Series: What Small and Mid-Sized Business Leaders Need to Know About Their Company’s IT – Website
You have so much to do when you are running a business, much more than when you were employed by someone else. You have to manage employees, take care of customer service, and keep an eye on the books. It can be overwhelming. So you need to depend on the advice, knowledge, and execution of your technical employees or IT service providers. But, you also need to have some basic knowledge about your company’s data and IT systems.
So, we’ve created this guide for Business Leaders in Small and Medium Businesses (SMB’s). Our goal is to give you, the business leader, the ability to “trust but verify” the technology, your internal staff, and their data security.
Ask yourself: Where is your company data and who owns it?
Data comes in a variety of flavors, and it’s usually in a multitude of places. In this series, we talk about some different kinds of data that your company may own or use.
Data example #1: E-Mail
Data example #2: Your Company Website
Why your website matters: Your company website is one of the main ways your company presents information about itself to the world. Yours might contain information regarding who owns your company, pricing on your products and services, who your main customers are, how you do business, and more.
What you must know:
- Who owns your website domain?
Laymen’s terminology: the “domain” is where your website lives. So, a domain name is the actual “www.” address that people type in to get to your website.
Possible answers: your nephew who originally helped you buy the domain 15 years ago, the Marketing Company who you use, the IT support company you use, your old IT guy, you.
Why it matters: Your website and its name are a reflection of your company. We have seen times when a website gets shut down, locked out, etc. There is a lot of data about you and your company on your website.
Business Continuity Concerns: If your website goes down, or gets hacked, you need to know who owns the domain so that you know what steps to take to recover your information.
What you must know:
• You should run a WHOIS lookup. This shows you the ownership of the domain (the name). This doesn’t tell you where it’s hosted.
• You need to ask your provider – Where is our site hosted? What is the company name?
• What type of support do we get if something fails or goes down?
• What type of backup do we have?
In case you missed it, check out our last post on what business leaders need to know about email data. Stay tuned for our next blog post about your servers.
Are you tired of having recurring IT issues? Do you want to have more time to focus on your “real” job instead of having to be your company IT guy? Do you have internal IT but would like to take some of the weight off of them so they can work on things that really matter to you? Managed IT Services can get you there. Call Auxiom today!
