Phantom Technology Solutions Blog

It's one of the most recognizable icons in modern digital design: three short, horizontal lines stacked neatly together. You've seen it countless times, representing the main menu on nearly every website and application. Sometimes it transforms into three dots—a "kabob" menu, if you want a fun fact, but its function remains the same: it's the gateway to everything your site has to offer.

For all its benefits, remote work has certainly created some challenges. One major issue is the lack of visibility you have over your employees and the ramifications that could result.

While it is critical to cultivate trust in and with your employees, you also need tools to monitor progress and hold your team members accountable. Let’s talk about some of the issues you may discover once we give you the visibility you need.

Manufacturing equipment costs a pretty penny, so you naturally expect it to drive profits and yield a return on investment. Yet, how often do these machines break down and cost you more than they should? By the time the red light turns on that tells you something’s wrong, you’ve already wasted precious time that you could have been saving with proactive, preventative maintenance.

Many businesses think of IT as nothing but an expense, often represented by losses on your budgeting reports. You might dump countless dollars into your IT only for it to eat it all up without providing any discernible return on investment. Here’s the truth about IT: when it’s managed properly, it can represent opportunity and investment rather than expense.

Let’s assume that, as a responsible business owner, you’ve established standard operating procedures for your employees to follow—including the tools they can officially use in the course of their tasks. That said, there is always the chance that someone encountered an issue and independently investigated and “fixed” it.

If anyone is using an unapproved tool or an external account to access and manipulate your business data, you have a problem… a problem known as shadow IT.