, you shouldn’t be managing your technology anyway—you should be relying on a professional like Coleman Technologies. Give us a call today and we can discuss how it’s beneficial for you to work with us.

Cybersecurity has to be a big deal for any business that uses IT, and today, who doesn’t? When your employees don’t follow cybersecurity rules, it can put your business in danger, like getting hacked or losing money. The first step is to figure out why employees aren’t following the rules. This could happen because they don’t know the rules, haven’t been trained enough, or think the rules are too hard or take too much time. 

Once you understand what the problem is—whether it’s about not knowing, finding the rules too complicated, or resisting changes—you can fix it more easily and in a way that makes sense to them.

Prioritize Training

After figuring out why, it’s important to give employees the right kind of cybersecurity training. They need to know why protecting the company’s data is important and how their actions can keep it safe. The training should include real examples to help them understand the possible risks of not following the rules. Also, make sure to update the training often so employees learn about new threats and how to stay safe.

Choose the Right Procedures

Keeping the security rules clear and simple is another way to help employees follow them. If the rules are too complicated, they might try to find shortcuts, which can make things less safe. For example, if passwords are too hard to remember, employees might write them down, which is dangerous. Instead, make things easier by using tools like password managers and security apps that help them follow the rules without much effort.

Build Accountability

Holding people accountable is also important. Employees need to know there are consequences if they don’t follow cybersecurity rules. This doesn’t mean punishing them, but setting up a system where mistakes are fixed. Make sure employees know how to report security problems and create a safe environment where they aren’t scared to ask for help. You can also check regularly if they’re following the rules and give rewards for doing a good job.

Employees Should Feel Responsible

Making sure everyone feels responsible for cybersecurity is key. Employees should see it as something that affects the whole company, not just the IT team. Encourage teamwork between different departments, have leaders set a good example, and pick team members who are really good at following cybersecurity rules to help others. When everyone, from the bosses down to employees, works together to keep the business safe, it’s easier to protect against threats.

If your business needs help creating and maintaining a robust cybersecurity culture, the IT experts at Coleman Technologies can definitely help. Give us a call today at (604) 513-9428 to learn more.

Change is inevitable, especially in the dynamic world of business, where it is the driving force behind growth and innovation. Yet managing change can be a daunting task. It requires strategic planning, effective communication, and strong leadership.

This is where change management optimization comes into play. It's about refining your approach to change, making it more efficient and successful… particularly when it involves your IT and related processes.

Let’s explore the world of change management optimization to understand its significance, IT's role, and leadership's importance in driving change. By doing so, we’ll be able to hammer out a strategy that will ensure that your approach to change is well-matched to your business goals.

What is Change Management, and Why Does It Matter?

In essence, change management is the process required to ensure the success of any movement from one status quo to another. If you want your business to grow and adapt to changing circumstances over time, some aspects of change management will need to be incorporated into your operations.

To be absolutely clear, the nature of business today effectively guarantees that an organization that doesn’t invest time and energy into change management will ultimately slip behind its competition. It also risks internal strife, operational confusion, and hindered productivity.

However, successfully implementing change management can have some serious benefits:

• It helps make the entire process smoother and more likely to succeed.
• It helps reduce the negative impacts of change on your team members.
• It helps maintain communication and collaboration throughout the process.
• It helps make future changes easier for your team to adapt to and accept.

Innovating on Your IT is Important to Your Change Management Efforts

Unsurprisingly, putting the right technology tools in place makes change and change management much easier and can inspire more changes later. In this way, it isn’t unreasonable to say that any successful change management relies very much on having modern technology at your disposal, while implementing this technology will also require change management.

How to Match Change Management to Your Business Goals

Every business process is closely integrated with every other, so change management should run in tandem with the entire organization's objectives. What changes can you make that will advance your progress toward these objectives? Adopting this focus can make your change management efforts more effective.

You must also communicate the benefits of this change and the process to come with your entire team. Informing your team and answering questions also helps smooth the transition and keep everyone on track, engaged, and on board.

What Can Your IT Do to Boost Your Change Management Efforts?

You can use your technology to push your change management towards optimization in a few ways. For instance:

• Project management software can keep everyone on task as changes are implemented.
• Communication tools can smooth over potential pitfalls by ensuring everyone has the information needed when they need it.
• Data analytics can help you make better choices in directing your changes.
• Training platforms can make the transition easier for your team as they adopt new processes.

Change Management Should be an Ongoing Process

Technology is always changing, so change management is something that you always need to pursue. Don’t stop evaluating and improving your business routines and procedures, taking the time to evaluate your success based on the appropriate key performance indicators.

When planning your future changes, it never hurts to look back and evaluate what worked well in the past, either, as these trends can help inform your choices. Doing so can make your efforts more successful for your business.

The long and the short is that change management is critical for a business seeking to grow, and so it pays to invest in IT that can help you optimize your efforts. Coleman Technologies is here to help you do so.

Interested in learning more about the benefits of our managed IT services? Give us a call at (604) 513-9428.