Why Small Business Owners Need to Make Data-Driven Decisions

Why Make Data-Driven Decisions?

For businesses, the importance of data analytics and business intelligence cannot be overstated. Small businesses need to make informed data-driven decisions that lead to better business outcomes, and help them stay competitive.  Small businesses can use their critical business data to provide insights into daily operations to help make more informed and effective decisions.

• Improved accuracy: Data-driven decisions are based on facts and statistics, which provide a more accurate picture of a situation than relying on intuition or guesses.
• Better decision making: Data can provide insights and information that can help small business owners make more informed and effective decisions.
• Increased efficiency: Data-driven decisions can help small business owners allocate resources more efficiently and make the most of their limited resources.
• Reduced risks: Data-driven decisions can help small business owners identify and mitigate potential risks, reducing the chances of costly mistakes.
• Improved performance: Data can help small business owners track and measure performance and make necessary adjustments to improve outcomes.
• Competitive advantage: Data-driven decision making can give small businesses a competitive edge, helping them stay ahead of the curve and better serve their customers
  

The Data-Driven Decision Framework?

• Track key metrics: Identify and track key metrics that are relevant to your business, such as sales, customer satisfaction, and marketing metrics.
• Use data analysis tools: Utilize data analysis tools, such as spreadsheet software or business intelligence tools, to gather, organize, and analyze data.
• Automate data collection: Automate data collection processes to ensure accuracy and minimize manual effort.
• Collaborate with a data analyst: Work with a data analyst or a data-savvy team member to help you make sense of the data and turn it into actionable insights.
• Visualize data: Use data visualization tools to quickly identify patterns and trends.
• Test and iterate: Test new strategies based on your data insights, and continuously iterate and refine your approach.
• Encourage data-driven culture: Encourage a data-driven culture within your organization by sharing data insights with your team and using data to make decisions together.

The Most Important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Small Business

The most important KPIs for a small business owner to track will vary depending on the specific business, but some common KPIs include:

• Sales: Track sales revenue, growth, and conversion rates to understand the performance of your sales and marketing efforts.
• Customer satisfaction: Measure customer satisfaction through surveys, feedback, and reviews to ensure that you are meeting customer needs and expectations.
• Expenses: Track expenses such as cost of goods sold, operating expenses, and overhead costs to control costs and maximize profitability.
• Website traffic: Monitor website traffic and engagement metrics such as page views, bounce rates, and time on site to understand the effectiveness of your online presence.
• Lead generation: Track the number of leads generated and the conversion rate of those leads to sales to evaluate the performance of your lead generation efforts.
• Employee productivity: Measure employee productivity and efficiency to ensure that your team is working effectively and efficiently.
• Inventory levels: Monitor inventory levels and turnover to ensure that you have enough stock to meet customer demand and avoid overstocking.
• Social media engagement: Measure social media engagement such as likes, shares, and comments to evaluate the performance of your social media marketing efforts.

It’s important to track the KPIs that are most relevant to your business and regularly review and adjust your KPI tracking as needed. 

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Make Data-Driven Decisions For Your Enterprise, Using Data That You're Already Gathering

Webinar: Data Center Development Innovation for the New Age of Facilities

How Edge Data Center Solutions are Evolving for New End User Needs 

What You’ll Learn: 

• Why do edge facilities require more customization? 
• What does that mean for design strategy and delivery speeds? 
• Are virtually integrated edge facilities the future? 
• What could that mean for construction and development in the sector? 
• How do on-prem facilities plan to evolve in both dense and secondary markets? 
• How are IT loads and management services being integrated into future solutions while keeping operations in mind? 
• How does the expansion of the cloud impact on-prem and edge facilities? 
• What are end users doing to migrate successfully today? 

Sponsored by PTS Data Center Solutions 
Recorded: Tuesday, April 20, 2021 

How You’ll Do More Business: 

Learn how end users and providers are determining cloud or on-prem strategies for new facilities coming online, how fully integrated edge developments have changed the need for on-prem solutions, who are changing their migration to the cloud and where the opportunities are for expansions. 

Who You’ll Meet: 

VP Design and Construction, director of operations, head of facilities, end users, GC’s, architects, IT directors, engineers, providers and owners 

Why You Should Attend: 

Learn how edge facilities can providing an alternative solution to the cloud, what vertically integrated data centers look like and how end users are choosing their capacity plans. 

Speakers and Panels

• Pete Sacco - Founder & President, PTS Data Center Solutions, Inc. 
• Marissa Jules - Director, Architecture & Infrastructure, Georgia Institute of Technology 
• Rajesh Gopinath - Product Leader, Bloom Energy
• Phillip Marangells - EdgeConneX

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The Key to Cutting Data Center Construction Costs? Use Minimal Infrastructure

The average enterprise data center costs between $10 million and $12 million per megawatt to build, with costs typically front-loaded onto the first few megawatts of deployment. What's more, the typical edge data center costs between $8 million and $9 million. And if data center builders want to keep a lid on ever-rising costs, they need to keep the installation of supporting infrastructure to a minimum from the outset.

That’s the advice of seasoned data center builder Peter Sacco, founder and CEO of PTS Data Center Solutions, who claims that it is possible to drive down costs by around 25 per cent or more, simply by being more disciplined on design.

“When I start working with clients and I ask, ‘What should be the facility’s goals?’ they are clear that, first, it needs to cost less to build. And, not only that, but it needs to cost less to operate, too. And it needs to be deployed faster and it needs to perform better,” said Sacco. 

While that may sound somewhat challenging, the only way in which these potentially conflicting demands can be satisfied is by designing, from the outset, to install “the minimal amount of supporting infrastructure needed to achieve [your desired level of] resilience,” said Sacco. “If you do all that, you improve all four, simultaneously.” Costs, of course, will also depend upon the desire Uptime Institute tier (or equivalent) that the operator wishes to achieve. 

Read the Full Article on Data Center Dynamics’ Site >>>

AFCOM NYC/NJ Metro Chapter Quarterly Meeting: March 25, 2021

Join PTS at AFCOM’s second Virtual Event. With lots of help from AFCOM members, and some hard work from the Board, this should serve as a great format for everyone to enjoy. And there will be some great education from all of the sponsors.

Quarterly Virtual Meeting of the NYC/NJ Metro Chapter
March 25, 2021, from 1:00 pm to 6:00 pm
 
Click Here to Register!

 

Schedule of Events

• 1:00pm – 2:00pm – InVue Education Presentation, Trivia and Music Bingo 
• Presentation: Zero Trust Architecture in the Modern Data Center 
• (2) Trivia Questions with Prizes by Sponsor 
• Music Bingo with Prize 
• 2:00pm – 3:00pm – PTS Data Center Solutions Education Presentation and Music Bingo
• Presentation: The Evolving Edge Data Center: Minimize On-Site Construction for Faster Deployment 
• (2) Trivia Questions with Prizes by Sponsor 
• Music Bingo with Prize 
• 3:00pm – 4:00pm – World Wide Technology Education Presentation and Music Bingo 
• Presentation: The Affects of COVID-19 on the Industry 
• (2) Trivia Questions with Prizes by Sponsor 
• Music Bingo with Prize 
• 4:00pm – 4:20pm – State of the Chapter – Mr. Keith Jackson 
• 4:30pm – 6:00pm – Cocktail Hour and Virtual Networking

We Hope to See You There!

REGISTER HERE

Powering the Digital Economy: The Data Center Reimagined

How can data center operators insulate themselves from the increasing risks posed by aging centralized power grids prone to outages and vulnerable to natural disasters? 

Data centers are the critical link between the digital and physical world. They power almost every aspect of our economy today, consuming close to 3% of global electricity in the process. Increasing demands on data center infrastructure are being propelled by the shifts to the cloud, machine to machine communication, mobile technologies, VR/AR, AI, 5G and IoT. 

As the world continues to innovate, data center builders and operators grapple with the question of how to navigate a myriad of facility design complexities – balancing 24 x 7 x 365 operations with growing power demands, elevated risks, and the urgent need to reduce the sector’s carbon emissions. 

Elevated risks to critical power infrastructure 

Covid-19 has highlighted our economy’s digital dependence, elevating risks and exposing harsh new realities. 

An aging centralized power grid that is prone to outages and natural disasters, coupled with a dangerous cyber-threat landscape has left society heavily reliant on an electric delivery system that has simply not kept pace with the evolution of its surrounding environment. 

>>> Read the Full Article at Data Center Dynamics… >>>

Webinar: The Data Center Reimagined – Lower Cost to Build and Operate Your Facility

 

It’s vital for companies to invest in data center operations that are simple in design, easy to operate, and minimize infrastructure needed to achieve data resiliency. By doing so, companies can realize energy efficiency and resiliency by building and operating mission-critical data centers that cost less, can be deployed faster, are easily scalable, and perform better.

In this webinar, Peter Sacco of PTS Data Center Solutions offers groundbreaking views for data center operators pursuing solutions to key operating challenges. Leveraging advanced technology like fuel cells, microgrids, and indirect evaporative cooling, PTS offers revolutionary solutions to cost and resiliency challenges.

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Key takeaways from the event to include:

• • Balanced approach to cost, performance, speed of deployment and ease of management
  • Complexity reduction in both data center facility and IT systems
  • Step change reductions in CAPEX and OPEX without sacrificing resiliency
  • A data-centric workload strategy focused on latency, cost, security, application performance, platform reliability, and regulation

Date: Wednesday, February, 10, 2021
Time: 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM Eastern Standard Time

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Contactless Body Temperature Scanning for Safer Reopening

Reopen with Confidence

As the world enters the next phase of the pandemic, businesses are forced to make changes to accommodate not only a changing workforce, but also a changing workplace.  Brick and mortar businesses need to reopen a safe environment in order to protect their employees, clients, and visitors.

Zero-Contact Body Temperature Scanning 

Near the building entrances, employees and visitors will now pause to have their body temperatures checked. The scanner resembles a small tablet on a stand, and produces an accurate temperature reading in seconds. A voice confirmation assures “Your body temperature is normal,” and entry is allowed. All visitors should be scanned every time they enter the building. 

Buy Now

Increase the safety of employees and visitors

• Complies with U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) COVID-19 Policy
• Non-Contact Touchless Scanning
• +/-0.5°F Accuracy for use in the fight against COVID-19
• 0.1 of a second scans keeps lines from forming
• Suitable for adjunct use in public areas, entrances, doorways
• Easy to install
• Easy to use
• Integrates with management system to manage alerts

Non-Contact Body Temperature Scanner 

The new normal is anything but normal. The modern workplace will require both employees and visitors to be screened for any indication of high temperatures. 

Technology designed to keep everyone safe.

Bloom Energy Webinar: Microgrid Strategies for Hospitals and Healthcare Organizations

Strategies to Continue Operating During Power Disruptions and Improve Air Quality

Title: Microgrid Strategies for Hospitals and Healthcare Organizations Webinar 

Date: Thursday, August 20, 2020 

Time: 1:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time (10:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time)

Duration: 1 hour 

 Register Now

The nature of today’s hospitals — 24-hour services provided by teams of specialized professionals, supported by an expanding use of technology — creates an extraordinary demand for energy. Now, as the health care field is tackling the most challenging pandemic of our lifetime, resiliency in healthcare energy systems is getting even more critical. Hurricanes, storms and wildfires are unavoidable, but when coupled with viral threats such as COVID-19, reliance on the central grid alone is no longer an option. 

This webinar will consider a strategic focus on how health care systems can prepare themselves for resiliency under pandemic situations. Our speakers will address energy procurement strategies, onsite energy generation technology, , how to reduce energy costs, mitigate revenue loss from canceled procedures, and doing all this while deploying clean energy solutions that improve air quality by eliminating smog-forming pollution and particulate matter. 

What You Will Learn:

• How to reduce energy costs and mitigate revenue loss from canceled procedures.
• How to create energy security during pandemics, natural disasters and planned and unplanned outages.
• How to implement sustainable energy sources, without emitting NOx, Sox and particulate matter and improving local air quality for sensitive patient populations.

Speakers:

• Nirupama Prakash Kumar, Bloom Energy, Senior Product Manager – Healthcare Microgrids
• Ryan De La Cruz, Ecom Energy Inc,  Director of Business Development

We invite you to join this discussion and Register Now!

What is DRaaS, and How is it Different from Backup?

Backing up critical data is clearly a major component of any comprehensive Disaster Recovery (DR) plan, but is that all that is needed to ensure your business is safe from catastrophe? What is the difference between DR and Backup? Is DR the same as DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service)? Some definitions of these terms will help create a better understanding of the best way to preserve business continuity, in case disaster strikes. Of course there is no "one size fits all" solution to address the areas of backup, DR, and business continuity, but these definitions will help direct you towards the most suitable DR plan for your enterprise.

What is Disaster Recovery/DRaaS?

• Disaster Recovery (DR) is the replication of hosting of servers (physical or virtual) from a primary "production" location (typically, your onsite data center) to a secondary "DR" location (a co-located data center, or to the cloud). This replication provides fail-over in the event of catastrophe, as well as fail-back (recovery) when the production data center becomes available.
• Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is DR that uses a service provider's cloud-based secondary data center location and compute/storage infrastructure. This is especially critical if your enterprise does not have a secondary data center location.
• DRaaS On-Demand is DRaaS that uses a service provider's cloud-based secondary location, but you only pay for server fail-over/recovery when it's needed. However, you will still have to pay for the ongoing backup data costs.

What is Backup?

• Backup can refer to data backup, or in a DR context, virtual server environment backup.  Data backup is simply an extra copy of data. Virtual Server Backup is a snapshot of your virtual machine(s), taken regularly (typically daily), stored in a separate location. This backup serves the short-term purpose of restoring the virtual environment.
• Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) is backup to a service provider's cloud-based secondary data center.

What About RPO and RTO?

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) are two fundamental components of a disaster recovery plan. Each addresses business decisions that must be made as part of a disaster recovery plan:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) determines how frequently data backups are created to addresses the acceptable level of data loss a business is willing to handle between backups. Businesses need to consider how much data they are prepared to lose if disaster strikes.
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the time it takes for a business to resume regular activities following a catastrophic event. The business consideration here is: how much post-disaster downtime is acceptable before recovery is completed?

The Difference between Disaster Recovery and Backup

Disaster recovery covers the plan to be used to quickly reestablish business operations following an outage. This includes access to applications, data, and IT resources. Paramount to this recovery process is how fast and how non-disruptively you can recover. Keep in mind that data recovery alone, although part of the recovery process, are NOT sufficient to guarantee business continuity. Understanding that backup does NOT equal DR is a major move toward mastering the data protection challenges every enterprise will face.

On-Demand Webinar: 10 Minutes to DRaaS with PTS and Datrium

With the rampant rise in ransomware attacks, the ability to recover quickly and without paying the attackers has never been more critical. But traditional DR has been expensive, complex and unreliable. In this webcast, you'll learn about:

• The most important capabilities in a DR solution according to IT leaders
• How to get started with cloud-native DR in 10 minutes
• How to get 10x savings on DR with an on-demand model using the public cloud

Join Datrium and PTS Data Center Solutions for a virtual event and learn how to recover instantly after a ransomware attack. After you attend the webinar, we will email you a complimentary $25 Uber Eats gift card you can use to support your local restaurants or we can make a donation in your name to Feeding America.

Date: May 13, 202
Time: 12:30pm - 1:30pm ET
Speakers:
Peter Sacco, Founder & President, PTS Data Center Solutions
Datrium Keith Mossberg, Sales Engineer, Datrium

Register to View the
On-Demand Recording!