Tech Solutions That Are Cost-Effective for Your Business

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Today, every business should be using the appropriate amount of technology. It’s just a fact of the modern business landscape. There is no industry that can compete in today’s marketplace without the right tech. However, many small business owners are still resistant to this truth due to the perceived costs involved. Thankfully, there are tech solutions that can certainly be cost effective for your business.

Open Source Software

You can’t get much more cost effective than free. While you may have heard there is no such thing as a free lunch, there is such a thing as free software. This kind of software is known as “open source.” This is software in which the original programmers chose to include a copyright that essentially makes the software public domain and free to download and alter as you wish. If you are sick of spending money on software products from Microsoft, Adobe and more, you won’t have to anymore. Most of the most popular software applications, especially office applications, have completely free open source alternatives. For example, LibreOffice is a popular open source alternative to Microsoft Office. Finding downloads for such programs should be rather easy. Some of them even provide support through their own websites via message boards.

Ediscovery Software

Another kind of tech that is very cost-effective to implement is ediscovery software. You may be wondering, “what is eDiscovery software?” This is software that is used by businesses to help them navigate the legal process of discovery in relevant court cases. Discovery requires the exchange of documents between both the plaintiff and the defendant. In the past, this would have involved paper copies. Today, these documents are mostly digital files. Things like emails, word documents, spreadsheets and more must be exchanged. Ediscovery software helps to more easily facilitate this process by making all these items quickly accessible through one application. Without it, the process of discovery can be much more costly and time consuming. Due to the fact most businesses will at some point be involved in lawsuits, ediscovery software is a safe investment to make for slashing future costs.

Cloud Backup

In many cases, software is cost effective because the things it prevents from happening would be much more expensive. This is certainly true in regards to cloud hosting used for the purpose of real time backup. With cloud backup services, everything on your own local machines will continually be backed up by that cloud provider. Due to the way cloud hosting is designed, losing information on accident is nearly impossible. This is not the case in your offices. Things as simple as a lightning strike or your air conditioning failing can lead to information on your computers being lost forever. When this nightmare scenario happens, all your work from over the years could be lost permanently. However, if you have cloud backup services in place, you’ll be able to restore everything you lost in a very quick manner.

VoIP

Telephone services are something else that businesses spend a lot of money on. Thankfully, you can actually lower this cost for good by implementing a technology known as VoIP. VoIP is an acronym that stands for voice over internet protocol. Instead of using a landline like traditional phone calls, these calls are instead made directly through your internet service. All you need to make a VoIP phone call is a computer, a router, internet service and a VoIP provider. VoIP is usually cheaper than using traditional landlines for your phone calls. This is especially the case for international calls in which you can save up to 90 percent versus using a landline. Another added benefit is the ability to make video calls via VoIP. It’s a great choice for teleconferencing and digital meetings.

Conclusion

Overall, technology can do amazing things for businesses. In certain cases, new technology can be cost prohibitive. It’s understandable in those cases that small business owners may be skeptical of their end benefit. However, this is not actually the case for many kinds of tech you can integrate into your company. Things like open source software, VoIP, ediscovery software and cloud backup services can help you save money by slashing costs and preventing larger expenses in the future. Certainly consider these and other options for cost-effective tech for your business.

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