New Year 2021: Here is Your Step-By-Step Online Business Plan

Blacknight presents a digital roadmap for business in 2021.

2020 was horrific, for individuals, for communities and for business. There is hope on the horizon for 2021 but recent events affirm that we are living in a time of great difficulty and uncertainty.

At times like these, both businesses and consumers look for safer options. Ecommerce and remote working were the twin beacons of the business world in 2020. Productivity surged in companies that had the capability to let their people work from home, while millions of people shopped online for the first time. They continue to do so.

It’s clear that an effective online strategy is an essential requirement for a business in 2021. No matter how advanced your online abilities were 12 months ago, everyone has had to discard their 2020 playbooks. As a new year begins, it’s time to take concrete steps to secure your business and follow your customers online.

‘Steps’ is the key word. The path to digital success can be viewed like a road. You may find that you have already completed the first few miles, and you’re ready to drive forward. Or you may discover that you’ve taken a shortcut and missed out on some important details. Depending on your type of business, and especially on your customers, you may not need to follow every side-road and detour. And while there are common elements for every digital business, ultimately you will need to tailor a unique strategy which supports your staff and serves your customers.

Blacknight is uniquely placed to help companies navigate the online journey. A homegrown Irish business, we’ve built our success on technology, reliability, and an enviable reputation for customer support. As the new year begins, we’re bringing technology and expertise together to help Irish SMEs forge a new path.

Our message is that it doesn’t have to be difficult. Small steps can offer huge gains, and further refinements build incrementally to a successful digital business. Let’s take it one step at a time, shall we?

A Three-Part Strategy for Digital Business Success

Over the next few weeks, Blacknight will present a Three-Part Strategy for Digital Business Success in 2021.

1. We’ll start with the basics:
   • Step 1: Why Your Own Domain Name is Essential
   • Step 2: Hosting, Email, Ecommerce, Community
   • Step 3: Your Domain is Your Brand – Tell the World
2. In Part Two, we’ll talk about remote working, managing distributed teams, collaboration tools and groupware, including Microsoft 365. Need broadband for your staff? We’ve got that too. Part Two will be published on 4 February.
3. Part Three will focus on the back end: your office infrastructure. Are you maintaining an office server, running shared services for staff or customers? Blacknight’s six datacentre locations in Dublin and Carlow offer competitive colocation and dedicated server options, as well as scalable virtual machines (cloud servers), backup and server management. We provide on-call support for enterprise customers and port speeds up to 10Gbps, national Layer 2 Connectivity and IP Transit. Power and network connectivity are guaranteed by SLA and our datacentres offer geographical diversity for disaster recovery. This will be published on 11 February.