As every CEO and CFO of a smaller business knows, credit is very hard to come by these days. According to one national survey, last year only 40% of smaller businesses could get all their credit needs met. Several years ago, 90% were able to get all the credit they required.

Now a new $30-billion government program aimed at helping small businesses secure credit is winding its way through Congress. But that money will flow to banks, not directly to businesses — and some, like TARP watchdog Elizabeth Warren, have expressed doubts about whether making more money available to banks will actually translate into increased lending.

We know that many of our clients cannot afford the long wait to find out. They must put information technology to work now to stay competitive.

That’s why we’ve developed the QuestFlex SLA. With a QuestFlex SLA, you can toss out the old ways of thinking about buying or leasing. Instead, you’ll get the IT capability your business needs from a trusted, experienced technology partner — without having to find the money to boost your CAPEX budget.

These challenging times demand that we all be open to new ideas and creative in our thinking. I invite you to discover how QuestFlex can help.

Passwords can be an effective way to make sure only those who should have access actually get access.

But now virtually every application demands its own password, and it’s unrealistic to expect end-users to memorize five, ten, twenty different strings of letters, numbers, and symbols to do their jobs.

It’s also unrealistic to expect system administrators not to buckle under the burden of managing these mushrooming password requirements.

For all the password pain expressed by frustrated end-users, the real pain is at the backend, where system administrators spend countless hours defining the levels of access those passwords provide for every application used by each end-user. It’s so complex that mistakes are inevitable. Add these errors to the risky ways end-users deal with passwords and it’s inevitable that the security of vital company information is jeopardized.

The best solution we’ve found is single sign-on (SSO) technology, which shifts where end-user access gets defined from the application level to the gateway. Since SSO means end-users need only a single password, system administrators can easily make and keep track of adjustments to application access.

Ask your technology partner to talk with you about SSO — because there’s a cure for those sign-on blues.

Mention disaster recovery or business continuity and you’ll often get panicked looks about the cost.

Yet as I consider our own brush with disaster, here’s what strikes me most: Everything we had in place that assured our ability to function during the crisis and resume normal operations afterwards was not expensive.

There’s a myth out there that real disaster recovery will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. In fact, those figures couldn’t be further from the truth. Using Quest as a guide, a similar-sized business could expect the same capacity to restore operations for a few thousand dollars a month.

Certainly it’s true that our ability to respond is aided by our willingness to take disaster drilling seriously — and also because we keep our skills sharp aiding clients during a crisis. But from a purely infrastructure standpoint, any 150-200 person company can get the same capability for a lot less than most think.

Of course, if you opt to go it alone — buy the products, build and maintain the system — it could easily get expensive. But it doesn’t have to be. There are other options. What’s more, a managed service approach brings with it the expertise of people who do disaster recovery and business continuity every day.

If you’re like most CEOs, you don’t have time for your lawn, so you hire a lawn service to keep it healthy and appealing.

Chances are you don’t know anything about the equipment used on your property. And you don’t care because you’re not buying equipment — you’re buying a service, a capability, and, most importantly, an end result.

That’s precisely the approach we advise CEOs to use when considering information technology. Like taking care of the lawn, discussions about IT also should be about an end result.

So don’t let conversations about how IT can help your organization address a business challenge or exploit an opportunity drift into elaborate product and solution debates. Too often, you’ll end up confused, frustrated, and unclear about how to proceed.

To keep IT discussions from becoming too technical, you need to stay focused on capability.

For example, you know your customer service operation needs to handle a certain number of calls per minute and can’t be down more than, say, five minutes a day. So all you need to know about your IT operation is that it’ll support this level of service. You don’t need to know or care what products are used or why.

A trusted partner will usually understand your business goals and help you achieve them — not try to blind you with technology.