Be honest… how often have you thought about negotiating your IT contract with your provider? Many don’t, and as a result, their businesses are susceptible to slow response times, hidden fees, and set lists of vendors.
This isn’t sustainable. A real partnership is, and is established through a balanced contract that promotes proactivity and accountability. Let’s talk about what goes into these types of contracts.
How many vendors and subscriptions does your business rely on to function day to day?
Now, to ask a question that hopefully has (but very easily doesn’t have) the same answer: How many vendors and subscriptions does your business currently pay for?
Unfortunately, for most small and medium-sized businesses, these answers can vary widely, which often creates confusion and leads to wasted capital. Let’s talk about a simple and reliable way to help align the answers to these two key questions: vendor management.
Most successful businesses don't succeed by being the first to invent a new way of doing things. They succeed by taking systems that already work and putting them to use for their particular needs. In the world of business technology, trying to be unique is usually a fast track to wasting money and facing technical headaches.
Once upon a time, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) was seen as mutually beneficial. An employer could save substantial costs by eliminating the need for new hardware investment, while the employee didn’t have to juggle devices and could stick with what was familiar and comfortable.
However, there is a pretty significant drawback that could upend the undeniable usefulness of BYOD if it isn’t addressed: the inherent insecurity that the business needs to contend with.
Is AI good for productivity? Of course… but, like most things, there are two sides to consider. Since artificial intelligence is so good for productivity, many employees (perhaps even some of yours) are turning to public AI tools without authorization or oversight, exposing summarized meetings, written code, entire spreadsheets, and other proprietary and sensitive data to a public database.
In short, they’re using a specific form of shadow IT… shadow AI.
