Email is now an essential communication path between business and client. So, how do you know what kind of email service to choose for your business? Do you choose a free email provider or a paid email service?

Both styles of email providers come with advantages and disadvantages.

When browsing the internet, it's easy to run into offers for free IT risk assessments. But are they helpful and effective for your business? Or are they a sales pitch?

Some free assessments can indeed bring immediate, glaring dangers to light. However, these assessments are often ineffective in the long wrong due to the limited time and resources used.

Would you be all right if your business shut down for a week due to ransomware?

What would you do if a cybercriminal accessed employee emails and stole the contacts and information inside?

Do you know how to protect your business from cyberattacks like these?

When it comes to security, effective defensive measures are your best chance of preventing cyberattacks like ransomware and cyber extortion.

If your server goes down, do you know how to get your systems running again?

What happens to your data if your facility is damaged or unreachable?

What do you do when your business productivity drops because your IT system is down?

IT disaster recovery answers questions like these, allowing you to respond to system failures and minimize downtime.

What happens if your business productivity comes to a grinding halt?

For every hour of downtime, your company loses money and, sometimes, its reputation.

How would you minimize the downtime to come back online? How could you prevent this from happening in the future?

Fortunately, there are ways to prevent downtime, lost revenue, and damaged reputations.

What would you do if you turned off your computer and all your files were gone? What would you do if none of the programs worked or had also vanished?

This is stressful on a personal computer, but what if this happened on your work laptop? Or for your office?

Would you have to start from scratch? Or would you have copies of the data saved and ready to reinstall?

Backup and recovery systems safely store data from a designated timeframe in case data is erased or compromised.

Have you recently hired a developer to create software for you but find the lack of deadlines confusing? Or maybe your IT provider is working with strict deadlines, but you feel the lack of communication is frustrating?

These different approaches are due to two main project management styles: Waterfall and Agile.

What happens if, suddenly, one of your IT systems fails? Who do you call? How do you respond? How long until you can come back online and continue working?

If you don’t create response plans for IT system failures and emergencies, you could lose valuable data, time, reputation, and profits while gaining immense frustration.

When IT systems fail, companies lose profits until systems come back online. If data backups aren’t set up or fail, data vanishes, deleting hours, days, or even years of work and information.

So, what can organizations do to minimize downtime and protect data in a crisis?

Your company’s internal IT department or IT provider can help you create an incident response plan.

What would happen if your company’s main server suddenly stopped working? Productivity would come to a sudden halt. If you don’t have a backup server with a continuity plan, it can take hours or days to get back online. In that time, you lose money for every hour of downtime.

Every day, hundreds, if not thousands, of new cybersecurity threats are uncovered. Cybersecurity Ventures projects global cybercrime costs to reach $10.5 trillion annually by 2025. With profits like that, cybercriminals aren’t backing down any time soon.

Managed IT Services can be divided into three different services: managed IT, cyber security, and compliance. Click here to learn about each service.