Imagine putting a confidential document in a locked safe before mailing it. Only the person with the right key can open the safe and read the document. Anyone who intercepts the package along the way sees only a locked box—the contents remain completely inaccessible to them. That's essentially what encryption does for your digital data.

Your employee calls from home: "I need to access that file on my work computer, but I can't get to it. Should I use the remote desktop thing or the VPN?" You realize you're not entirely sure what the difference is, or when they should use which one. You've heard both terms countless times, maybe even use them yourself, but the distinction remains fuzzy.

The email from your employee arrives with a subject line that makes your stomach drop: "My computer won't start and it's making clicking noises." Or maybe you arrive at the office to find your server displaying an error message about a failed hard drive. Your first thought is probably some version of: "What does that actually mean, and more importantly, can we get our data back?"

Walk into many small business offices, and you'll find a humming box tucked away in a closet, under a desk, or in a cramped server room. When asked what it does, the owner often shrugs and says, "Our IT person set it up years ago. I think we need it?"

You've heard the term "the cloud" countless times. Your team uses cloud apps, your files are "in the cloud," and everyone says you should move your business to the cloud. But what actually is the cloud, and how does it work?

When most business owners think about IT support, they picture someone showing up to fix a broken computer. But if that's all your IT support is doing, you're missing about 90% of their value.