Do you really need the Internet?

How important has the Internet become to your business?  For most of us that answer is simple (VERY) and complex (What do you mean important?) at the same time.  The Internet is used every day at probably 80% of companies in East Texas. No, I don’t have any fancy polls or research data to support that. I am just going off good ole fashioned conversations I have had with people and claiming broad generalities.  That’s right I am in Marketing!  We use the Internet to send business communications via email, to keep in touch with business colleagues on LinkedIn, to reach prospects with email, blogs and Facebook.  We send backups into “the Cloud” and use hosted software products.  We manage employees and grant access for remote workers.  If you aren’t sure how important the Internet is to your company, try having your entire company stay off of it for one day. Just one.

Frantic will be the watch word of the day. Or maybe it will be frustrated-or both.

Internet usage is high up there these days in the rankings of business tools. That is why you need to do these five things:

1.       Choose your Internet Provider wisely.

2.       Know what up and down speeds to expect. Pay for a faster connection, if you even think you will need it.  Well worth the money.

3.       Install a good quality firewall. We suggest SonicWall products.

4.       Make sure you have the permissions on the firewall set correctly.  This will help you to secure the network, ensuring fewer viruses and better bandwidth speed.

5.       Hire a good IT Management Team. Of course we suggest Wood Networks- that would be us!  An IT Management Team can help you manage the network in such a way you will have fewer problems and more uptime. Not that they can keep your ISP from having an outage, but they can work on the other issues that sometimes interfere with the Internet and ensure your emails are not getting lost in cyberspace when there is an outage.

 Cut down on those frantic and frustrating days and give us a call! 903-581-0922