Disaster Recovery ain’t what it used to be. Long gone are the days where a DR solution cost over a hundred thousand dollars and predominantly relied on tape backups. With the onset of cloud computing, today’s DR landscape has dramatically changed.

Upgrading to a new operating system is a challenge that many businesses face, especially in light of several prominent older systems reaching their end-of-support date in recent times. For example, Windows XP reached its end of support date just a few years ago, and this past January, Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows 8. While unsupported software is certainly a problem, why does a business ultimately choose to upgrade away from their current OS?

According to a study by Spiceworks, there are several reasons a business wants to start using a new operating system on their workstations:

Most businesses will only start to use more recent operating systems as needed (69 percent).
Others will upgrade because they want to take full advantage of new apps that are supported by the new OS (42 percent).
Some will even try to use a new OS due to their hardware coming with the software pre-installed (38 percent).

However, there are other reasons that a business might decide to adopt a new OS, and most of them are issues that are addressed by upgrading to a more recent OS. Here’s a chart from Spiceworks’ report:

It’s no surprise that the biggest culprit for convincing businesses to upgrade their systems is end-of-life events, at a solid 66 percent.

Business Intelligence (BI) has conventionally been the preserve of big business, given the need for specialist knowledge meant hiring pricey experts was often the only way to leverage its value. But the rise of self-service BI tools has leveled the playing field, allowing small- and medium-sized businesses to get in on the game too.

Between your customers, vendors, employees and other moving parts of your organization, it can be difficult to find the time to focus on your business. On a daily basis, you likely have to deal with dozens of tasks, and oftentimes don’t finish them all.

LinkedIn is a highly useful site, but many small businesses simply don't make the most of it. The problem is that most of the information out there, that SMBs try to model, is focused on tips and strategies for larger organizations. And these strategies are simply not as effective when applied to the SMB. So what can the small or medium-sized business do to actually gain value from their LinkedIn efforts? Here are few tips to get you started.

A thorough data backup is important for your business continuity plan, and so is a fast and efficient disaster recovery solution. What's that? Aren't those the same thing? Unfortunately, the two concepts are far from the same thing, but many business owners are still under the impression that their data backup is also a disaster recovery solution.