April 15th is known as National Titanic Remembrance Day. What does that have to do with your business and technology? Plenty. A steamship like the Titanic is a business, and in this case the business failed miserably. Technology has advanced by leaps and bounds over the last few years and yet in spite of all of this, many businesses find themselves using outdated technology to “get the job done”.
Sometimes this is unavoidable – many times it is not! As a business owner, you want to avoid capsizing like the Titanic back in 1912. So here is a list of outdated technologies that, if you still use them, you should consider upgrading from:
Windows XP
Support for Windows XP was discontinued by Microsoft as of April 8, 2014. That is a full TWO YEARS ago! If you still use Windows XP in your business, every new security threat could potentially bring your network to a grinding halt and potentially corrupt or outright destroy sensitive business data. If you don’t have a continuity plan in place, this scenario could potentially destroy your business.
Landline Phones
If much of your business is handled by telephone, VoIP phone systems offer so many more benefits than traditional landlines. In addition to all of the basic features that businesses are used to, many VoIP systems offer advanced features such as flexible call routing and forwarding (including the ability to use a cell phone like an office phone), auto-attendant scheduling, and multi-location routing, just to name a few. They are also very comparable in price to a landline system.
Fax Machines
With today’s technological advances such as scanning and email, there is really no need
for fax machines any longer. Every feature that an end-user loves about a fax machine can easily be replicated by scanning a document and sending it via email to the desired recipient: a time-stamped record of having sent a document or when a document was received. If you think fax is more reliable than email, think of it in volume; if you send and receive as many faxes in one day as you do emails, which do you think would have a higher failure rate? Which method do you think is faster
Tape and/or On-Site Only Backup Systems
Fairoaks IT strongly believes in having a good backup system that reliably retains files not only onsite but also in the cloud. Disaster planning 101 – if a disaster occurs and your office is destroyed along with your onsite backup, how will you run your business? Tape backup systems also degrade over time – the longer you use the same tapes, the less likely you are to actually retrieve data. Many businesses even choose to keep data solely in the cloud to avoid this type of loss.
