Significant IT Challenges for 2021

2020 was… well, 2020… so it really isn’t any surprise that those businesses that made it to 2021 aren’t quite out of the woods yet. The many difficulties and challenges that 2020 brought will carry over into this year, many of them pertaining to information technology and how businesses utilize it. Let’s take a few moments to anticipate how these IT challenges will manifest this year.

Where Work Can Be Done

In the recent past, remote work was almost seen as a taboo subject—many businesses either discouraged it or neglected to implement any organized policies in the first place. Even amongst those businesses that did adopt some form of remote work, only 20 percent or so of their employees were able to work remotely.

2020 changed this considerably, as many businesses hastily adopted remote work as a means of remaining operational. Some businesses—if they were able to do so—completely transitioned to remote work.

These shifts have necessitated numerous changes to be made so that businesses can ensure their workforce’s productivity and safety simultaneously. These changes won’t go away anytime soon if projections are to be believed.

Moving forward, companies will need to ensure that the correct security protocols are implemented, and processes carried out, particularly because many users will likely be working on their personal devices. This means that implementing remote monitoring and management solutions will be an important step for businesses to take from here on out.

Fighting Burnout and Downtime

With the prospect of remote work preserving productivity, it becomes important to protect it from other negative influences. The fight against downtime should be a matter any business takes very seriously… after all, its clients will expect 100 percent uptime, and anything less than that will quickly erode the trust they have.

After the year we’ve all just experienced, that trust is something no business can squander.

In addition to having trustworthy technology, businesses must also make sure that their team members are receiving the requisite TLC. Technology solutions aren’t the only component of your business subject to downtime: fatigue and burnout can each have a considerable impact on morale and output. Considering this, these factors also need to be addressed.

Budgeting

The past year flushed many business’ budgets down the proverbial toilet, which will carry over into this year by some measure. Money is bound to be tight. As a result, any proposed investments need to be scrutinized for the return they provide to the business.

We predict that this will lead many more businesses to the cloud as a means of acquiring the services and solutions they need. In addition to this, we expect automation and tools like it to be given much more consideration.

One way or another, 2021 will see some considerable changes to how businesses do their business. Net Activity can be here to help you see them through, and beyond. Learn more about our solutions and how they can benefit you by calling 216-503-5150 today.

Increasing Remote Workforce Creating Rise In PC Hardware Sales

In December 2019, the covid-19 pandemic began, and it spread across the globe in early 2020. To curb the spread of this deadly virus, lockdown tactics were employed. Companies all over the world responded to this situation by having their employees work from home. This led to a great increase in the remote workforce and consequently the rise in PC sales. This kind of rise was last noticed in 2010.

PC hardware producers such as Acer, Apple, Dell, Lenovo, and so on have noticed an increase in demand for their products. Lenovo got back the top position in the hardware PC market during the third quarter of the year 2020. They had an 11.4 percent percent increase in sales and shipments attaining more than 19 million units.

HP rated next, with a growth of around 23.6 percent and shipments summing up to 18.7 million. Dell attained the third position despite a 0.5 percent decline in shipments compared to 2019. Apple had a growth of 13.2 percent and ranked fourth, while Acer claimed the fifth position with an increase in sales of 15 percent. Ryan Reith, the program vice president, worldwide mobile device trackers said the rise in demand in the PC market would last.

According to the NPD, notebook and laptop sales increased by 10 percent in the first week of March 2020. They claimed that this significant rise in sales was due to the shift to working from home. A 14 percent decrease in the sales of mobile devices was also noticed due to the quarantines that made people consider larger screens. International Data Corporation (IDC) also documents that the fourth quarter of 2020 saw international shipments boost for the sales of 91.6 million units of PC which is equivalent to a 26.1 percent difference when compared to the fourth quarter of 2019.

Information from Gartner also shows that laptops and notebooks global shipments summed up to 79.4 million units in the fourth quarter of 2020, which is equal to a 10.7 percent increase from the fourth quarter of 2019. The initial results by Gartner, Inc. for the year also shows that PC shipments attained 275 million units in 2020, which is a 4.8 percent increase from 2019 and the highest growth in a decade.

The increase in the remote workforce has been an advantage to a lot of PC hardware producers. The necessity to have a functional and efficient working area influenced the decision to set up high-quality workspaces at home. This necessity subsequently led to the surge in acquiring PCs, monitors, and other required gadgets.

How Office Delve affects Microsoft 365 users

Microsoft 365 is a cloud-based productivity suite widely used by small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). It comes in a wide variety of subscription plans, making it a popular choice for businesses. However, users have expressed some security concerns about storing and accessing data on this platform. Microsoft addresses this problem with Office Delve.

What is Office Delve?

Office Delve is a cloud-based data solution, file hub, enterprise social network, and collaborative tool developed using Microsoft Graph. It is currently available for Microsoft 365 Business Basic and Standard, Office 365 Government, Office 365 Education, and Office 365 Enterprise. This nifty tool allows you to:

• Discover new information – Delve displays information from different sources in Microsoft 365 that you may find useful for what you’re currently working on.
• Discover what you need – Documents you have seen before, or have recently worked on, are highlighted and made easier for you to find, regardless of where they are stored. This makes it less taxing to find work you have done/started in the past, and continue from where you left off.
• Discover new connections – Typing a name in Microsoft 365 will allow you to see what a user is working on, their connections, and even connect with them to build relationships and share information.

How does it work?

Microsoft created Delve with a tool called Graph to provide users with information they’ll find useful. Graph maps the relationships among the various Microsoft 365 users in your company and the content/information related to them.

This “map” is then used by Delve to provide users with the information they need, when they need it. Content and information are displayed on a card-based screen, which is found under the Delve tab in the main Microsoft 365 launch screen.

Aside from content such as profile information and document links, users can also see likes, views, comments, and tags, bringing a deeper social integration into Microsoft 365.

Delve also orders content in different ways, including:

• What you’ve recently worked on – shows you content in card-form that you recently opened or worked on
• Content that has been shared with you – shows the content your colleagues have shared with you
• Content that has been presented to you – shows content that colleagues have presented recently, or content that has been sent to you

If you don’t have access to your desktop or if you’re working outside the office,you’ll be glad to know that Delve is also available for iOS and Android. The mobile app version of Delve lets you browse cards with files, search for colleagues, view documents they have shared with you, and view their recent activity.

Is my data safe with Office Delve?

Delve keeps all your documents private by default unless you want to share them with other users. For example, if you have a document stored in a private folder, you’ll be the only one who can access and modify it through Delve. If that document is in a shared folder, it’s accessible to you and the people you shared it with.

If you are looking to learn more about Delve, contact Net Activity today.

Does Your Business Have Too Much Technology?

Starting a business is certainly no easy feat. It was likely a hassle just to get things up and running at a basic level. While most organizations that provide a product likely had to focus on getting that product to market, technology has begun to help aid this endeavor considerably. Unfortunately, it’s easy to fall into the trap that your organization uses too much technology–so much that it negatively affects your bottom line.

It’s understandable that some technology is absolutely required for organizations to function, but there are always those who look to technology to solve every single issue facing them. This is a dangerous practice. Technology might be great for sharing data, increasing collaboration, and ensuring that your business can meet its designated requirements, but too much technology can make it more difficult for organizations to get their jobs done. Let’s take a look at some situations when technology doesn’t help a business, but hinders it.

Unnecessary Technology
It’s not necessary for your organization to implement every single new solution that is released. It’s often the case that more technology creates more stress for the average worker–particularly if that employee doesn’t need to use the technology in order to go about their day-to-day responsibilities. For example, a CRM solution might be able to help your organization manage customer and interdepartmental communications, but if you only have a small number of employees as is, is it really worth it? There isn’t as big of a need to track how long everything takes, or how your few customers connect with your company, simply because you only have a small number of employees or clients in the first place. It will become apparent if somebody isn’t doing an adequate job, or if one of your clients isn’t happy with how they are being treated. This isn’t to say that your organization can’t benefit from a CRM solution–rather, it’s about weighing the costs versus the benefits that your organization receives from a CRM solution. Basically, if a centralized software solution is what you need to keep your employees busy, it’s probably more than just a technology issue that needs to be addressed.

Of course, this is only one example. Technology that’s not needed ultimately wastes both time and resources that could be better spent elsewhere. Therefore, you need to be careful about how your organization implements new solutions, as well as how you determine whether or not a solution is worth investing in. To do this, start by analyzing how much value your business gets from implementing it. To use the CRM as an example, consider how much time is actually spent using a CRM when you have only five employees. Now compare this to the time spent using a CRM when you have 40 employees. Compared to the smaller workforce, you’ll practically have to use a CRM in order to ensure that you can properly manage all of the relationships and communication within your organization.

Old Technology
In contrast, you might consider implementing new technology if your business has been around the block a time or two. If your business has existed for several years, has a dedicated consumer base, and is still growing despite the fact that it’s using outdated technology, it can be a detriment to your organization to resist implementing new technology. Simply put, old technology is more prone to failure, leading to more revenue spent on maintenance and management, as well as opening up the door for security threats.

Some businesses wait so long to replace or upgrade their technology that they face major legacy technology issues down the line. Others simply don’t have the resources available to upgrade as every new version is released, compounding the problem and making it even larger the more time passes. Either way, failure to upgrade your technology when it’s needed can lead to considerable detriment:

• Loss of productivity: Old technology can lead to a decrease in operational performance. The latest and greatest solutions are much more efficient, leading to faster processing speeds and more productivity.
• Problems with security: More recent operating systems are more likely to have addressed security concerns found in older operating systems and software. This makes them much more secure overall. Plus, older technology is more likely to be fast approaching its end of life event, where it’s no longer updated or maintained by the developers.
• Redundancy: Technology is often the solution to the redundancy issue, but work needs to be invested so as to allow both new and old technology solutions to be compatible with it. This takes time and resources that not all organizations have access to.
• Loss of opportunity: Regarding your web presence, having an outdated website or page can negatively influence your potential interactions with clients. If they don’t like what they see, chances are that they will take their business elsewhere. On the other hand, if your website is streamlined and sleek, they will be more likely to invest in your organization.

Does your business want to take full advantage of business solutions so as to improve your organization’s functionality for the long haul? Net Activity can help. To learn more, reach out to us at 216-503-5150.