5 Important Business Tech Trends to Share with Your Clients

With you as their technology partner, your small-business clients are likely quite tech savvy. But there is always more they can learn about new tools and processes that can streamline their operations and boost their bottom lines.

Here are a few of the leading tech trends for small businesses in 2016, which you can share with your clients to show them you are always on the lookout for ways to help them improve their businesses.

1. Fortifying Against Cyber Attacks

According to a report by the National Federal of Independent Business (NFIB), Tech Trends Small Business Can’t Ignore in 2016, nearly 80% of all businesses do not yet have a cyber-attack response plan in place–despite the fact that 63% have already suffered at least one attack.

The NFIB’s report–which includes data from Forrester Research, PayPal and Salesforce–points out that to protect against cyber attacks, many retail businesses are installing readers for the new, chip-enabled smart credit cards, as well as deploying user-behavior analytics to detect potentially fraudulent transactions.

2. Developing Mobile-Friendly Websites

The NFIB report also notes that mobile-friendly websites now enjoy better search rankings from Google than websites not designed for mobile users.

Google is simply responding to demand. A recent Spiceworks report, The Rise of the Mobile Empire, found that although the desktop remains the top productivity tool in the office, roughly 40% of marketing professionals, 57% of sales reps and nearly 100% of all executives and senior managers use smartphones and tablets at work. All of which is to say that your clients will enjoy a better online response with a mobile-friendly website.

2. Deploying Analytics to Better Understand and Serve Customers

According to Business News Daily’s 50 Business Trends and Predictions for 2016, sophisticated analytics software has become so affordable and easy to implement that it can significantly help small businesses learn what’s working and what isn’t with website visitors and customers.

With tools such as Google Analytics and Optimizely, for example, even the smallest businesses can implement a robust user analytics platform to test and optimize their user experience.

3. Moving More Operations to the Cloud

According to the 2016 State of the Cloud Survey from IT firm RightScale, 95% of businesses are now using the cloud for at least some of their data and applications. But there is still a lot of room for more cloud adoption–because even among these businesses, most are running less than 20% of their applications in the cloud.

With the operational efficiencies, cost savings and reduced IT overhead available from outsourcing their workflow tools and data to the right software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, your clients should be investigating what applications and services they can migrate to the cloud.

4. Eliminating Aging Fax Infrastructure–and Moving Faxing to the Cloud

Speaking of migrating more operations to the cloud, your clients should look into outsourcing the management and troubleshooting of their aging fax architecture to a trusted cloud fax service.

eFax Corporate lets your clients significantly streamline their business operations–allowing their employees to send and receive faxes securely by email, without the need for paper, fax machines, fax servers or analog fax phone lines.

Unlike the other cool tech trends here, this fax-by-email service from eFax Corporate isn’t new– we’ve been delivering it to thousands of businesses for nearly 20 years. But that only means we’ve proven it works, year after year, to help companies like your clients save money, boost productivity and enhance the security of their fax processes.

And this solution is part of our support-driven, high-touch, lucrative Partner Program. Please visit our eFax Corporate Partner page to learn more.

Currently responsible for the Enterprise Partner Program for j2 Cloud Services, Peter Ely is a 27-year technology veteran, having held senior executive positions looking after presales support, product management,  product marketing and technical evangelist teams in the telecommunications and data networking arenas in positions located across two continents and three countries.