Your data is important and ought to be kept secured, safe yet able to be shared readily among the authorized personnel in the office.

SMEs and start-ups should take pre-emptive measures to keep their business systems secure and should not wait till business is mature. A secure business would mean software, especially operating system, is updated regularly; employees are educated on email and internet safety; firewall is setup; power supply to important equipments such as server is isolated and uninterrupted eg. when lights in office are tripped; data is backup and that includes the data in every individual desktop; wireless networks are secure; and data in thumb drives are encrypted.

Your colleague requires you to pass him your edited document so that he can add his portion. Do you send the document via email or thumb drive? You can do this for a start but as your data or team grows, you may find it insane to share data in this manner. A better solution is to store information on a shared and secure server to enable employees to access and share files easily. The shared space could be a file server; network attached storage (NAS) and collaboration tools such as Microsoft Office Groove and Microsoft Sharepoint Workspace.

It is important to realize that your initial upfront purchases of IT equipments such as desktop, laptops, UPS and servers only makes up a fraction of IT hardware cost. The rest of the costing make up of the maintenance of hardware and software. These investments are worth it as you see an improvement of productivity and support to your customers, and minimum downtime and risk involved.

If your office does not have a dedicated IT team and you wish to find out more on how to secure your IT systems or would like to purchase technology products, please feel free to contact our friendly staff.