Phantom Technology Solutions Blog

For modern businesses, data is king. It's the driving force behind decision-making, strategic planning, and competitive advantage. Enter business analytics.

This powerful tool transforms raw data into meaningful insights, but how can you use small business analytics for yourself?

Budgeting for anything can present challenges, especially when businesses heavily rely on information systems. Securing funds for IT initiatives can be particularly daunting in such organizational landscapes. Despite these hurdles, however, the IT sector continues to build steam, with year-over-year business IT spending reaching its highest levels ever. Let’s go into how your IT budget is pivotal in advancing your organizational technology endeavors.

If there’s one part of any organization’s operational expenses that concerns many business owners, it’s IT expenses. In fact, some companies have so little control over their IT expenses that they practically hemorrhage money, leading to limited capacity for growth and investment in other parts of the organization that desperately need the help. How can you fix your IT spending and improve your organization as a whole?

It all starts with a network audit and some intelligent future planning. Let’s review some of the most important work you can do to help your business better budget for IT expenses.

Information technology, or IT, is an indispensable component for most contemporary businesses and serves as the backbone of their operations. To ensure a smooth operational infrastructure, it is crucial that businesses manage their IT in the most effective manner possible.

One such way businesses can do this is through working with a managed service provider, or MSP. These types of arrangements can provide businesses with clarity and ease of mind as it pertains to IT and operations.

Your IT team plays a crucially important part in your business machinations. However, many small and even medium-sized businesses may not have the in-house resources to effectively cover their needs. If this could easily describe your business, you might want to consider outsourcing some of your technology management needs to a managed service provider. 

Defining art can be a challenging task, particularly in light of the constantly evolving techniques and mediums. At its core, art can be succinctly described as the creative expression of an individual using some form of medium.

The Right to Repair movement has evolved from a simple idea into a full-fledged campaign, with numerous states enacting measures to enhance the rights of consumers and businesses who use various technologies daily. Let's take a moment to assess the current status of this movement and explore what it means for businesses.

Now that we’re in Q3 of 2023, it’s time to start planning out your budget for the next fiscal year—including your IT services budget. Let’s go over some of the considerations you’ll need to keep in mind for this remarkably important aspect of running your business.

The Internet of Things, or IoT for short, has changed how businesses approach many areas of technology management, including how utilities and other systems are managed. Thanks to automated systems that can control utilities such as HVAC systems, heating, lighting, and so on, the IoT gives businesses more opportunities to control costs and improve efforts at efficiency. Let’s look at some of the ways businesses can use IoT devices to produce consistent cost savings.

Your business relies on its profits and continued profitability to succeed, but this priority is surprisingly challenging. By investing in a managed service provider, however, you can gain a considerable advantage while improving your productivity, thus resulting in increased profits for your business.

The past several years have brought about innovations in artificial intelligence, or AI, that has workers worried for their jobs—especially as it moves into more practical and usable mediums. This can all be tied to the Turing Test, a way of measuring the intelligence of a computer, created by one of the most notable minds behind computing, Alan Turing.

Whether you like it or not, organizations are going to get hacked. It’s the cruel truth. There are just so many individuals and organizations looking to gain unauthorized access and siphon off data and money from businesses, that it is basically impossible to go long stretches of time to not have to confront it in some way. With the threat landscape what it is, companies now offer cyber insurance. Let’s take a quick look at cyber insurance and what you need to know about it.

Remote work might have been crucial in the face of the pandemic, but now that companies are bringing employees back to the workplace, many are pushing back. While we can of course assist with your implementation of remote work technologies, there might be more reason to consider allowing for remote work. This doesn’t come from just us; it also comes from industry experts.

There are plenty of companies out there making technology investments, and chances are you are ready to take the plunge yourself by investing in the appropriate business technology solutions to take your company to the next level. However, we want to caution you to only invest in the right technologies, those that push your business forward. Here are some tips you can use to make sure you are keeping this strategy at the top of your mind.

Cloud technology has shifted the way that many businesses operate in their day-to-day, offering advantages that were once a business owner’s pipe dream. Of course, there are now different ways that businesses can embrace these advantages. Let’s compare your options to determine which one better matches up to your needs.

No matter what type of business you run, we are sure that you have paper documents of some sort filling up a filing cabinet somewhere. These paper documents might be signed contracts by employees, clients, or just about anything else out there that you need to file and store away for later. These documents can take up a ton of space, though, so what is the business to do? The answer is simple: go paperless.

The cloud has proven to be an extremely useful tool for the modern business. Not only does it provide anywhere-anytime access to applications, processing, storage, et al; it also delivers those products as a service, allowing you to budget for recurring costs rather than major upfront ones. This provides your organization with functional, supported, and secure computing environments that eliminate a lot of the support costs that traditional computing environments require. It sounds like a perfect scenario for small and large businesses alike, but things aren’t always what they seem, as a lot of cloud users have found that they have incurred several hidden costs by using cloud platforms. Today, we take a look at these hidden costs.