The Executive’s Guide to Technology Decision-Making

READ TIME: 5 MIN

The Executive’s Guide to Technology Decision-Making

As a senior leader, you’re responsible for determining your company’s strategic goals and empowering your teams to execute. The technology your business utilizes plays a crucial role in your workforce’s ability to perform the tasks necessary to achieve those goals. In the digital age, having the right technology is no longer a “nice to have” because business operations and the technology that supports it are closely tied to the success of your business.

Even if you’re not a technology expert, business leaders are becoming increasingly important in the technology decision-making process because the latest technologies are enabling business objectives.

What considerations must be made in technology decision-making? Let’s walk through some of the factors that need to go into your decision-making process:

Align Technology Needs with Business Goals

It sounds simple enough and many executives can easily identify the basic technology required to operate. In addition to meeting the immediate technology needs to perform everyday tasks, it’s equally important to evaluate what technology should be implemented to achieve business goals.

For example, a common business goal across multiple industries is to “Improve Customer Experience.” Let’s say for the purpose of this example, you determine one of the ways your company will achieve this is by “enhancing your digital engagement with customers” (e.g. online, mobile applications, customer service and buying experience). You decide that when your sales team engages with customers, you want them to be able to use mobile devices to provide customers with digital information and perform remote transactions in real-time.

As you continue to drill down on your business goals and get more specific to determine “how will we achieve this?”, the answer to “what technologies are required to enable and support this goal?” will become clearer. Focusing on technology that will support the achievement of business goals will help improve ROI, and with creating and prioritizing your IT budget.

Budget

Many executives have experienced that awkward moment of assuming that they were on budget for their IT expenses only to find that they have gone over budget due to unforeseen expenses or have realized that they are significantly under budget without the time to use that budget to upgrade their existing hardware/software or infrastructure.

Here are some scenarios that may cause over & under budget situations:

  • OVER BUDGET – You experience a ransomware attack and have not implemented an enterprise-grade backup and recovery solution. In turn, you are forced to either rebuild your infrastructure with severe data loss or you pay a significant ransom to possibly get your data back.
  • OVER BUDGET – Your business experiences hyper-growth requiring significant hiring and simply issuing new laptops to all your new employees will not suffice. Your infrastructure is not made to scale, and you need to enable a new virtual desktop solution to accommodate the growth.
  • UNDER BUDGET – An economic recession causes you to become “cash conservative” and the executive team issues a freeze on upgrading technology that is due to be refreshed. The result is that your infrastructure and employee devices now become outdated creating increased risk of downtime and inefficiencies.

Determining your upcoming year’s IT budget requires significant planning with IT and business leadership. It’s important to understand what technology to invest in to achieve business goals and factor in likely business scenarios that could cause you to go over budget.

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Consulting

You may not initially know the exact technologies needed or the different options available (and that’s okay!), but you do know what you want the business outcome to look like. Consult with an experienced IT services provider, like NexusTek, to help you better understand the IT solutions available that can be implemented.

Having an IT consultant that acts more like a trusted business partner is a great way to help you transform your business. Being proactive by including an IT consultant during your planning stages will help with developing your business strategy, forming your IT budget, and adopting the proper technologies to achieve your desired business outcomes.

Even if you identify a new technology requirement outside of your planning cycle, an IT consultant can come in and help you select the best technology to meet your evolving needs.

Resources

Once you’ve identified the IT solutions needed for your business, you’ll want to factor in the resources required to support them: What are the technologies that your business must own? Do you have the IT staff in place to support the technology? Do you need to acquire resources, like an IT manager, to support them? Or, can some of the technologies be implemented and managed by an IT provider?

Often businesses that have internal IT staff have found that the internal staff either does not have the time or expertise needed to accomplish the goals outlined by your IT partner. This is where augmenting your IT staff with an IT partner becomes vital.

There are many considerations when answering these questions, including evaluating the resources you currently have and working within your budget to determine which options are best for your business. Talk through the different options with your IT leadership and even an IT consultant to help you decide.

Have you optimized the technology in your business lately?
If not, contact NexusTek to find out how technology can make your daily operations more seamless and productive.

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NexusTek Acquires IT Services Firm, Symmetrix Solutions

NexusTek Acquires IT Services Firm, Symmetrix Solutions
NexusTek Acquires IT Services Firm, Symmetrix Solutions

NexusTek Acquires IT Services Firm, Symmetrix Solutions

Nationwide managed IT services leader reinforces its upmarket footprint and capabilities by adding market leader to its portfolio

Denver, CO; (September 29 , 2020) NexusTek, a national provider of managed IT services and technology consulting services, today announced that it has acquired Symmetrix Solutions, an IT services company headquartered in Denver, CO.  NexusTek is backed by private equity firm Abry Partners based out of Boston, MA.

Founded in 2012, Symmetrix Solutions provides enterprise class IT services to mid-market businesses, with a primary focus on customer service .  Symmetrix Solutions brings added expertise with upmarket clients further enhancing NexusTek’s IT services and consulting expertise.  Both NexusTek and Symmetrix Solutions have core values that focus on delivering world class customer satisfaction based on enterprise grade technologies.

“NexusTek’s focus on exceptional customer satisfaction is enhanced through internal process improvement as well as through additions of companies like Symmetrix Solutions to the NexusTek family,” said Bill Wosilius, NexusTek CEO.

“Symmetrix Solutions attention to customer satisfaction shows in their extremely high customer retention rates and direct customer feedback.  We are excited to add the Symmetrix team to our national platform and increase our market presence in the Denver/Rocky Mountain region”

“Our expertise in bringing IT from the basement to the boardroom, specifically with Enterprise clients in many industries including the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC), Healthcare, and Education verticals, will help NexusTek grow not only in Colorado but nationally.  We are excited to join the NexusTek and Abry Partners portfolio” said Shawn Audino, Managing Partner of Symmetrix Solutions.

Symmetrix Solutions’ service portfolio is very complementary to the existing NexusTek service portfolio.  “NexusTek is a trusted technology advisor for businesses searching for IT solutions, including managed IT, cloud, and cybersecurity services,” said Wosilius.

“With NexusTek’s nationwide support infrastructure and 24/7/365 service model, mid-market businesses can be well assured that all their IT needs can be managed under one umbrella.”

With the addition of Symmetrix Solutions, NexusTek continues on its mission towards becoming the industry standard for delivering premier IT solutions and best-in-class customer satisfaction.

About NexusTek

Thousands businesses depend on NexusTek to manage and optimize their IT and cloud environments for business continuity, productivity, operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness. With an all-encompassing services portfolio, infrastructure, high-touch personal attention and IT consulting expertise, NexusTek delivers true end-to-end, outsourced IT management to organizations nationwide.

An SSAE 18 SOC II certified company, NexusTek designs problem solving and efficiency-minded IT solutions that bring together storage, virtualization, unified communications and collaboration, data protection and networking technologies from the world’s foremost technology leaders. Unfettered visibility, 24 x 7 x 365 monitoring, IT management and a true 24 hour staffed helpdesk, coupled with its comprehensive solutions portfolio and more than 2 decades of experience, empowers NexusTek to deliver better services to customers, regardless of how their needs change.

About Abry Partners

Abry is an experienced and successful media, communications, and business and information services sector focused private equity investment firms in North America. Since their founding in 1989, they have completed over $82 billion of leveraged transactions (including many roll-up investment strategies) and other private equity, mezzanine or preferred equity investments.  Currently, they manage over $5.0 billion of capital in their active funds.

Because Abry brings deep industry insight to the investment process, they are able to quickly understand key issues, accurately assess opportunity, value, and risk, and bring relevant information to bear. They partner with skilled executives and invest significant capital to help build stronger companies and industry leaders.

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Business Continuity vs Disaster Recovery: What’s the Difference?

READ TIME: 6 MIN

  • (Updated May 15, 2023)

Business Continuity vs Disaster Recovery: What’s the Difference?

When it comes to IT downtime, it’s not a matter of “if” but “when.” In fact, over the course of a 3-year period, 96% of businesses can expect to experience at least one IT systems outage1. Unexpected downtime can be caused by a variety of issues, such as power outages, weather emergencies, cyberattacks, software and equipment failures, pandemics, civil unrest, and human error.

Because downtime can vary in terms of root cause and severity, different incidents of downtime will exact different tolls. Any business operations that are dependent on IT—likely most of them—will be paralyzed until the root cause of the downtime can be rectified. For most small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), this costs anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000 per hour2.

Depending on the cause of the downtime, it may also be accompanied by data loss or destruction. For example, ransomware attacks often involve a “double whammy” of IT systems downtime plus inaccessible data, which has been encrypted by the attackers. Ransomware attacks and disasters that result in permanent data destruction hit SMBs especially hard, and unfortunately, there are businesses that never recover.

With a business continuity plan and disaster recovery solutions, however, businesses can minimize their risk of experiencing downtime and data loss due to a disaster or other crisis event. The terms “business continuity plan” and “disaster recovery” are often used interchangeably, but they do represent distinct processes and solutions. The following sections clarify what these terms mean and how they work together to form a cohesive strategy:

What Is a Business Continuity Plan?

A business continuity plan is a set of processes, programs, supporting policies, techniques, guidelines, and procedures used to help an organization continue running during a disaster. They ensure a firm can continue functioning without downtime, regardless of adverse circumstances or events. Business continuity planning may include measures such as establishing redundant infrastructure, establishing backup management procedures, and creating guidelines for employee conduct during an adverse event. Most organizations have their business continuity plan written, kept under “lock and key,” and distributed amongst their senior leadership. Only certain members of leadership have the authority to initiate the business continuity plan, and it is regarded with the utmost seriousness if it is enacted.

What Is a Disaster Recovery Plan?

Normally included within a business continuity plan, the elements of a disaster recovery plan include the required steps and enabled technologies for recovering from a disruptive event. Disaster recovery commonly focuses on restoring data and IT system functionality immediately following a crisis event like disaster or cyberattack. Included in the plan is a list of all disaster recovery technology to be deployed and the owners of each deployment when applicable. This may include on-premises as well as off-site replication to ensure redundancy. There are many solutions that also allow for an entire technology environment to be “spun up” in the cloud—referred to as failover—in the case of an onsite disaster.

How Do They Work Together?

The business continuity plan is all-encompassing with the necessary steps for a business to respond to and recover from an unexpected incident or peril. The disaster recovery plan is a component of the broader business continuity plan and is the “mitigate” and “recover” portion of the plan. To put it simply: business continuity planning provides the blueprint to help you maintain “business as usual” with processes and procedures, while disaster recovery planning focuses on the tools and solutions required for restoring your compromised technology and data.

Do You Need One, or Both?

Now that you know the difference between the two and understand how they work together, the answer becomes very clear…you need both. If you have a business continuity plan, but no disaster recovery element to your plan, your efforts to restore normal functioning of your infrastructure may be disorganized and chaotic due to a lack of clear procedures. Even worse, if you have not taken measures to protect data from loss or destruction through careful backup planning, you may find yourself unable to restore some or all of your data.

Now let’s flip the scenario. Imagine that you have a disaster recovery strategy in place without a broader business continuity plan. In this case, you may have technology deployed that can be used to restore business-critical functions and data. But without the context of the business continuity plan, your employees may not know how to continue to be productive and serve your customers until the fix is implemented. In a high-stress situation such as a cyber incident or disaster, employees need clear instructions to follow until the situation is resolved. Without a business continuity plan, you can’t proactively manage your teams to make sure your organization can maintain critical operations and ultimately recover in the event of a disaster.

NexusTek Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning

We offer complete business continuity planning services, as well as products designed and customized to ensure data and applications are fully restored and running when problems arise. Our disaster recovery services help protect your key business data while maintaining productivity and limiting financial losses during an outage. Our planning steps include:

  • Evaluation & Consultation: NexusTek will evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a company’s systems, its areas of vulnerability and possible threats, and identify other areas of potential risk.
  • Plan Design: Based on our evaluation, NexusTek will design a business continuity and data disaster recovery plan that will be optimized for your company.
  • Implementation & Testing: NexusTek will implement the plan, and formalize an ongoing testing and validation process to ensure your business continuity plans adapt to the company’s needs over time.
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  1. Gill, M. (2023, February 9). 14 shocking data loss and disaster recovery statistics. Comparitech. https://www.comparitech.com/data-recovery-software/disaster-recovery-data-loss-statistics/
  2. Infrascale. (2020, May 13). Infrascale survey highlights the heavy costs of business downtime. https://www.infrascale.com/press-release/infrascale-survey-highlights-the-heavy-costs-of-business-downtime/

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