The Greater Seattle Area IT Experts

GDPR itself is a bit tricky to understand. Even though it doesn’t have the PII designation, it’s still the strongest data protection law passed to date. Any organization that does business with businesses within the nations of the European Union needs to comply with the regulations outlined in the GDPR. One of the most notable results that we’re sure you’ve noticed regarding GDPR is that many websites have updated their privacy policy, and they are required by law to tell their viewers about this. This is to protect themselves from the fines associated with non-compliance to GDPR.

The biggest issue concerning blockchain technology is found in the GDPR mandate. According to the new regulations, if a company obtains personal information that doesn’t need it, they must delete it. Blockchain nodes can’t be deleted, so it makes sense that the GDPR would be an issue for companies that use them. It’s a strange coincidence that blockchain and GDPR are both meant to improve user privacy, even though the blockchain technology used to this end isn’t compatible with GDPR regulations.

Even though GDPR was designed to adapt to changes in technological innovations, blockchain is already testing its ability to do so. For example, applications that utilize blockchain technology already pair well with the three major points of GDPR: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The blockchain uses encryption to remain confidential, but the ledger itself remains transparent.

Let’s think about a potential scenario for a customer named Jim. Jim can use a blockchain-based account to pay for his monthly checkup. This works out for him because most of the EU has universal healthcare as a principal. The details of this payment are hidden, but the record shows the overall price in the form of cryptocurrency. Because this company has collected information--encrypted or not--and it’s not needed, this would be a breach of GDPR policy. Consequently, some EU-based companies have stopped accepting Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as payment, though it’s worth mentioning that GDPR isn’t the exclusive cause of this.

Though the GDPR regulations only cover EU-member countries and organizations that do business with them, there is a considerable chance that these regulations will be amended as time goes on. What will this future look like? Will it be more like GDPR, or will it focus primarily on the blockchain? Let us know in the comments.

Accessible Solutions
No office is complete without a comprehensive communications solution, but it’s especially important for your business to have solutions designed to help remote employees stay connected to the workplace. This can include the following:

• Virtual private networks: Any time you have employees accessing sensitive information from outside your network, you want these communications to be encrypted with a VPN.
• Voice over Internet Protocol: Access to a phone system can make communication much easier, and the best way to do this is with a software-based VoIP solution that can be used on desktops, mobile devices, and laptops.
• Remote desktop software: Sometimes you have employees who are only remote half of the time. In this case, you can let them remote into their work desktops to access files located on them.
• Cloud-based applications: Any applications hosted in the cloud are great for remote workers, as they are frequently (or permanently) out of the office, away from their desktops.

Ensure Proper Documentation
Project management is incredibly important for remote workers, as they are disconnected from the everyday hustle and bustle of the office environment. They aren’t going to be available for “by-the-way” conversations that can lead to major breakthroughs in projects. They aren’t going to be there to hear the collaboration going on. Instead, they need a place where they can see all of the details at a glance. Project management software makes this possible by allowing you to allocate tasks and resources to whoever needs them.

Be Inclusive
The most important part of having remote employees is remembering that they are still a part of the team. It can be easy to forget that they are still hard at work for your organization, so be sure to reach out and check up on them once in a while. Remember, remote employees don’t get the social aspect of the workplace that other employees get, so they might find themselves wishing for some human interaction once in a while. Plus, it helps them feel like they are valued by your business--and when employees feel like they are valued, they work harder and better.

Is your business considering going mobile with remote employees? Be sure to reach out to Digital Seattle beforehand to make sure they have all the tools they need to succeed, including software solutions, mobile devices, and so much more. All you have to do is reach out to us at (206) 709-9556.

There are five major business communications tools on the market today, they are:

• Telephone
• Email
• Conferencing
• Instant messaging
• Team collaboration apps

We’ll take a brief look at each to see how they’ve been innovated (or invented) to help businesses like yours build profitability.

Telephone
The telephone, as with any other transcendent technology, has had business grow up merely because of its presence. Of course, around dinner time, those businesses just happen to be the most annoying businesses in the world, but all-in-all they’ve been around for a long, long time so if the brilliance of the technology has dimmed a bit, it still is admittedly necessary for almost every modern business.

For decades, telephone service was dominated by the telephone company; and, while they still exist, many people now get their phone service through their cable provider. For the modern business who needs telephone service with certain options, and who doesn’t need cable, the cable-provided telephone service can get costly fast.

VoIP, or voice over Internet protocol, is an enterprise telephone service that uses your organization's existing bandwidth to place and accept calls, and comes with a lot of the features any company would need, for a fraction of the price they would have traditionally paid. There are all types of VoIP plans and services out there. If you would like to save money, while getting the reliable telephone services you are used to, the friendly consultants at Digital Seattle can help you find the VoIP plan that fits your organization's needs.

Email
Again, email is a technology that almost everyone will be accustomed to using. For the average office worker or salesperson, their email is a constant source of information. A person’s email address is used by most organizations to set up accounts, correspond, and integrate with line of business applications like customer resource management (CRM) software to push notifications in a central area, so workers don’t miss anything.

Today’s email platform is more intuitive and service-laden than in the past. While email is extraordinarily useful, it can be very time consuming, and is the predominant way many organizations get infiltrated by hackers. As phishing schemes get more sophisticated, more people fall into hackers’ socially-engineered traps.

The integrations are email’s biggest superlative feature. Many pieces of productivity software integrate with many separate types of email. In doing so, a worker’s email can provide them with a lot of the information they receive without having to depend on multiple applications to do so.

Conferencing
With more collaborative work going on, and with more technology available to fuel remote connectivity, having virtual meetings has become an important part of many organizations’ communications strategies. Today there are several strong conferencing options that include the ability to share information via screen swapping, video presentation, or face-to-face communication. New conferencing technology moves your meetings out of the boardroom and into the chatroom.

Many times the conferencing software you need either comes with, or successfully integrates with a VoIP solution. Again, our consultants can assess your needs in order to develop a communications strategy that works for your entire company, remote workers and all.

Instant Messaging
By now, everyone that uses social media knows all about the ease of instant messaging (IM). Instant messaging allows your team to communicate with minimal distraction. Nowadays, most business application have some sort of chat program, whether that be a forum-based interface or a direct one-on-one chat interface.

One problem that businesses have with IM is that they are typically part of another program (e.g. Facebook Messenger) and could present significant distractions for workers. Most of these platforms offer a “for business” product, but finding the ones with the security, reporting, and media-sharing features that is commensurate with your organization's needs could be difficult. The consultants at Digital Seattle can help place you alongside the platform that will work for your organization's needs.

Team Collaboration Apps
In what seems to be the next step for business communications, the team collaboration app has become a major player for project management. The two major titles on the market at present, Slack and Microsoft Teams, provide users with an interface that is much like that of the modern email, with all email’s capabilities, but real-time messaging, and integrations with many third-party applications. Set up like a forum, any person on a team can start conversations with whomever they choose and from there, they can drag and drop information crucial to their shared project’s success.

By creating an interface that takes the best parts of all network collaboration tools, team collaboration app developers have successfully innovated the market for team collaboration and project management. If you are interested in getting to know more about these team collaboration applications, contact us and we’ll tell you what application will be right for you.

Being able to properly innovate to be the best business you can be, can be tough. Call the IT professionals at Digital Seattle today at (206) 709-9556 to start taking your organization’s communications to the next level.