Feel like your small business is in the dark ages?

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Guest post from Francesca Geens, who runs Digital Dragonfly, offering practical IT and tech assistance for tiny businesses (typically 1-5 PCs) across the UK. Working with both Mac and PC clients, Digital Dragonfly specialises in business email, cloud solutions, mobile working and general best-practice, giving business owners peace of mind when it comes to their IT setup.

Do you feel like your small business is in the dark ages?

That’s exactly how a recent client felt when she approached Digital Dragonfly for an IT audit. "The difference to our systems is amazing", says Kemi who runs a Lettings Agency in Central London. So what did the IT audit reveal and how did we bring this Small Business into line with current IT best-practice?

This two-person company was using 3 PCs on Windows Vista and XP Professional: the computers were slow to boot up, did not have any backup systems in place, were not able to share calendars and suffering with high volumes of spam.

What did Digital Dragonfly do?

  •  Reinstalled their machines and upgraded them to Windows7 Enterprise
  •  Installed Windows Intune for virus/malware protection and so we could remote monitor software updates infuture
  •  Upgraded their email to Office365 allowing emails, calendar and contacts to sync with Smartphones and a tablet; a shared office calendar; the ability to set Out of Office for the first time; excellent spam filtering and a much more reliable email uptime.
  •  Set up backup systems with a new removable hard-drive as well as a cloud solution.

The customer really liked the fact that she could pay monthly for the Office365 and Intune subscriptions. Also Intune allowed for the upgrade to Windows7 without additional costs which brought the whole upfront spend and overall cost down.

The work took one day to do with no email downtime and the business owners now have peace of mind that they can access their data from anywhere, that their files are backed up and computers protected from viruses and malware. 

 

So if you are small business in the dark ages with your IT hopefully this will show you that it doesn’t need to cost the earth to get yourselves in line with current best-practice.