Using Business Technology to Reach Your Organizational Goals

As a business owner, you’re constantly planning for the future. Adding staff, offering new products or services, or changing up your business focus all help you stay competitive. 

But have you thought about creating a business technology plan to guide your company's future? The right technology can play a significant role in helping you grow your business, increase revenue, and outperform the competition. 

A trusted IT service adviser can help determine the best path, working with various suppliers and vendors to remain unbiased. They’ll help you identify effective technologies for your industry, introduce new ones, and weigh the cost-benefit potential of these technologies.

Picture your business technology needs as layers on a pyramid, building from a base of infrastructure and cybersecurity all the way to digital maturity at the top to boost your revenue and competitive advantage. 

Discover what effective technology looks like for your business. Read on to learn how to complete the pyramid and grow your business.

Layer One: IT Infrastructure

Servers, switches, computers, routers, and similar hardware form the foundation of your business technology and are critical to keep updated. Given how quickly it changes, you might be surprised that you can actually save money by upgrading your business technology. 

Improve your operations with the latest IT.

From employees struggling to use older tools to safety concerns, the wrong hardware and software can drag your business down, leading to poor productivity and cybersecurity risks. Keep your business running smoothly with a stable, secure, and up-to-date IT infrastructure. 

For instance, buying new computers can save on energy costs and give employees the right equipment to turn out amazing work. Or go a step further by integrating IT automation (or outsourcing it) to handle their most tedious tasks.

Layer Two: Cybersecurity, Compliance, and Backup & Disaster Recovery (BDR)

You might be surprised by how many businesses don't address these three areas properly. We see it all the time and try our best to make proactive and strategic recommendations to keep our clients' data safe from modern hackers.

Tighten your cybersecurity.

Stories about companies ruined by cyberattacks and the barrage of commercials about hacking attempts, such as ransomware and phishing, have become white noise. The problem is that most businesses are still behind on cybersecurity. And of the small companies that suffer data breaches, 60% go out of business within six months. 

The dollars lost in downtime from an attack can do irreparable harm. Your customers expect you to secure their digital data, using systems that can help them quickly recover from attacks. 

Ensure regulatory compliance.

Companies in highly regulated industries, such as healthcare, financial services, legal services, and government, are required to maintain regulatory compliance. Customer data protection is a big deal, with a number of rules and regulations, including:  

• General Data Protection Regulation
• California Consumer Privacy Act 
• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act 
• Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard 
• Financial Industry Regulatory Authority
• National Institute of Standards and Technology 
• Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement

Ntiva has many nonprofit clients who deal with highly sensitive data about high-profile donors and constituents. They know a data breach could have disastrous consequences, so they’ve opted into the highest level of managed security services.

Don’t forget BDR.

Your business probably has some kind of backup in place, but is it the right recovery solution? Answer this question before you need to use it—and note that BDR and business continuity aren’t the same.

Business continuity keeps core functions running in the face of a disaster, while disaster recovery restores interrupted services. Document a business continuity plan to reduce your downtime and get back to work. 

Layer Three: Business Productivity and Communications

Email, phone, project management—communication tools keep the wheels of your business spinning, especially when they’re modernized to meet the way you work today.

Implement select productivity apps.

Cloud software, ranging from Microsoft Office 365 to Google Workspace, falls under the business productivity category of business technology. But there's a huge list of business tools to choose from, especially for:

• Team collaboration
• Email management 
• Time management
• Scheduling 
• Customer support 

If new tools save money, old ones do the opposite because they’re harder to maintain and slow your organization down. Staying up to date on productivity apps helps in the long run. 

Give communication tools a facelift.

Dealing with an aging business phone system? Cloud-based communication technologies have ousted older, on-premise telephony solutions. Switch to a cloud-based Unified Communications VoIP. It boosts your productivity by integrating messaging, video chat, and email across desktop and mobile.

Layer Four: Line of Business Applications

Many businesses own well-known, commercially available applications that support specific industries. But often, only custom solutions will do, which can either be your competitive advantage or your downfall.

Balance the pros and cons of proprietary solutions.

Just dusting off something the company built ages ago? Stop and think first. Paying to maintain legacy business software that you’re not really taking advantage of could be throwing valuable dollars away.

Custom business technology could radically transform your operations instead. Are there better, modern tools you could use? Partner with a qualified IT consultant to assess your tech stack to find additional opportunities.

Layer Five: Digital Transformation and Tools

Digital transformation is really just a term for our societal shift toward technology from personal to business and every nook and cranny in between. But technology isn’t changing what businesses do—just how we use technology in our processes and workflows.

Enjoy universal access. 

It wasn’t that long ago that big infrastructure demands and price tags limited tech access to massive corporations. But between the cloud and AI, companies of all sizes can now implement most digital tools.

According to Harvard Business Review, knowledge mismanagement costs companies up to 25% of their annual revenue. But using advanced business technology can give you a jump start. AI-powered tools alone can drive measurable business results, including:

• 47% higher success rate in achieving goals 
• 39% better team efficiency and speed
• 23% greater productivity per employee

Still hesitant about investing in digital tools? Clearly, it pays off!

Grow Your Business with Technology

If you spend all of your time and resources at the bottom of the pyramid, you could miss out on opportunities to innovate and gain a competitive advantage. Many businesses turn to a managed IT services provider to handle routine tasks so they can prioritize growth. This could be the way forward for your business too!

Want to learn more about how the latest technologies can power your organization? Get in touch with Ntiva to discover the possibilities and determine if outsourcing could be the right move for you!

This blog was originally published in January 2017 and updated September 2025