Wouldn't it be great if you could walk on clouds? It would be quite a dream! But what if the clouds were to suddenly dissipate into nothingness, causing you to plummet out of the sky and straight down towards the jagged face of a cliff? How quickly the dream would turn into a nightmare!

Now, while the scenario above is a flight of fancy, the danger of your business suffering a cloud outage — which can halt your operations and prevent critical files from being backed up — is very real and can severely affect your business.

Most people don’t realize that servers are often the most underused computers in a business. In the case of smaller companies with their own in-house IT infrastructures, a server often runs only one operating system and uses only a fraction of its available processing power to manage things like the company email.

Today’s internet speeds might be faster than we would have imagined just a few years ago, but that doesn’t mean bandwidth problems don’t still occur on occasion. Even the fastest corporate networks can slow down to a crawl due to one misconfiguration or because of a cyberattack.

Virtually every business leader is aware of how common cybersecurity threats are, but only few are equipped to make judgement calls on which solutions are best for their company. In fact, most small business owners don’t realize that if there’s a data breach, there’s a 90% chance it was the direct result of human error.

Every company, whether a large enterprise or a mom-and-pop store, is at risk of an IT disaster. Almost every business stores data electronically. So, ask yourself: Have you considered the impact of a flood, an earthquake, hardware failure, or a cyberattack on your business?

How essential is disaster recovery to your operation? The Small Business Administration claims that 90% of companies fail within a year if they can't get back up and running within five days of being struck by a disaster.

Since 1996, USWired has continuously provided reliable IT support for small businesses with little resources to hire their own IT staff. Through our years of experience, we've learned that one of the biggest problems businesses face is working to minimize risks -- without the assistance of a managed IT services provider (MSP).

Make no mistake: Disasters can strike anywhere, anytime.

Office 365 is Microsoft's top-notch, productivity-boosting tool for enterprises. Microsoft is still on track to reach its ambitious goal -- a $20 billion revenue run rate for its commercial cloud services, mainly due to Office 365’s built-in security, continuous compliance, larger inbox storage space, and no upfront monthly costs for small- and mid-sized businesses (SMBs).

When migrating to the platform, it’s important to plan carefully, otherwise you risk not getting the returns you expected.

For many small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), building a solid technology infrastructure means a lot. And you know that technology can make the difference between business success and failure. Investing in technology is often challenging because of the numerous vendors and solutions available.