Directive Blogs

We often discuss data backup and disaster recovery on our blog, and you may even be familiar with some of the terms and practices we throw around. Today, we want to take a closer look at the 3-2-1 rule and how it impacts your business’ ability to recover in the face of a disaster. Let’s dive in and see how the 3-2-1 rule can make or break your company’s data infrastructure.

Considering how essential telephone services are for just about any organization, it’s surprising how limited—and expensive— telephone service providers here in Otsego County are. Between the lack of support and, again, the costs that are involved, they’ve dropped the ball…and yet, they still expect businesses to play.

Not only do businesses here in Otsego County deserve better, better options are available.

The increase in wearable technology that you see coming into your business has substantially increased over the past couple of years. People are doing a better job of tracking their health and using wearable technology to improve their work lives. This creates a problem for the business because every single device brought onto a network is a potential threat and threats have to be managed. Let’s take a look at how people are using wearable technology and what you can do in response to this trend. 

Productivity suites are universally one of the best tools for getting work done in the business world, so if you’re not familiar with the term, then take a moment to consider how often you use Microsoft Office products or the Google Workspace apps. These are productivity suites, and they are remarkably important and valuable for your company, whether you realize it or not.

Business technology has grown so much over time that it’s practically unrecognizable compared to some of the original solutions. The Internet of Things has given businesses more opportunities to automate processes and build efficiency into their IT infrastructure, and in more ways than one. Let’s look at how businesses use the Internet of Things and what you might accomplish with it.

The Internet is used for a great many things in business nowadays, but some may not realize just how much Internet speeds have changed over time. This week, we thought we would take a brief look at the evolution of Internet speeds and what today’s speeds allow businesses to do. 

The landscape of telephony for small businesses has changed dramatically. It’s likely that you don’t rely on your phone nearly as much as you rely on other technologies, like your Internet, communications solutions, and email. Still, an antiquated phone system can hold you back, so let’s explore the other viable option for your business: Voice over IP.

Software makes business run: that is an undeniable statement. From the operations software that allows your business to manage and pay its people to the CRM that provides a pathway to communicate efficiently with customers, to all of the applications that it takes to conduct business in earnest, software plays a crucial role in your business’ success. 

Data backup is a must-have for every business, but it isn’t enough to just copy your data. You will need to have a data recovery strategy in place to ensure that your business can effectively respond after a data loss incident. Today, we’ll take a look at why considering your recovery strategy early is important, and how to prioritize it with everything else going on with your business.

The keyboard that you may very well have used to access this blog is, in a word, gross. While we aren’t going to go into too much detail about what makes keyboards so grimy, we did want to outline how you can easily clean up your keyboard every so often, just to make sure that it’s A: more hygienic, and B: less likely to malfunction at some point.

Most modern organizations will have digitized their businesses to at least some degree without really putting much effort or thought into it. This massive and often unconscious change has created a lot of benefits for businesses with perhaps one of the most overlooked benefits being document digitization. Today, we want to discuss the great benefits that come from this initiative and why you should consider it.

Ah, the business telephone solution. You know you need it, but you dislike working with your current telephone provider for a number of reasons. You know you can get a better deal if you look around, but we bet that the best deal around is a hosted Voice over Internet Protocol solution from Directive. How can our VoIP solution save your business time, energy, and resources?

AI has been a hot topic in recent months and years, which only makes sense. Not only has it been used in more public applications, but it has also caused a bit of controversy as it seems to “compete” with people. Back in September, art made by using an artificially intelligent platform caused a stir by winning an art competition, and workplace fears of a computer taking one’s job have seemingly become more well-founded than ever.

We talk a lot about different types of technology, securing your technology and your accounts, and a lot of other technology-related issues on this blog, but because of the generalities of whatever technology (or strategy) we’ve chosen to write about that day, we never confront the thing that is most important to a business: How does any technology fit into what we do here? What value do we get from any type of technology? Today, we thought we’d talk a little bit about what you need to do to find the right technology for your business and how to come up with those decisions. 

For many years now, there’s been a bit of a fear of AI—artificial intelligence—in the workplace, all while it has been put into practical use more and more often in many businesses. This all ties back to the work of Alan Turing, who (amongst his accomplishments in computing) created what we know as the Turing Test as a means of gauging how intelligent a computer is. 

There’s no beating around the bush with this one; moving data from one place to another, also known as data migration, is critical to get right the first time. If you create and follow a migration strategy, evaluating here and there to make sure it’s all going according to plan, you’ll see great success in this effort. Let’s go over how you can make it happen.

Countless jokes have been made in the IT world about the perfect place to hide something being page two of Google—just hang out with some IT professionals, and there’s a good chance you’ll hear it. Unfortunately, Google is making a change to its search results that will make this joke completely irrelevant.

The Internet of Things, or IoT, has grown to over 14 billion connected devices as of this year, and this number is expected to exceed 20 billion devices by the end of 2026. With such a shocking number of devices, you might wonder what types of devices are out there and what they mean for your business. Let’s look at the IoT and what you need to know to keep it at the top of your mind this upcoming year.

Magnets are often portrayed as the bane of technology’s existence, especially in media where data must be scrubbed from devices through the use of a magnet. How true is this representation of the relationship between magnets and technology? We’ll examine this in today’s blog article.

There’s no denying that the economic forecast at the moment is a bit bleak, with murmurings of a recession growing louder by the day. As this situation develops, many companies are likely seeking out opportunities to trim the fat. Despite this, however, we anticipate that artificial intelligence will actually see a bit of an uptick. Let’s go over why.