How many times have you heard the word “Trump” today?
It doesn’t matter where your staff fall on the political spectrum. One thing is clear—EVERYONE (even people without a single political bone in their bodies) is talking about something related to politics. And it’s become strikingly clear that your staff are talking about politics too (ON THE JOB!). In fact, in a recent poll by Betterworks, 87% of workers read about politics on social media during the work day. 77% have conversations during the workday.
And guess what?
It typically takes 23 minutes to resume work at full mental capacity after distractions. So on top of having a workforce that is distracted more often than not by social media and the 24-hour news cycle blasting up-to-the-minute political news, every time a new announcement or post comes out, it is taking your staff an additional 20 minutes or more to get back to fully functioning?
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I was searching online for the right bouquet of flowers to send a friend yesterday and had decided to visit one of half a dozen national flower chains—one that I had used in the past. After navigating from the homepage to the birthday flowers section, I clicked on the purchase button and nothing happened. At first I thought it was an issue with my computer. But after trying to make a purchase from my phone, I realized, their site was “sort of not working”. Pages were loading, but the site was NOT fully functional. The most important part—the PAYMENT pages—were offline. A few minutes later, I realized that this flower website was hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and was affected by the MAJOR outage experienced by millions. Around noon eastern, AWS reported a major outage to customers across the United States. In fact, millions of American customers were struggling with accessing their data—many of which were websites (Amazon hosts nearly 150 THOUSAND websites).
Amazon’s web services is currently one of the largest web hosting providers in the US. When an outage occurs and you’re impacted, you’re just another number. I could only imagine having my website hosted by a company that large resolving a HUGE outage.
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Did someone just try to PHISH Me?
I want to start with a personal story. Last week, I received this very realistic (and Sneaky) email from who I thought on Initial inspection was American Express.
I saw the AMEX logo, A gold card that kind of looked quite similar to my card (although on second thought my card was platinum).
The message: someone from China had attempted to use my account!
How terrible! I need to take action Now!—that was my initial thoughts (and I’m sure I wouldn’t have been alone!).
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Why you can’t just go with a solo guy that helped your husband’s company last week.
Just like that old story about the man that was too busy shoveling snow that he had no time to use the snow blower, having the wrong IT Support—inadequate or under-qualified—is constantly costing businesses much more than simply their costs for the IT guy. Recently I had been talking to a couple of prospective clients that really wanted enterprise-level IT support, but had an awfully hard time justifying the cost of it. Because all business owners think about costs, I wanted to plainly lay out why getting ‘bargain IT Support’ may end up costing more money, more headaches and more risk than you might have ever expected. And as you think about IT costs, consider whether you are using a shovel or a snow blower to dig out of a blizzard and how is that shovel slowing you down?
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Last April (2016) laid underscored the reason why businesses should not use Gmail.
On April 1st—yes, April Fool’s, Gmail caused many bosses (including myself!) problems. That was the day Gmail introduced the [now removed] “Gmail Mic Drop” function. The mic drop allowed users to “send and mic drop” an email that automatically attached a GIF of a minion—those weird little yellow creatures from Despicable Me.
Gmail’s prank had replaced the “send and archive” button, which lets a user close a conversation and archive the email thread, in exchange for an attached minion dropping a microphone before closing a conversation and archiving it.
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I want to briefly go through 4 questions to ask when determining whether you need an outsourced IT recovery solution. If you answer any of the following questions with a ‘NO’, you should seriously consider an outsourced solution.
Do you understand the business impact of downtime of your applications?
To sufficiently confirm that you understand consequences of application downtime, you need to have performed a business impact analysis (BIA). A BIA allows you to understand the relative importance of each business application to your business operations. In particular, how application failure can affect different roles in your organization.
You also need to have mapped application inter-dependencies. In many situations, processes may require more than one application for successful completion. Understanding how different applications are linked to each other across your operational process network will paint you a clear picture of how important it is to your business. You need to understand how long your business can run without specific applications.
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