If you’re a New Jersey business owner, you need to be judicious in your investments, especially these days.

At the end of 2019, the outlook wasn’t optimistic for the Garden State’s economy, with many experts fearing that New Jersey wasn’t prepared should a recession happen in 2020. Sadly, the COVID-19 pandemic has all but guaranteed that local businesses will be struggling in the coming months.

Even before the global pandemic hit us, the trend toward remote work was already on the rise. Two kinds of remote workers fueled this trend: regular employees whose companies allow them to work from home several times a week, and individuals who strike out on their own as freelancers.

Because of the pandemic, many housebound New Jerseyans have turned to teleconferencing applications for work and for socializing. One of the fastest to, pardon the pun, zoom up the ranks of popularity is Zoom.

Founded in 2011, Zoom is a teleconferencing service that offers video conferencing, mobile collaboration, online meetings, and chat.

Many businesses have chosen Skype for Business Online as a collaboration suite because of its numerous features: instant messaging, Skype-to-Skype audio-video conferencing, and interoperability with Microsoft productivity platforms like SharePoint, to name a few.

Cost-cutting is inevitable in business. At some point, almost every department in any business will face the need to reduce expenditure while maintaining its functions. This is especially challenging when it comes to IT, where the mix of people, infrastructure, and equipment complicates the matter significantly.

The fifth generation of mobile networking is finally here, and it’s on course to change the world of small-business communications. The most notable improvement is its speed boost over 4G, with data rates 10 to 100 times faster, potentially reaching 10 Gbps.

In today’s highly competitive market, consumers have more choices than ever when it comes to goods and services. In an environment where many products are often at parity, you need to give customers a good reason to choose yours over your competitors’.

More importantly, you need customers to come back to you again and again.

If you’re the owner of a small- or mid-sized business (SMB), the latest cybersecurity statistics ought to be your wake-up call:

Small businesses account for 43% of breach victims.

Small businesses (1 to 250 employees) are targeted the most with malicious email, at a rate of 1 in every 323.

94% of malware is delivered by email.

Many New Jersey businesses and residents aren’t strangers to cyber breaches. In 2017, over four million in the Garden State were affected by the Equifax data breach. By 2018, the numbers had been reduced significantly to around 358,000 residents. But this doesn’t mean a decline in data theft; it just emphasizes the massive scale of the Equifax breach.

It’s now 2020 — is your business still using legacy hardware and software? In technology parlance, “legacy” refers to anything that’s outdated or obsolete. If so, you’re in trouble.

In New Jersey, competition is stiff for small- and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). Small businesses make up 99.6% of all enterprises in the state.