The COVID-19 coronavirus has changed the landscape for many–if not all—businesses, technology companies, and in-deed, all organizations. Having been content to keep with the status quo or crawl slowly into modern technologies, businesses were just forced to face a tough decision: cease operations or rapidly deploy remote work tools. With governments mandating ever increasing levels of social distancing, self-quarantine, and even curfews, small business owners and senior business managers scrambled to find ways to keep their teams working through the confinement and quarantining. As the economy is reopened in each state across the country and around the world, businesses will continue to need modern technology to stay ahead of the game. Proper technology may be the difference between surviving or throwing in the towel. There is a constant concern about how to pay for all of this. The good news is that there are many completely free solutions as well as several long-term trial offers to help businesses get through this crisis. carpasean is also offering free and reduce priced services to small business that have been financially devastated by the pandemic.

One of the greatest opportunities for businesses has been Microsoft’s free 6-month trial of Microsoft Office 365 E1 including Office Professional, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online and a variety of their other cloud based solutions. But everything comes with a catch it seems. Eager beaver IT consulting firms and managed service providers created very enticing shortcuts to enable business to quickly and blindly adopt video conferencing and team collaboration tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, dragging businesses into unfamiliar territory and sometimes ignoring the risks of allowing employees to work from home with unsupervised tools. Many of the companies that started offering these solutions had never worked with them. Desperate to keep their own businesses running, they foolishly convinced unwitting customers to trust them to these high-risk implementations.

We live and work in a digital environment polluted with infiltrators, intruders, and thieves. Businesses may have just handed these deviant players all the game pieces they need to hold your data ransom, sell it on the dark web and black markets, violate customers, and destroy hard earned trust and reputations. When we were all still working from our offices a municipality’s files and data was encrypted and held ransom by cryptoware producers, highly skilled professionals fell victim to email phishing scams allowing mailboxes and entire computers to be breached, and IT Managers missed that unauthorized accesses to their networks occurred allowing data and credit card information to be redirect to external locations. That all happened while we were working supervised in an office with “safe guards in place.” Can you imagine what can and is happening to unmonitored home-based worker computers? What’s on that computer? Your customer information, confidential payroll and employee records, secret merger and acquisition agreements, legal case materials for an upcoming settlement, proprietary source code, and so much more.

While security and data protection should always be the first consideration for every technology solution, it very likely was not done well, or at all, in the rush to keep many of America’s small, medium, and mid-market businesses (and technology companies) as agile and operational as possible these last few months. It is never too late to get tested and protected. carpasean has more than two decades experience helping businesses transform these types of unfortunate and egregious disasters into success stories.

Reach out to us today and gives us a chance to prove ourselves your trusted technology advisor for secure, safe, efficient, and easy people-first business solutions. The pandemic has already taken so much from us, don’t let your businesses be part of it if there is a chance to save it.