Business owners, this one is definitely for you. You've probably experienced the fact that shaving expenses here and there can lead to more flexibility and long-term savings, but at what cost? Are you limiting your company by nixing those extra services and costs? Sometimes you can get more and still save money. Let's look at a few ways Upstate New York businesses can do just that.

Nobody wants to spend more than they have to, especially when it comes to those necessary evils like bills, utilities, insurance, and the general costs of keeping things running smoothly. At Directive, our goal is to provide outstanding enterprise-level solutions for small business prices. Let's talk about a few ways to cut long term IT costs.

Controlling and managing a big network with multiple servers is no small endeavor, especially keeping them maintained. On top of that, software licenses, warranties, user permissions, and security all need to be managed and controlled. As your business expands, you may need more servers in order to perform certain tasks ranging from email, file distribution, specialized software, and security management of various levels. Pretty soon your server room is beginning to look like a cramped mini data center and you need to worry about controlling the heat and maintaining multiple high-priority, mission critical machines. There's got to be a better way, right?

A lot of Upstate New York small businesses are taking advantage of regular proactive maintenance that keeps their servers and workstations in tip-top shape much longer than their typical lifespan. Amazing amounts of money are saved on new hardware and downtime and everything is just peachy! You've been able to run that old server for years and you have workstations that are still chugging away on Windows XP. What you don't know is that your old technology, even if it is in perfect working order, could be drastically slowing things down for your business.

Voice Over IP phone systems add a lot of great features that businesses can take advantage of, and are improving the way companies are using their voice communication. Besides the fact that supporting older analogue phone systems is becoming increasingly harder as technology carries us forward, here are 7 reasons why Upstate New York businesses should switch over to voice over IP.

You are an expert in your field, right? Whether you sell a product or commit to a batch of service offerings, you know your job and you know it well. We're guessing you have some great employees who know their job well too, right? You hired them because of their drive, interest, and possibly knowledge in the field (or you spend plenty of time teaching and training them). So when someone's computer goes down, why should they waste their time trying to fix it?

Businesses these days depend on having reliable, fast desktop computers. The trouble is, these high-end desktops offer plenty of resources that never get touched, making them underutilized. Huge hard drives and extremely fast CPUs mean each desktop has more capabilities than most users will ever tap into.

Here's a scenario: Tom's computer is acting up and getting a blue screen error a couple times a day. Obviously this is a problem because it drastically cuts into Tom's efficiency. Tom is a smart guy though, so his manager asks him to see if he can fix it before calling support and putting in a ticket. After all, tech support costs money. Tom spends about 4 hours across the next few days researching the issue, attempting a few things, and finally fixes it. Way to go Tom! You just saved the company money... or did you?

Cloud computing is the new way to get things done for small businesses.  It's easy, it's secure, and it is great for the environment.  According to a report put on by the Carbon Disclosure Project, cloud computing can potentially reduce the world's carbon emissions by millions of metric tons.  The differences are wildly significant compared to running your own in-house data centers, even if you just have a server or two.

If you use email, you've probably seen spam. If you think we're talking about a canned meat product, and are wondering how it relates to email, then we envy you. For everyone else, saying your inbox probably has a little spam is a dramatic understatement.

Spam comes in several different flavors; ranging to inappropriate solicitations to unwanted gibberish to carefully coordinated scams. We're going to go over one of these tricky spoofs that is known to fool users.