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Whether you’re solo or scaling, here’s our go-to list of tools (some free, some freemium) that help you eliminate repetitive tasks, save time, and run your business more efficiently — without the bloat or overwhelm.
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G’day folks! At the start of the month, Microsoft’s dropped some news that’s bound to shake up the way we handle our business suites. From 1 April 2024, they’re rolling out new licensing changes for Microsoft 365 and Office 365 outside Europe, mirroring the updates we saw last year in the European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland. Let’s break down what’s new and how it might affect your business.
Cloud computing is a major aspect of thousands of businesses, but there are a lot of mitigating factors that can confuse people. Josh was joined by Sayuj Nath, a cloud mitigation expert, to discuss all things to do with the cloud and how you can use it to help your operations.
Sayuj is the Principle Consultant at Slalom. In his role, he consults with businesses on strategy, technology, and business transformation regarding cloud services.
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On 31st March, Aussies and many individuals around the globe will be celebrating World Backup Day. Take time to consider what you would do if your photos, contacts, and important documents disappeared without warning. All of your irreplaceable digital files will be lost for good if you don’t have backup data.
Data loss happens more often than you may realize. So, if you want to safeguard your important files, regularly backing them up is the ideal solution. Instead of storing all of your valuable files in one place, keep a copy elsewhere. In the event that your computer or device crashes, goes missing, or is attacked by some malware, you can be sure that your precious data will be safe.
Migrating your domains is one of the newest ways for Australian businesses to try and stand out in the world of online marketing. Since March 24, 2022, it has been possible to register domains directly under .au, which could help target a specific geographical market, comply with local laws and regulations, or improve search engine rankings in Australia. Let’s take a look at everything you need to know about .au Domain changes.
Take advantage of your reserved opportunity in the Australia namespace. Check the availability of your preferred domain.
Gone are the days when growth meant employing more people and asking them to work longer and faster. Thanks to technology, it’s easier to grow your small business through automation.
In Savannah, GA, there are old federal buildings, such as the historic Davenport Museum, and Georgian houses like The Olde Pink House. And there’s the cotton exchange, a Romanesque-style building, in the historical area of Savannah. Let’s not forget the classic McArchitecture style we have all come to know and love. There are over 300 years of buildings in the area and all lovingly restored.
Restoration is an incredible thing to bring back something that was lost. When it comes to data, restoration can be a lifesaver but you need to be prepared. Just like with buildings, you need to create something with a strong foundation in the first place, so ultimately you’re left with something to recover rather than just a pile of junk.
There are lots of ways to backup your data. I’m often asked what’s the best option, but to be honest, it varies from person to person and from business to business. For one client, just having a USB stick with a few files in it might be fine. For another client, we might be discussing something like bare metal recovery with daily incremental backups at an off-site centre.
But no matter what your needs are, there’s one thing I can tell everyone: act now! The more prepared you are, the less damage that is done when you lose your data. Back up, be organised, and build systems and strong foundations so your data and your legacy can be around for years to come.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on 19th September 2019. It has been revamped and updated for accuracy and to reflect recent trends.
Need help with your data backup? Contact us for custom tech solutions for your small business starting at $1.
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As companies expand and start-ups take the plunge, they need to be extra careful in protecting their data.
Most data is sensitive and must be strictly guarded. Otherwise, loss of data can be a fatal mistake for a business, so IT has a very important job: data protection. However, regardless of the number of mechanisms you put in place and the number of precautionary steps you take, data protection is only as good as your best data backup strategy.
Thanks to technology, there are many ways in which you can get an effective onsite and off-site backup for all of your data, both on your premises and in the cloud.
One of the best practices followed in data protection and backup strategies is the 3-2-1 rule. With this rule, all businesses are advised to have 3 backups stored on at least 2 different kinds of media with 1 copy being stored off-site.
Have 3 backups stored on at least 2 different kinds of media onsite and 1 copy being stored off-site.
There are three main prerequisites to having an effective data backup strategy.
Not all data is equally sensitive. Some data is redundant so it’s not really needed. Before you choose a data protection and backup strategy, the first thing to do is to identify the data that is crucial to running your business.
Once you have identified which data is critical, it’s time to sort it in order of priority. The data which is on top of the ladder has to get full attention. As you go down, the data will become less and less sensitive, but it will still need extra care.
There are many other people who have access to your data—maybe not to all of it, but some of it. Check out all of the third parties that have access to your data and review their security setup and backup measures. In the long run, this will make your work of data protection a lot easier.
Creating data backups on hard drives and keeping them under lock and key is an age-old method to preserve and protect data. Although it sounds like a good idea, this method is no longer sufficient. What are the options available today and which of those are really effective? To answer this question, let’s study some data protection and backup strategies.
There was a time when organisations had their own servers. Some, very few, still have their own server today. These companies would create data backups on their own servers.
If you have strong firewalls and other precautionary measures in place, creating data backups on your own servers is a good idea. In hindsight, all the data is now in one place, so a person who gains unauthorised access into your server will have everything at his disposal to create mischief.
Storing your data in the cloud is a good option because your data is stored in a virtual world and relatively hard to access. It does not involve your servers and can be accessed from anywhere.
A good data backup and data protection strategy would be to divide the data, with some of it on your servers while keeping the others on the cloud.
Instead of keeping all of your beers in one esky, you can distribute them into different ones. You take the data from a production environment and store it in another public cloud environment. Data in one cloud is backed up and stored in another cloud. Effectively speaking, you separate the fault domains for your backup data and production data.
The key to having an effective backup and data protection strategy in a hybrid environment lies in data separation.
A point-in-time backup is known as a snapshot. It is almost like snapping a picture of all of your data at a given point in time. Cloud backups, in reality, are a snapshot. Creating a virtual image of your machines allows hassle-free rollback to the last saved snapshot.
In this data protection and backup strategy, you need to do a full backup—all of the data is backed up. When you are creating a data backup for the first time for any source, it makes sense to create a complete backup.
However, creating the entire backup again and again as you move ahead in time is a wasteful activity. It also impacts your efficiency as you continue to do redundant work, so once you have created a full backup, what you need to do is have incremental backups. In incremental backups, only the changes since the last complete backup are saved. In the cloud, storage has a value.
It is also important to have backup versions available. Say you updated your software to its most current version. When you did that, unknowingly, you made some changes to a file that contained some important data. The problem due to these changes will arise after some time, not immediately. In such a case, if you have backed up the older version, you will be able to recover the file with the original data where no changes have been made.
Once you’ve identified the backup strategy that suits your business the most, you can go ahead with it. The important thing to consider here is the Restore Point Objective (RPO). This is the amount of data that a business can lose yet withstand its repercussions. In business terms, it would mean losing say 90 minutes of data because your automatic backup happens every 89 mins.
The other thing to consider is the Restore Time Objective (RTO). This is the time it takes for the RPO to get restored. Based on this information, you can even choose how often you want the backup procedures to run automatically.
The Final Word
In the end, backups are essential for all businesses. In the hour of need, they will become your saving grace. However, creating backups is a costly affair. You need to fully analyse your needs prior to deciding what needs to be saved. The most effective backup strategy is that where data is prioritised and all information is not saved in a single location. Separate the locations and backup just what you need!
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on 25th January 2019. It has been revamped and updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
Need help with your data backup? Contact us for custom IT solutions for your small business starting at $1.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgqOK0_B0uc
Well, that’s pretty cool. Can you tell what type?
Maybe you’ve got cloud backup, incremental backup, bare-metal restore backup or some other hybrid backup. Maybe it’s on your workstations, maybe it’s on your server, maybe it’s on everything, it’s onsite, it’s offsite, it’s doing everything and you’ve got some other sort of RAID setup but you’re not quite sure what it does, but it has mirrors. Yeah.
Any of that stuff may mean nothing to you, but a lot of people think they’ve got backup maybe as part of their Business Continuity Plan and Disaster Recovery Plan, but they don’t. They just think they’ve got backup, and there’s nothing there. They have their emails in the cloud, and they think, ‘Well, the cloud’s secure. Someone else is backing that up. Not my responsibility anymore.’ The truth is, kind of is, eh?
If you’ve got Xero accounts and something goes wrong with Xero, it’s your responsibility to keep your records for seven years, not theirs.
So you need to make sure you’ve got a backup of your files.
You might be like, ‘Nah, they’re never going to go down. What are you talking about? It’s Xero, mate.’ Yeah, they do. People do. Companies go down. You can’t help it. It’s a thing. It’s a way of life.
You need to have a backup. You don’t know if things are going to disappear off the Earth. I’m sure if something like that happened, the ATO would help you out a bit, but it’s still something important that you need to make sure you’ve got a backup of everything.
There are different types of backup. You can have your computer or your workstation backed up. That could be something as simple as dragging and dropping your files from your documents folder onto a USB stick if you’re old school. But that’s means you’ve got backup of only a few of your files. If your whole computer was destroyed, you’d still lose all your licences, you’d lose the ability to log in because it’d be gone. You’d lose any stuff on your desktop, and any other stuff since the last time you copied your stuff on the USB stick.
That could be a huge problem for your business and that could mean downtime. If you need to copy things across and know that’s time wasted doing that, and it’s a task you’re not going to remember doing, you need to automate it or have some sort of system in place to monitor it. There are lots of fantastic IT companies out there that will allow you to do that sort of stuff, and they’ll monitor it for you. They’ll make sure that you’ve got hourly backups, daily backups, quarterly backups, whatever’s required.
Make your business downtime-proof with our Guaranteed Uptime Plans—you get paid when you go down!
What’s more important when you’re backing up is it’s not just a couple of files. There are all these settings and configurations and everything else that you know goes into when you get a computer and you go, ‘Uh, that took them hours.’ It’s going to take them hours again. So you need to make sure that if you’ve got a full backup, your IT company should be able to click on the backup for whatever you want to restore, click ‘Restore’ and go back to what it was an hour ago or a day ago, or whenever the problem wasn’t there. That’s what you want.
The other thing that backup protects you against is if you’re just copying your files across, you only have that version that you’ve copied across. Backup gives you the backup of every version that you’ve got, from then all the way through to when the backups were first archived. So you could potentially have someone that has an Excel document, and they’re there tapping away at the Excel document, doing their thing, and they have a fault in it. That could have happened a month ago. You can now go back to that backup and go, “Ah, yeah, that’s the version here.” That’s what you want.
The Final Word
So there are different types of backup. Some’s file backup, some’s hardware backup, some’s backup that goes to the cloud. Some are backups that go through the cloud or through your internet connection to your home address or to another business, or an offsite location. But there are lots of different types of backup. Make sure that you are backed up, with your hardware if it’s important, with your software if that’s important, and overall with everything if you don’t want to have any downtime. If you have any questions about it, feel free to contact us and I will personally answer them for you. Stay good.
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Businesses nowadays have gone digital and embraced technology as part of their workflow operations. One of the biggest myths small business owners have about business automation is it’s intended solely for large companies. The truth is business automation solutions are essential for any organisation and industry because it helps to streamline processes and leverage the company’s quality of work and productivity, regardless of its size.
Due to the current advancements in technology, many of you may have begun pondering what is automation? Automation is a buzzword at the moment. You need to automate as much in your business as you can because if you don’t, your competitors will.
Looking for an IT Support Provider for Your Business?
An IT service provider plays an important role when it comes to the daily operations of Aussie businesses. An IT partner is responsible for helping you with some or all of the IT-related aspects for your business to work like clockwork. This is the reason why selecting an IT support provider is significant and, at the same time, a hard decision to make.
What Is IT Lifecycle Management and Why Should You Care?
Getting people and equipment to accomplish common business goals is not an easy task. Management makes this work easier by keeping track of everything. As the digitization of business increased so did the use of technology. Keeping track of all the IT assets became mandatory for survival. In the quest for gaining technological superiority, IT lifecycle management became an area of focus.
Small- and medium-sized business (SMB) owners in Australia need an IT security audit just as much as large companies. However, many SMBs are unable to perform business IT audits due to a lack of qualified personnel. Even if you have an in-house IT team, their duties are often different from the function and role of an independent audit or compliance group.
Receiving spam emails in large quantities is incredibly annoying. If you are using a public e-mail address, you can receive thousands of spam messages every day. Even if you have a good filter, some of them can still go through. Anything unwanted, unsolicited digital communication which is often an email can be called spam. You will mostly receive marketing spam from sellers, but there are cybercriminals attempts to break into online accounts, steal data or spread malware. Whether you a business owner, a student or an employee in a company, it’s necessary that you educate yourself of how spam works and how to stop them. In this episode, Joshua Lewis will continue to share some tips on how to stop spam and increase your chance of obtaining leads.
Where did the term “spam” come from? This was derived from a Monty Python sketch where a couple tried to order something at a restaurant other than spam (the popular meat product). Then a group of Vikings in the background started to sing the praises of spam and soon the only word you can hear in the sketch is “spam.” The same thing happens to the Internet, which would be overwhelmed by large-scale unsolicited emails. Let’s say you paid for a list of email addresses from a local business organization. The list of addresses seems like it could contain great prospects for your business, and you wanted to send them an email containing a relevant offer they can’t refuse. But since these recipients didn’t give you explicit permission to contact them, sending an email to this list would be considered spam. In this episode, Joshua Lewis shares some tips on how to stop spam and increase your chance of obtaining leads.
Face it! Information technology has drastically changed the face of business. It doesn’t matter anymore where you are, where your employees are, and where your customers are and we have proven that during the lockdown.
If your IT department is doing its job well, it can help you reach anywhere on the globe. Employing a full team of IT professionals might be too big a step for businesses that are just starting out or bouncing back after the Covid-19 crisis. For most companies, you can simply outsource. It means bringing on a team of IT brainiacs as a third party to manage your IT requirements. To make matters easy, here is the ultimate guide to IT outsourcing for small businesses.
We help businesses in Brisbane and across Queensland automate processes, reduce manual tasks, and improve efficiency. With tailored automation solutions, we make technology work smarter, so you can focus on growth.
Curious about how automation can transform your business? Let’s chat. Get a FREE Business Automation Consultation (normally $249) and discover how we can optimise your workflows and boost productivity.
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