The Thurston, Pierce, Lewis, and Mason Counties IT Experts

First, you need to consider what you need the hosted computing for. If, for instance, you plan to host your own infrastructure solutions and have an established history of success in doing so, moving to the cloud would likely only complicate matters unnecessarily. However, this is not to say that the cloud couldn’t be helpful—particularly if you’re introducing new services to your workforce or trying to expand your business’ resources.

Here, we’ll compare each alternative.

In-House Servers

Despite cloud technology now giving businesses a real alternative to purchasing and maintaining local servers, doing so can still offer many businesses some serious benefits. First and foremost, you must consider the control that complete ownership brings with it. While expensive, owning your own infrastructure gives you the freedom to approach each element precisely how you want to.

An in-house server setup can also be beneficial to a business whose Internet connectivity isn’t the fastest or most reliable. Furthermore, their local nature lends itself well to a business that is held to some compliance standards where data security is involved. While cloud servers certainly don’t lack in security, moving data through an intranet is inherently more secure than moving it through the Internet.

Cloud Servers

Cloud servers are great for the business that needs to keep its options open without breaking the bank in the process. With virtual environments available to meet every need, the costs of sustaining the physical infrastructure are greatly diminished. This makes the cloud an effective and affordable way for a small business to get whatever resources they need for a more predictable rate.

As a result of this, cloud servers are more scalable than self-hosted servers as a rule. With no chance of underutilizing the hardware you invest in; your business can dictate precisely what it needs and pay for that access accordingly. The main impetus at that point becomes ensuring the security of your data as it moves back and forth.

Whichever option is right for you, PC Technologies is here to help you make your selection and handle it for you. To learn more about what we can provide, give us a call at 360-491-2227.

Communication

Communication is well-known to be a crucial aspect of any business’ success, so it only makes sense that leveraging the capabilities that today’s tech offers is a strategy that so many organizations have embraced. With so many options now available—including Voice-over-Internet-Protocol telephony and video conferencing, email, and other all-encompassing collaboration platforms—businesses have the means to boost their productivity readily available.

Many of these communication platforms are unified, giving you and your team access to a comprehensive suite of tools to use. That way, your investment goes much further and is more guaranteed to provide you with the return you need and expect.

Automation

The easiest way to expand the role IT plays in your business is to embrace automation. Today’s software provides the opportunity to improve your business by shifting its priorities. Automation can take the mandatory tasks that create workflow and coordination within the separate departments of your business and remove the need to assign human resources to complete them. This allows your staff to focus on the revenue generating parts of their job while removing the time and effort that is typically required to support that coordination and efficient operations. This shift in strategy can really provide some stark benefits when trying to create a more effective workflow. 

Some of the parts of your business that can be improved by utilizing automation include: 

• Inventory Management
• Security
• Supply chain management
• Sales and marketing 
• Customer relationships

...and more.

By committing to automating certain rote, yet mandatory tasks, you can expect more productive endeavors to be successful. That’s the name of the game in business.

Security

Security is seemingly everyone’s favorite answer when asked what you should be investing more of your business’ capital in. There is a good reason for that: there are more threats than ever. SMBs account for half of all cyberattacks, so it is important to put the solutions in place to solve the cybersecurity problems your organization faces. Some strategies you should consider include:

• Regular risk assessments
• Comprehensive staff training
• Penetration testing
• Network, server, and website audits
• Additional software investments

Successfully accomplishing those strategies will help you reduce and eliminate:

• Theft (money, service, data)
• System corruption
• Regulatory and compliance fines
• Legal fees
• Loss of customer confidence
• Loss of intellectual property
• Damage to reputation

PC Technologies can help you expand your IT with our multiple services, including comprehensive monitoring and management and our hardware and software procurement services. Our experts can help get your business where you want to go. Call us today at 360-491-2227 to learn more.

Artificial intelligence is perhaps the perfect example of an advanced technology that seems to be reserved exclusively for pop culture, but plays an exceptionally beneficial role for many more businesses and their operations than many of us likely consider. 

For instance, if you use the Google search engine with any regularity, you use a type of AI.

One case study that extolls the potential benefits of the use of AI comes to us through one designed to help out in a bakery, but has actually shown its strengths in the accurate diagnosis of cancerous cells.

No, we aren’t kidding.

Why a Bakery Would Use AI in the First Place

Here’s some background: The AI we are referring to originated as a relatively simple means for bakeries in Japan to expedite the checkout process in their open-cafeteria style layouts. Rather than having a human cashier count out the shopper’s selections at checkout, the cashier would simply instruct the customer to spread their purchases out on the counter. A display would show a bird’s eye view of the confections, each Danish and doughnut individually identified based on its size, shape, and color. At that point, the cashier just confirms the price that the system calculates, allowing each customer to be rang up in moments.

Simplicity at this level was extremely beneficial to bakeries, which tend to offer a massive variety in Japan through different flavor combinations and pastry types. In this market, the higher the level of variety that a bakery offers, the better their sales did—and the same could be said of pastries that lacked any individual wrapping and scannable barcodes.

Of course, this meant that checking out was far slower and very easy for the cashier to mess up. As a result, the eventual development and release of an automated means of expediting the process was of a clear benefit to bakeries. The AI that was ultimately developed by BRAIN Co. is known as BakeryScan, and (at about $20,000 a pop) now appears in 400 retail establishments throughout Japan after first appearing in 2013.

Side note: if you’re worried about the prospect of unwrapped baked goods being sold in the past year or so, the technology has since improved to recognize pastries through protective wrapping just as accurately.

Naturally, this kind of technology shows obvious promise as a means of streamlining modern retail outlets and such places as time goes on, but the potential to adopt the methods that were implemented into BakeryScan have since spread much farther.

From Pastries to Pathology…and a Donut-Hole Lot More

However, it wasn’t until a doctor from Kyoto’s Louis Pasteur Center for Medical Research saw a segment on TV that the connection was made. Apparently, when viewed under a microscope, cancer cells look a bit like bread loaves. Once contact was made between the researcher and BRAIN Co., it wasn’t much longer before BakeryScan was repurposed into a platform called AI-Scan.

In addition to being able to spot differences in cancerous urinary cells with its Cyto-AiSCAN offshoot (with accuracy measuring over 99 percent), AI-Scan has also been adopted for many different uses. Hospitals can use it to distinguish types of pills, while another company now uses it to identify problematic bolts before they’re used in jet engines. In Hyogo, SACLA (the SPring-8 Angstrom Compact free electron LAser) uses the technology to process the millions of images produced by its laser pulses. One of Toyota’s subsidiaries has used it to help design more effective side airbags.

AI and Your Business

Hopefully, this little case study has served as a way to demonstrate that artificially intelligent technology is far more flexible than we might initially give it credit for—and as a result, it can be adapted and adopted to serve purposes that would seem to have no connections otherwise.

While we can’t promise that we can implement AI-Scan into your operations, it should still be said that more and more business-friendly solutions are being created to take advantage of similar machine learning processes that benefit the operations that you likely rely on. How could your operations benefit from automation and other labor- and time-saving processes? Going beyond that question, what benefits are you giving up by not fully considering the options that are available to you in terms of your business’ technology? 

PC Technologies is here to help you find out. Give us a call at 360-491-2227 for a chat about your current technology and how we can help you make it better.