As a small business owner, you understand through your first-hand challenges how difficult it is to accomplish specific goals because of a limited budget. Other challenges may stem from a lack of expertise in a specific and vital area. Specifically, building and IT infrastructure present challenges that small business owners in previous years and decades were stymied by. However, modern solutions to these challenges are available to today's small business owners through cloud-based services. Understanding the primary cloud-based solutions available to your small business may help you to make smarter decisions going forward.
Business Speak
SMB Digital Transformation: Why, When, Where and How?
SMB Group’s 2017 U.S. Small and Medium Business Digital Transformation Study reveals that today’s small and medium businesses (SMBs) have tuned into the digital revolution. As noted in Pulse Check: SMBs and Digital Transformation, roughly three-quarters of SMB (including small (1-99 employee), medium (100-999 employee) and upper midmarket (1,000-2,500 employee) businesses) decision-makers agree/strongly agree that digital technology is impacting their businesses and industries.
The Network “Hack” that Wasn’t To Be
Sometimes the idea looks great on paper but doesn’t really work out when you try to configure it. And often, the only way to be sure is to break out the good old scientific method and try. So I tried. And it didn’t work, so I’m putting here in case you get a similar wild idea in near future.
The goal was to start with a primary VNET in Azure for some VMs. This network was going to act as a collection point for data coming in from a number of remote physical sites all over the world. In addition, some machines on the primary network would need to send configuration data to the remote sites. Ultimately, we were looking at a classic hub
February is Channel Education Month!
Just a short note to invite you to join me in a complimentary 5-session online conference during February 2018. I'm supporting my good friends Peter Jensen, Marie Wiese, Jim Hamilton (Yay!), Julian Lee and Marc Gordon. Discover more about this complimentary conference here. I consider this a startup/start over topic as we should all be educating, transforming and reinventing ourselves – continuously!
Quick Hitters!
I’ve found this format to be surprisingly well-received and effective. It’s my quick hitters that quickly summarizes a few topics circulating around the SMB Nation MSP community.
Karl’s “Hear Ye, Here Ye!” Community Meeting
Longtime SMB Nation fan Karl Palachuk is at it again. He’s holding an innovative live community meeting that uses the power of video presence to create a greater sense of intimacy (the platform is based on Zoom which I recently experienced first hand via Steve Taylor’s MSP Webinars).
How to Build Employee Engagement in Your Small or Medium Business
SMB Tech
Companies of all sizes often have difficulty understanding the importance of developing trust and engaging employees in their organizations. CEOs will sign off on a serverless API because someone has shown them that it can save cloud computing costs, but the value of employee engagement, employee collaboration and trust often goes uncalculated.
IoT security needs a white knight
Jon Gold By Jon Gold
Senior Writer, Network World
Thanks to the Mirai botnet attacks, few people in the world of tech need a reminder that IoT devices remain a serious threat to enterprise networks. Still, more than a year after the botnet made headlines worldwide, IoT security remains mostly an idea, rather than a reality.