Managed IT Force Blog

If you open any business publication or scroll through LinkedIn, you are bombarded with the message that every company must migrate entirely to the cloud. It is often portrayed as a seamless environment where technical problems disappear.

Let’s skip the traditional marketing slop. There are already plenty of self-proclaimed tech gurus filling the internet with generic jargon to maximize operational velocity. It is exhausting, and it does not help a business owner trying to run a company on a Tuesday morning.

Without experience running a business, the intricacies of accepting credit card payments probably wouldn’t occur to the average person. However, there is a complex maze of requirements, rules, and standards that a business must meet before it may do so. These are what make up the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. Let’s go over what this standard demands and what you need to do to ensure compliance is achieved… plus, why compliance is so critical in the first place.

The reactive method of managing business technology means waiting for something to explode before you address it. When a computer fails or the network completely bites the dust, a business owner contacts a technician to fix the damage, which usually results in a beautifully unpredictable invoice.

This system creates a pretty backwards relationship between your business and your tech support. The service provider only makes a dime when your life is actively falling apart. (Apologies for the bluntness, but it is true.) Consequently, they have no real financial incentive to put long-term preventative measures in place. This pattern keeps a company permanently stuck in a frustrating cycle of unexpected downtime, panic, and temporary patches.

Modern cyberthreats are understandably terrifying to consider… enough so that it may seem best to lock down your network to the point where someone would need an authentication code to open every window.

Here’s the problem: If you make your security framework so restrictive that your employees feel like they are being micromanaged by an algorithm, two things happen. First, their productivity plummets. Second, they will actively look for ways to bypass your security just to do their jobs.

A lot of IT consultants love to drop big, scary global statistics to get business owners to take backup and disaster recovery seriously. They will wave a report in your face claiming that the average corporate network outage costs $5,600 per minute.

Of course, if you run a local business with 15 or 30 employees, a global enterprise statistic doesn't mean a thing to you. It's generic, it's irrelevant, and it feels like a high-pressure sales tactic.

That said, network downtime is expensive. When your server fails, your internet drops out, or a critical cloud application crashes, you aren't just dealing with an annoying technical glitch. You are actively hemorrhaging cash.