The twelve items listed below comprise the basic elements of your strategic business computing environment. Each one of them must be carefully considered, evaluated and addressed in order to guarantee that your business systems will not have a negative impact on your business. Download a copy of this report here.

The good news is that once each of these elements are addressed, most small businesses will never have to repeat the process, experience low computer productivity and insurmountable computer issues that we hear about so often. Get these things right and your business might prosper. However, get them wrong and your business will have a high probability of failure. We hope to give you the information to prosper.

1 – Provide a top tier, high-speed, secure and impenetrable physical network environment for your employees, customers, vendors and service providers.

2 – Provide robust and redundant file sharing, printing, scanning and faxing systems.

3 – Establish a computer and peripheral hardware procurement and break fix procedure. Drive cost savings by leveraging computer company opportunities with warranty, service contracts and asset management tools.

4 – Deploy pro-active systems monitoring and automated self-healing computer systems.

5 – Evaluate and fix physical security, including lock and key, issues.

6 – Identify and optimize your primary business software. Partner with a solutions provider, a VAR dedicated to your niche market. Focus on doing all of your business within the feature set offered by your chosen business software.

7 – Identify, then align your tech savvy workers to policy based, computer support functions, raising all of your employees computer skills. Promote relationships between your employees and your solutions and service providers.

8 – Evaluate your company’s Internet marketing identity. Confirm that you completely control your email, website and domain names.

9 – Bulletproof your Email messaging systems.

10 – Use a robust data backup and recovery procedure that includes scheduled testing to confirm that your backup will restore your data in the event of any data loss.

11 – Develop a worst-case, disaster recovery plan to use as a guide to immediately return to business after a catastrophe.

12 – Document your entire computing environment. Document all of the specifics that you need to have in place to conduct business, including hardware, processes, names, telephone numbers, licenses, software CDs, hardware, training and user guides. Write everything down and place it in a binder for future reference.

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