There’s an energetic feeling that only comes around as the calendar turns over to a new year. This drives many types of new year’s resolutions and business optimization strategies as people and companies want to start the year fresh and make it better.

The best area for companies to aim towards goals designed to improve their sales and efficiency in 2022 is technology. Your business technology infrastructure is responsible in large part for how your company does and how well you operate.

Following are some top technology goals to shoot for in the coming year. These will help your organization improve cybersecurity, employee productivity, and how you interact with clients in the new virtual meeting space.

Remove Cloud Waste

Cloud waste is expected to increase 41% in 2022 as compared to last year. One of the biggest issues with the cloud right now is that it’s being adopted without a clear plan, and businesses don’t always have budgets under control.

Wasted cloud spend crops up in the form of:

• Overprovisioning of services
• Redundancies in cloud functions
• Unused accounts that aren’t closed
• Duplicate apps being used in different departments
• Shadow IT (apps employees use that aren’t officially approved)

This year, take time to root out cloud waste to lower costs and improve efficiency. You can start with surveying employees to see which cloud apps they use, which are helpful, and which aren’t. 

Begin an Adoption of Zero-Trust Cybersecurity

Ransomware grew 485% during the pandemic, along with other types of attacks, like credential theft. IT security measures that may have been enough to protect you two years ago, might not be sufficient in today’s more sophisticated threat climate.

Make this the year your company begins adopting a zero-trust cybersecurity approach. This is applying systems of checks and balances to asset access and doing things that can block malicious threats by default without needing to specifically identify them first.

Zero-trust can be implemented piece by piece, as fits your budget. Just a few of the tenants of this system include:

• Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
• Safe listing of programs and users
• Ring-fencing how applications can interact with each other

Give Employees Time Each Month to Explore New Cloud Features

Companies like Microsoft add new features to their platforms all the time. These features are designed to add more value and can often boost productivity and save companies money.

But employees generally get so busy during the week that they don’t have time to explore these features, thus they go unused, and that value is left on the table. Employees might also be afraid of taking time to explore new app features as it might not be considered “work” by their supervisor.

You can improve productivity and workflow by giving your employees permission this year to take time and explore new helpful features in their business cloud applications. They might find that something like Excel’s data types saves them a considerable amount of time and effort. 

By allowing them 1-2 hours per month to explore these, you give them permission to optimize their workflows proactively. 

Put a Permanent Remote/Hybrid Security Structure in Place

As of September, approximately 45% of full-time employees were working partly or fully remote. The pandemic greatly accelerated the evolution of work-from-home (WFH), and now it’s becoming the norm in most organizations.

But, in the pandemic years so far, businesses have been putting together their remote infrastructure ad hoc. Security hasn’t always been as high a priority as just getting everyone connected to customers and their business apps.

It’s time to put a permanent security structure in place for your remote team. This means looking at some of the things you may do in the office, like using managed updates, backups, and antivirus for your devices.

Expand Your Virtual Meeting Capabilities 

Meeting virtually has become the default for meetings both inside and outside a company. But most companies are just using the bare minimum of the capabilities their video conferencing tools have.

Many of them have ramped up features like special presenter modes and reactions to try to bridge the gap and make online meetings more efficient and engaging. Microsoft Teams is even planning to bring 3D into the virtual meeting space this year.

Mesh for Microsoft Teams

Make a pledge to check out these types of meeting features in your tools that you may not have been aware of before, so you can expand your capabilities and improve the effectiveness and connection when meeting virtually.

Get Help Planning a More Optimized 2022

GEEK911 can help your Silicon Valley area business review opportunities and security measures that can improve your operations in the coming year and help reduce costs and risk.

Schedule a consultation by calling 1-866-433-5411 or reach us online.