Attention All You 70s Disco Divas, Rad 80s Babies, and Fly 90s Kids!
You’re Invited!
DP Solutions 50th Anniversary Celebration
Thursday September 30th from 3:00 to 7:00pm.
Technology Exhibits | Networking | Food & Drinks | Live Music | Games | Raffle Fundraisers
Welcome New Clients!
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A Flexible Partnership With IT Professionals
It’s hard to see how investing in your company’s IT services would be as incentivizing as other investments that might deliver a more tangible ROI. However, ensuring that your IT department has a competent team that’s up-to-date on the latest cyber security knowledge and has access to the latest software to allow them to do their jobs well is a sounder investment than you might think.
Investing in your IT services is a little like buckling your seat belt before you drive to work in the morning. You’re certainly not planning on getting in a crash that day, but you know that if you do, the seat belt will keep you safe, or at least mitigate the bodily damage the crash could cause.
We live in a world where it pays for companies to be on the forefront of cyber security. Even in just the past few years, ransomware and other cyber-attacks have become increasingly common, and they target antiquated IT systems that have yet to get with the times. If hackers can infiltrate your company’s servers and hold that data hostage, it could financially cripple your company to try to get it back – or shut it down entirely. It could also destroy your company’s reputation and hurt your clients and customers.
You need an IT team that you can depend on to keep your company safe, but that still leaves the problem of cost. We get it: keeping your IT up-to-date is expensive, whether because you can’t afford to hire the right number of IT professionals or because you can’t afford the software necessary for keeping your company from getting hacked. That’s why we believe co-managed IT is the best option for companies looking to protect their employees and their customers’ sensitive data.
Co-managed IT is a means by which growing companies can have access to all the tools and knowledge necessary to protect their data without paying the full cost. It won’t replace your current IT team, and it’s more than just a one-off project-based relationship with an outside IT service – it’s a flexible partnership between your business and IT services that you can trust.
Say your existing IT team does a stellar job of putting out the little fires that inevitably happen throughout the workday, but they struggle to find time for building and updating company security systems and protocols that will keep your data safe in the event of a cyber-attack. Or your company is going through a period of rapid expansion, and you can’t hire enough people for your IT department quickly enough to secure your ever-growing databases. Or perhaps your IT team does a stellar job of finding balance between the daily tasks and preventive maintenance, but they lack the software tools to do so efficiently. In all these scenarios, co-managed IT can ensure that those gaps your IT team just can’t fill on their own get filled through a collaborative effort.
Co-managed IT can be a great solution for a burnt-out, potentially disgruntled IT team. If you don’t know whether your IT team is getting burnt out or not, you can look for a few different signs. If they’re constantly working late or on weekends, they’re not getting projects done on time or correctly, they aren’t creating any new security measures or they’re showing signs of aggression or frustration at their job, you might be burdened with a burnt-out IT team.
Ideally, a burnt-out IT team would welcome help with their responsibilities and see the benefits of the collaborative effort between them and another group of experienced IT professionals. Together, we can protect your company from hackers, if you’re willing to invest in your IT infrastructure. Even though you might think that keeping things the way they are won’t cost you a dime, with how common cyber-attacks are becoming, it could only be a matter of time before hackers hold your data for ransom and cost you everything.
With all this in mind, we strongly encourage you and your IT lead to come to a diagnostic consultation with us. We’ll help you understand how, moving forward, co-managed IT can save your company a boatload of money and trouble.
What Is The #1 Key to Success?
Dr. Geoff Smart: The Key To Success Is Building A Talented Team
To start off, I’ll tell you what the key to lasting success isn’t. It isn’t financially savvy, competitiveness, humility or even hard work. Lots of people embody those traits, so they won’t cause you to stand out from the crowd. No, what it really takes to be successful is hiring a talented team.
Successful leaders aren’t successful just because of the things that they do on their own. They find success in hiring the right people for the right jobs. That’s ultimately what leaders do: they assemble talent and allocate it toward a worthy goal. They have to understand a person’s strengths and weaknesses and perceive if and how that person will further the mission of the team, whatever that may be. With a stellar team in place, the decisions of one person become less and less important.
If you don’t think that hiring a talented team is the ultimate sign of your success as a business leader, then maybe I can convince you if I approach my point from a different angle. In my book Who, which I wrote with Randy Street, one of the first things we established was that one of the biggest problems facing companies today is unsuccessful hiring. At the time, it cost companies $1.5 million per year, and the average company had a success rate of just 50%. Wouldn’t it make sense that solving this problem, which is arguably the most important problem many companies face, would be the key to lasting success?
Marshall Goldsmith: The Key To Success Is Creating Lasting Positive Change In Yourself And Others
I would agree with Geoff that success isn’t dependent on any of the common, pithy traits like trust, passion, honesty or engagement, but I don’t think it necessarily has to do so much with a leader’s team. I think that lasting success still starts when one person commits to make the most useful change that will bring about the most good for their business.
So, while having a talented team is important, at the end of the day, if you’re not committed to changing yourself, then you won’t be able to enact positive change in others when needed either. Your lasting success can only start with you, no matter how much talent you surround yourself with.
That’s why in my book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, I emphasize so many different “behavior derailers,” like passing judgment, making destructive comments, telling the world how smart you are, etc. Changing these things within yourself where lasting success begins.
Dr. Geoff Smart is the chairman and founder of ghSMART,which serves Fortune 500 companies and helps their CEOs make impactful, successful decisions. He is also the author of the New York Times best-selling book, Who, and many others.
Marshall Goldsmith is one of the most successful leadership coaches currently working. He is the only two-time #1 Leadership Thinker in the world, as ranked by Thinkers 50. He has written 42 books, many of which are best-sellers.
For the first time in over a year, most Americans are starting to get back out to restaurants, shows, travel, and of course... the office. But even though we want to forget about the pandemic and just get back to normal, the world has clearly changed:
Organizations now have a more decentralized workforce.The hybrid office/work-from-home model is far more common than before the pandemic.The technology and threat landscapes have evolved..
So, while it may be tempting to jump back into the way things used to be, let’s pause and take a look at what life after lockdown means for your technology and security management.
Watch the On-Demand Webinar Here:
Having too much data can present a big risk to your business
Data is a major asset. While you invest significant resources in buying networking equipment, computing devices, security solutions and other technology, this is all in service to processing and protecting data used to accomplish a goal for your business.
Many businesses, such as law firms, healthcare providers, social media companies and others use data as their business. Without it their core value to the community is completely lost. These same businesses often try to make sure they carry historic and detailed data for years and years or try to get more data than they need “just in case”.
But there is a flipside to this.
Every piece of data you carry needs to be stored and the more that needs to be stored, the more you will need to invest in redundant storage solutions and backups. You may also end up carrying specific kinds of data that has legal or compliance ramifications, which could force you to take on more scrutiny for how you manage that data and create liabilities to the business.
So it’s important to think about what kind of data you collect, where it is stored, and what’s actually needed to get your work done. If it’s not necessary, it’s probably best to not collect certain kinds of information.
