Tip of the Week: Understanding Business Technology Acronyms

Before investing in a solution for your business, it’s important to understand what you’re getting into. Sometimes it can be difficult, especially with all of the jargon floating around. In fact, an excessive amount of this “geekspeak” can intimidate prospective clients, and maybe even frighten away a sale. While it’s avoided as much as possible, it sometimes can’t be helped, and some business owners are still lost on certain sayings or acronyms.

Here, we’ll help you understand six of the common acronyms we might use the most when referring to the business or IT industry. This way, you can know what we’re talking about when we mention stuff like VoIP solutions for SMBs, or BDRs for your BCP.

Small and Medium-Sized Businesses (SMBs): SMB is a term used to refer to the group of businesses who employ 1-to-500 people. The SMB is actually our target audience, as our managed services allow smaller businesses like yourself take advantage of enterprise-level solutions that might not ordinarily fit your budget.

Return on Investment (ROI): A service like tech support doesn’t come without its risks. Any investment is the same way, and it requires a particular analysis to determine if the reward is worth the risk. When this is achieved, it’s called the ROI, or the return on investment. This measurement is used to determine whether or not the solution integrated was worth the investment. A similar term to this is “risk assessment.” In a sense, it’s cause and effect. The risk assessment will help you determine the ROI for a particular solution.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP): VoIP is a technology which is gaining momentum in the modern office. Basically, a VoIP phone transfers your voice over the Internet to another computer, allowing it to function largely like a legacy telephone system. Additionally, VoIP has several other features which can be integrated into it, like video conferencing, instant messaging, and more.

Unified Threat Management (UTM): When it comes to network security, nothing can beat the UTM solution. It’s our comprehensive security device that includes firewall, antivirus, spam blocking, and content filtering solutions. The main idea is that your network can’t afford to allow threats to have their way with your data, so the UTM keeps threats out of your network in the first place, and quickly neutralizes those that are detected.

Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR): An investment your business can’t afford to be without is a BDR. The BDR solution is designed to help your business handle a disaster in the quickest, most-efficient manner possible. It allows for multiple backups throughout the workday, as well as fast data recovery. In fact, the BDR can act as your server if you need to replace your hardware due to failure or other manners of destruction.

Business Continuity Plan (BCP): Some business owners confuse their BCP with a BDR, but in reality, the two are much different from one-another. In fact, the BDR is only one part of the BCP. The business continuity plan is how your business will deal with issues which might affect your business’s ordinary operations, like a major disaster, death or illness, employee turnover, and more. In other words, even unlikely scenarios should be considered in order to provide your business with the greatest likelihood of continuing operations as long as possible.

Now that you know all about some of the acronyms we discuss consistently, what do you think? Could your business benefit from a UTM or a BDR? You bet it could. Preferred is chock-full of trained IT professionals who want to see your business get the maximum ROI for your technology, and we specialize in making this technology work for you. Give us a call at 708-781-7110 to learn more.