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How long has it been since you last had a comprehensive assessment of your company's technology situation? If it's been more than a year since your last technology assessment, or if you have never had one, then you may be missing out on some great money-saving solutions. You can discover these solutions with a business review.

Seriously. In a recent blog post, Microsoft makes the case that the upcoming Xbox One is more than a gaming console; it's actually a powerful business tool. The way Microsoft sees things, the $499 Xbox One is "entirely justifiable as a business expense." Before you laugh, consider the business friendly features of the Xbox One.

If the front door represents the entry point to your company where prospects turn into customers, then the back door represents weaknesses in your business model that provide customers with reasons to look elsewhere.

In a recent economics survey of small to medium-sized businesses by Oxford University, it was discovered that two-thirds of companies believe that technology is the key to transforming their business in order to "achieve longevity and sustainable growth." This survey reveals a lot about how businesses worldwide feel about technology. Does your business identify with any these trends?

For those of us that have been able to witness the current technological revolution, we can say mankind has progressed at an exceptional rate. Remember spending hours on your TRS-80 writing code to play the simplest of games? At that point, if you didn't have the floppy disk drive, once you turned it off you had to spend all that time to rewrite the code. This period has taken us from bulky PCs (albeit still marvelous at the time) to devices with hundreds of times the computing power that fit in the palm of our hands.

Consider for a moment the computer you're using right now. Does it have wires? If so, how thick is the monitor you're using to view this? How many gigabytes is your hard drive? How many Microsoft Works documents could you have fit on your trusty 16-gigabyte USB thumb drive?Computing has certainly come a long way in the last four-plus decades; and it's getting exponentially better by the day.

There are many different sleep solutions on the market; some are simple like a fluffier pillow, others are more elaborate like a sleep apnea CPAP mask that assists with breathing. According to a new study by the University of Tubingen in Germany, the best sleep solution may be syncing the sounds around you with the rhythms of your brain.

The whole point of making a budget is to control costs. All it takes is one surprise to undo all the careful work of budget planning. No department is immune to unplanned expenses, and while it's impossible to totally prevent budget-busting expenses across the board, you can take action to turn many surprise expenses into controllable costs.

When you hear the phrase, "The machines are taking over," you may think of science fiction stories where robots become self-aware and enslave humanity. You may not have realized it, but the machines have already taken over; not with a violent uprising, but through what's called the Internet of Things (IoT).

With everything going digital, it's hard to believe that fax machines are still used today. What's funny, is that this same statement is true today just like it was ten years ago. Yet, sales of fax machines continue to increase every year. An alternative that's better in every way is a fax server solution; here are five ways it can save you money.

We are smack-dab in a mobile revolution. With any large-scale societal change brought on by technology, there are growing pains involved. Nowhere is this more evident than in the business world. How can you make this major technological shift benefit your business? Consider that the individuals that work in your office have indubitably been in open competition in their acquisitions of the newest mobile devices. Since they are buying them anyway, determining ways to harness the power of these devices to work for your company’s benefit is a sound strategy. Here are a list of some of the top-selling mobile devices of 2012 and what each manufacturer has on the horizon for 2013.

In part one of Vanity IT, we covered the numerous high-powered handsets that are on the market and available for users to add a degree of productivity that had been simply unavailable before. While smartphones are the most used mobile device by far, many people are looking to the larger devices to accomplish tasks on the go. Some companies are beginning to issue devices to their employees in a concerted effort to take advantage of the flexibility that these larger mobile devices give them.

In the first two parts of our Vanity IT series, we’ve gone over how some of the top smartphones and tablets can potentially bring additional productivity to your workplace with a proper Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and Mobile Device Management strategies. In our final edition of our Vanity IT series, we will go into other mobile devices that can present your company IT solutions and solve many of your remote computing problems.

The Internet was originally designed in 1989 as a tool for the European science agency CERN to help share information among physicist in universities around the world. On April 30th, 1993, the Internet went public. Back in 1993, Internet founders like Tim Berners-Lee did not likely realize that his invention would solve more problems than physics ever could.

Having an IT infrastructure that works properly is the goal for every IT department. While it’s nice to have all of your technology in working order, this is just one part of the successful business/technology equation. Having your IT network properly designed to meet the needs of your business will maximize your productivity and make your technology work for you!

Servers have always been one of the more expensive yet crucial pieces of your IT infrastructure. A new development in servers is the microserver, which is a stripped down version of a server. The appeal is that they can be designed to handle one task efficiently, and therefore, use fewer resources while costing less to purchase and maintain.

As a business, you do things differently than the mild-mannered consumer. Like paying bills, it’s not like a business can sit down for half an hour every month, write a few checks, and then be done with it. Businesses have employees whose major duty is paying bills. Technology is the same way, and businesses have different technology needs than consumers.

During the first week of PC ownership, you may have felt like the guy from the old Maxwell stereo ads being 'blown away' with your blazing start-up speeds. The "Wow Factor" eventually wore off, and after a year or two, your computer's start-up speed may have slowed down. What happened, and how can you again be blown away?

We are all familiar with the black and white pictures of old warehouse-sized supercomputers. These machines are now obsolete and we have way more power today sitting on our desks. The most recent supercomputer to be disassembled due to irrelevance was not an old computer made of tubes and pulleys, but rather, it was from 2008.

The consumer adaptation of mobile devices continues to skyrocket. In America, there is a 46% ownership rate of smartphones among adults, this according to Pew Research. Tablets are also a booming market, projected to sell 1.2 billion units in 2013. If your business is not taking advantage of this trend, then you may be missing out on a golden opportunity.