Zinc Blog

Nobody likes getting big, unexpected bills from tech companies—neither the business owners who have to pay them nor the employees who might feel responsible for causing them. Small businesses face a tough choice: spend money to keep employees productive or save money and deal with slowdowns.

Communications are huge for a business, and in the course of doing business, no other communication tool is as valuable as the telephone. Today’s businesses have a real choice on how they want to purchase their telephone system, and the more your business relies on collaboration and innovative communications tools such as video conferencing, the more it becomes evident that VoIP is the best option. Today, we’ll explain how VoIP can bring substantial value to your business.

When we call ourselves a managed service provider (MSP), it still isn’t common knowledge what we mean by that. Perhaps the simplest way to describe our role is to call us an outsourced IT support provider, but even this definition falls short of the value we can offer. To remedy this, we wanted to review what one of our clients expects (and rightly so) to receive from a partnership with us.

The IT infrastructure of any business can be complicated, especially if you’re going about things the right way. In fact, managing your technology is, more often than not, a full-time job that needs to be fulfilled in order to be done appropriately. Let’s go over some of the key parts of managing and maintaining a business IT infrastructure, and while we cover these tasks, ask yourself if you’re 100% confident that they are happening for your business.

Last week, we wrote about how patience plays a big role in people’s ability to be productive and efficient. This week we want to explore a few ways to help the people in your organization to become more patient. We all know people in our lives that seem like they could definitely take a chill pill. If that is you, using these four suggestions can help you be more patient in situations that demand it. 

People can be very productive. They can also be pretty terrible at being productive. The staff that can find consistency in their productivity typically results in a pretty successful business. Obviously, people have all types of suggestions on how to improve staff productivity, individual productivity, and a lot of it is just hitting on the same stuff. There is one variable, however, that is found in a lot of productive people: Patience. 

There are a ton of productivity suites out there, and we’ve all heard of the most common one, Microsoft Office. Still, there are other solutions out there, one of which is Google Workspace. What does Google Workspace offer, and what differentiates it from its competition? Let’s take a closer look and see if we can find the answer to this question.

While reliable technology support has always been important, the sudden and widespread adoption of remote work by so many businesses has made it an essential component for an organization’s success. However, for your team members to have technology that continues to serve them as they do so, it is important that they are able to receive the same support as they would in the office.

Wireless is one of the most popular utilities to have in the office. However, if not implemented thoughtfully, it can cause frustration and holdups to your processes. Therefore, it is important to understand what causes challenges for your Wi-Fi, and how to resolve or work around these challenges. Let’s discuss where these challenges come from, and how to fix them.

When you mention the term 'disaster recovery,' most people think about the big ground-shattering events like earthquakes, fires, floods, tropical storms, etc. While these natural events are certainly disasters and devastating in their own right, smaller things can constitute as a disaster for your business, and they aren't seasonal.

Your identity has quite a lot of value, especially in the wrong hands. Security firm ZoneAlarm put together some numbers in 2011 concerning identity fraud, and it even shocked us. Let's talk about a few of these statistics and what it means.

Sometimes when your workstation feels bogged down, a relatively cheap and simply hardware update can make a huge difference in performance. Adding more RAM (Random Access Memory, often just referred to as memory) can be a game changer for your bogged down PC.

Email is (and has been) a prime method of communication for businesses of all sizes. With email comes a whole slew of issues that are essentially synonymous with the technology; spam, information overload, phishing, and information privacy. Even Texas small businesses that only do business locally are at risk of these issues. Personal email accounts are equally at risk. Employing proper precautions and practices whenever communicating via email is very important to prevent the risk of security compromises, monetary loss, and even legality issues.

Saving a little on your technology can go a long ways, but cutting too many corners can lead to additional problems and expensive downtime. Here are a few ways you can cut costs without creating long term issues.