Monthly Archives: May 2015

Think your office is ready to be completely wireless?

Manage Service, ,
An office that relies on wireless connectivity sounds like a dream -- but make sure you ask yourself the necessary questions before making the transition.

An office that relies on wireless connectivity sounds like a dream — but make sure you ask yourself the necessary questions before making the transition.

It sounds like a dream:  an office that is entirely reliant on wireless connectivity rather than wired connections.  There would be no need to be tied to a desk with wires and plugs; instead, every member of the team could work wherever they liked, connecting to the network and to the internet no matter where in the office they might be.  It would streamline meetings, make presentations easier than ever before, and make it easy to relocate at need.  Think your office is ready to be completely wireless for connectivity?  There are a few questions you might want to ask first.

How many people are you connecting to your wireless system?  If you’re only connecting half a dozen people, it will work much like a home wireless internet connection:  that is, it might get a little slow every once in a while when every device is connected at once and everyone is streaming video simultaneously, but for the most part, it will work as smoothly as you could ask for.  On the other hand, if you’re working in a large office with twenty, thirty, or forty individuals who need to connect via your wireless setup at the same time, you might experience slow connection speeds and a host of other problems.

How fast do you need your internet to be?  If you don’t need to use the internet that often in your office, you can afford to be patient with slower connection speeds.  After all, that guy down in the billing department doesn’t really need to be able to stream Netflix on his break, right?  On the other hand, if you need instant access to everything that the internet has to offer (including such things as cloud storage solutions for your business data), then you might prefer to maintain an old school wired connection for most of your devices.  Remember the days of dial-up services, when you could brew a pot of coffee while you waited for your computer to connect to the internet?  You don’t really want to go back to that…do you?

An office that uses its wireless connectivity primarily for inter-office communication and sharing documents might quickly discover that it can function with fewer problems than one that requires access to videos, websites, and graphics.  Be sure that you evaluate your needs carefully before making a final decision.

What technology are you trying to use?  Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, wireless technology can be very effective and very efficient.  In fact, Intel made an announcement last year that they’re attempting to design an office that is entirely wireless–one that is free of the traps of wires, and looking for the necessary adapters to connect everything during meetings and other events.  Unfortunately, that technology isn’t yet available on the market, so depending on your technology needs, it may be some time before you’re able to make your office completely wireless.  Also, consider the reality that even with wireless connections, some technology might not be entirely compatible; so making an entirely wireless office might require making some shifts in the hardware that you’re using.

How much of an investment are you willing to make?  While one piece of equipment–a router–will go a long way toward making your office wireless, there are a number of other things that you might need to streamline your wireless connectivity and make your office run as smoothly as possible.  Be prepared for that initial investment before you go diving in–and consider making the investment a piece at a time, rather than trying to do it all at once.  After all, wireless connectivity might be the setting of the office of the future, but that doesn’t mean that you have to dive in immediately.

Looking for tips and tricks to help make a wireless office work for you?  Contact us for more information, or for tips and tricks to streamline your office so that wireless connectivity goes from being impossibility to something that you can implement.

24 x 7 x 365 Proactive Monitoring of Network Infrastructure: A Thematic Analysis

Manage Service, ,
24 x 7 x 365 network monitoring and support is crucial for ensuring your data stays safe and backed up at all times.

24 x 7 x 365 network monitoring and support is crucial for ensuring your data stays safe and backed up at all times.

When it comes to modern software and cloud-based hardware deployments, 24 x 7 x 365 proactive monitoring of network infrastructure  accompanies hosting, maintenance and support in order to create peace of mind and reduce stress and dissonance in business owners’ lives.

Introducing the Theme: Chaos and Dissonance

It is late at night, and your phone lights up. Your website just received emails from multiple people complaining that their accounts are inaccessible. 30 minutes later, your entire IT team has been called into the office to manage the software. After 3 hours, the sun comes up, and you start crafting emails to your customers explaining how a key server went down without proper back-up. Everything they had created on your site over the last 2 weeks since your last backup is lost.

Variations on a Theme

Variations of this nightmare scenario have been experienced by businesses of many shapes and sizes, where key network infrastructure is not properly backed up, does not have great redundancy, and the data loss is catastrophic. Whether data loss from storage or just a site going down for hours, days or weeks, many businesses will be catastrophically impacted by the effects of major infrastructure problems.

When you add the problems caused by growing beyond your infrastructure, network infrastructure significantly impacts your labor and capital bottom line. For many businesses with customers and employees in multiple areas, there is significant risk to the business from local events like earthquakes and fires which do not impact the rest of your target market. For local businesses, your customers and employees can understand data loss during shared catastrophe, but with global customers and multiple employee locations through telecommuting, you cannot afford to lose your computer services, even for an understandable catastrophe.

Resolutions of the Theme

In order to maintain and grow your business without the fear of catastrophic data loss, 24x7x365 Network support and management is necessary. For managed assurance, your network support team must be able to deliver service which prevents the same problems that keep you up at night. Look for the following standards to ensure that your proactive monitoring is secure and efficient:

  • Multiple Data-Center Backups – If someone is providing you business recovery, they have to have better infrastructure than you can provide in your office. This includes RAID5 servers in multiple locations so that neither hardware, software nor an act of God will cause a permanent or catastrophic data loss.
  • Fast Back-Up Recovery – What are your monitoring team’s processes for getting you back up and running in the event your in-house IT goes down? Good systems have automatic processes to switch to the backup hardware in the event your site or online software goes down. This needs to be automatic via a programming call, not manual entry.
  • Experience with Multiple Systems – With modern business systems, software, hardware and delivery systems are becoming increasingly more integrated. With cloud-based software deployments, many times a series of servers will run more than one business’s software and hardware products. Your proactive monitoring and support team needs to know the different parts of cloud-based infrastructure and be prepared to manage IT efficiently both remotely and in person.
  • Training – Sometimes the best way to learn something is to teach it. If your proactive monitoring team cannot teach your in-house IT and other employees how to manage software, servers and other IT hardware, they have not learned what is necessary to keep you from getting nightmares concerning their IT support.

Do not let your IT keep you up at night. With real-time monitoring, hosting support, managed software plans, training and professional installation, modern IT outsourcing is more effective and cheaper than many business owners have experienced in the past. To learn more about proactive monitoring, hosting and disaster recovery, please contact us.

Creativity and Quality are Just 2 Reasons Why We Love IT Support

Manage Service, ,
Your business doesn't have to reinvent the wheel each time it needs something done. You rely on the expertise of others to make your work run smoothly

Your business doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel each time it needs something done. You rely on the expertise of others to make your work run smoothly

Although many businesses see IT support as a necessary evil, there are so many areas where IT support is incredibly valuable for small, medium and large enterprises. We think of it with the same joy as some people get from a great kitchen remodel. IT support brings creativity to your business systems, increases quality in software and information management, drives innovation across industries and provides security and peace of mind. IT support does all that? Yes, and here are some details.

Creativity

IT support now runs the full spectrum of service and infrastructure, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS). For those unfamiliar with the term, any time something is offered “as a service,” companies have the option of gaining access through the cloud to someone else’s infrastructure, programs and other technology related items. As Pablo Picasso is rumored to have said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

The foundation of your business’s creativity is not reinventing the wheel every time you need something done. That is the value of IaaS, SaaS (Software), cloud based data back-ups and more. Your business energy and creativity pour into the systems which make you great, and someone else’s creativity and genius go into making your normal systems great.

Quality

While quality systems are incredibly important, many businesses do not have the time, capital or energy to put the effort into managing all the information necessary for Total Quality Control. Since the fundamentals for building quality systems are information and data management and workflow planning, the right IT systems and support will create opportunities to build intense high quality processes, with the stress outsourced to your IT support.

Before we get into the other reasons we love IT support, here are some ways that creativity and quality grow in your business when you outsource your IT support and business systems:

  • Email – Everyone loves free email systems, but for a business, “free email” quickly devolves into “my employees keep asking me for permissions to change their skins, and do 100 other things.” For businesses, free is often the best option when you have buckets of time and no money. For most businesses, a tailored email system makes more sense, because you realize that your time (and your IT team’s time) is money. Outsourcing email services gives you the ability to swiftly create custom email services (there’s that creativity) with a team of expert email IT professionals available to troubleshoot and further customize your business email (and the quality).
  • Training – You can have the best software on the planet, but it is a waste of money if your employees do not know how to use it. Outsourcing your training gives you time to focus on how to integrate your customer, vendor relations and internal business systems, not spend your time convincing employees to use your newest product. Employees who understand and use your software properly free up their creative energy for other tasks, and also do things well.
  • Disaster Recovery – If you have ever survived major data loss at your business, you know how much stress and thought processes are consumed by rebuilding your business systems. With an outsourced, cloud-based recovery system, you know that you have your information ready to go, and an expert recovery team to help your business continue operations as normally as possible minutes after a hardware crash.

Innovation

If you do not already see why we love IT support (and outsourcing) so much, think about how much innovation has been driven in various industries through the current IT as a service offerings. From Microsoft Office to Adobe Creative Suite, systems which formerly cost hundreds and thousands of dollars to even start are available at cash-flow prices. You pay for what you use, and cancel when you are done.

With so many people using advanced systems, innovation in industries is being driven from all corners, and an experienced IT support team will have regular contact with other leaders in industry innovation. Not only does IT support increase your business systems, it gives you access to other thought-leaders in your industry and in your target market.

Security and Peace of Mind

As back-up recovery promotes creativity and quality, so does the entirety of an outsourced IT security and recovery plan. Internal datacenters are one of the most likely points of entry for hackers and viruses. On the other hand, the same IT professionals who will set up your secure network, provide you with cutting edge virus protection and firewalls, can manage your datacenter in their own secure facility.

Having one team with the expertise and planning to build an entire safety, back-up and security system for your business from your keyboard to your customer’s computer screen is the cherry-on-top of the many reasons we love IT support. For more information about IT support, outsourcing, or IaaS plans, please contact us.

IT Help Desk: Do You Prefer On-Site Help, or Done Remotely?

Manage Service, ,
SystemsNet provides on-site help when you need it, but mostly stays remote so we don't get in the way of your workflow

SystemsNet provides on-site help when you need it, but mostly stays remote so we don’t get in the way of your workflow

The concept of the IT help desk has come a long way when you consider it’s been around for well over 30 years. You’ll even find facetious infographics online reminding you the first IT help desks started in the 1980s while not necessarily making everyone’s life comfortable.

Yes, it’s true that help desks once thought of as being the sometimes stressful starting point for IT professionals. Help desks were also a confusing process for those who needed the most technical support. It’s evolved from being a service you called in for (something not changed entirely), and an on-site process.

For the former above, trying to solve a problem by phone meant plenty of downtime companies didn’t need. Help desks by phone had to take office staff step by step through issues without being there in person. With those needing help not always understanding the technology they were working with, phone support only led to more confusion.

In the case of in-person help desks, they’ve never gone away, even if some office managers find them obstructive. If you’ve ever had an IT support crew take over your computers to solve a technical issue, then you know how it can sometimes disrupt work during busy moments.

Fortunately, in the age of the cloud, this doesn’t have to happen. This isn’t to say on-site visits aren’t still done under certain circumstances. Be happy, though, that you live in an era where you now have a choice thanks to evolving technology.

Here at SystemsNet, we give you a choice through our various management and technical support packages. We’ll let you decide what kind of help desk you want and how convenient it works for your company.

On-Site Support When it’s Necessary

We only provide on-site help when there isn’t any other choice toward fixing an issue. The good news is that we take care of things as quickly as possible thanks to advances in technology. It’s increasingly unlikely you’ll have your computers tied up all day or for days. If repairs on a computer need done, we’ll take the computer with us if it becomes too much of a distraction in your office.

As your company grows, we know how important it is to have as much time to focus on your work as possible. We’re there to communicate with you and make sure any technical issues gets solved when it’s convenient rather than forcing it during the most critical times.

Remote Help Desk

Your greatest benefit today is having IT support working remotely so it doesn’t get in your way. As part of our managed services, we guarantee this while we work behind the scenes. As many remotely managed services are, monitoring and troubleshooting takes place quietly.

What you’ll appreciate more than anything is we’ll take care of issues for you without you even knowing something happened. You and your employees might notice a software issue one morning, then suddenly see it fixed within minutes before it becomes a problem.

This kind of magic is the greatness of remote managed services through expanding network space. Best of all, our remote help service doesn’t slow down your computers. When you’re working on a critical project, we’ll make sure everything is running efficiently at all times so you don’t experience dreaded downtime.

You likely know by now how losing money from downtime is the enemy of all companies today. Using preventative measures, we’ll prevent the worst technical issues from happening in the first place.

Contact us here at SystemsNet to find out more about our Help Desk service and all of our comprehensive IT services and solutions. It’s time you realized how far the help desk has come while changing your prior perceptions of what it does.