Monthly Archives: July 2020

IT Monthly Management Reporting Can Lead To Success

Manage Service, ,
IT, IT reports, information technology

IT reporting can be a recipe for success.

As in several other industries, the information technology sector is facing a familiar debate about the production of IT reports. Should IT reports be created to increase success? Can the production of IT reports help your business maximize its value? While IT reports can be used to increase success and lead to greater development, if there is no way to gain insight from the data, will it be worth it to complete the IT reports?

In the IT industry and other industries, these two questions are asked often:

  • How many support tickets did we have this month or last month?
  • What was the average length of time to resolve the support tickets?

If the reports you produce are not able to answer the above questions and other questions, you will not have the ability to support your IT department the way you need to. Also, the success of your IT department will be hampered.

Today, IT reports can be created with ease and with great detail due to the advancements in technology. We are living in the digital age, and it should be easier to create the IT reports your department will need to answer some of the most common questions. The IT monthly management reports you create today can be more powerful than the IT monthly management reports you created a decade ago because the reports can include a wealth of essential details.

What is an IT Report?

An IT report will consist of key performance indicators(KPIs) that you need to track over a period of time. The key performance indicators you name can be used to assess a variety of situations that will relate to the following:

  • help desk concerns
  • project management
  • operational costs
  • revenue data
  • help desk resolution times

Regardless of what you want to assess in your IT reports, your IT reports should be valuable and insightful. Your IT reports should also align with the missions, goals, and objectives that have been established by your business. It is important to remember that your IT reports do not have to track every indicator because this can result in an overwhelming amount of data.

Understanding Your Business Goals

When you have a better understanding of your business goals and objectives, you will have a better chance of choosing the key performance indicators that matter most to your business. With the right key performance indicators and metrics, you will be able to use your IT report to view the data that has the most value and the strongest impact. Your IT reports can be the connection you need to help your business run as smoothly as possible.

How Can An IT Report Help You?

When you are creating your own business strategy for your business or your IT department, it is important to have a clear identification of your goals. When you have a clear understanding of the goals you want to achieve, the IT reports can be used to help you achieve those goals. The IT reports will include the information you need to make the right steps. The reports will also be able to help you identify what you have achieved and what the results of those achievements were.

It is important to use IT reports in the correct way. If you are reporting data that does not have an impact on your business, it could have a negative impact on the department or your business as a whole. You do not have to struggle with the creation of IT reports or deal with bad reporting. Contact SystemsNet today to find out how you can improve the success of your IT department.

Unlock Remote Work Opportunities with VOIP

VOIP, , , ,
VOIP, communications, technology, remote work

In today’s new world, remote work opportunities are more common than ever.

VOIP has a great deal of benefit to offer the modern business, from affordable high-end phone services to virtual numbers that are accessible on any device. But the single most important thing that VOIP has to offer is expanding your office phone system into the phones (and hotel rooms) of distant employees. VOIP is one of the essential elements of introducing remote work to a mobilizing company culture. Remote work has a number of incredibly powerful benefits for the modern business, and not just allowing employees to occasionally spend a day working from home in their pajamas.

Hire Distant Employees

The greatest new capability of a company that introduces remote work is hiring talent outside of commuting distance. Without cloud collaboration and integration technology, remote work is very difficult for companies to manage. In many cases, businesses can only work very limitedly with contractors when remote work is needed, or the expertise of a remote professional is needed. Businesses often get job applications from people who are distant, in hopes of a remote offer or a tempting enough relocation package, and most of the time businesses must turn them down. But times are changing.

Rather than having to regretfully turn down those outside a few miles radius or asking great talent to relocate for the job, VOIP gives your business the ability to benefit from their talents. You can give remote employees the freedom to telecommute through VOIP and your other cloud collaboration software. These new highly skilled employees can enjoy a company phone number and even become a fully integrated part of the team without having to move closer to the office.

Boost Morale with Telecommuting Options

For your currently commuting staff, VOIP opens the door to allowing your team to telecommute from home to boost morale. Since the very dawn of computer work, employees have vied for the ability to telecommute and those permitted knew they were part of a small, elite, and privilege number. But cloud technology is making telecommuting ever-more possible with VOIP at the cutting edge of work-at-home integration.

For today’s professionals, staying home and telecommuting every now and then is incredibly enjoyable and feels a lot like taking a vacation at home. Employees can stay home, wear pajama bottoms, and enjoy the company of their cat while getting a full day’s work done. In fact, many businesses discover that employees who occasionally telecommute get more work done in those morale-raising days than they might in the office.

Employees Stay Home Sick and Without Taking a Sick Day

Speaking of greater productivity, remote work also introduces the possibility of sick days without sick days. VOIP makes it possible for professionals to take days away from the office without taking days off of work. When an employee comes down with something contagious, it is both courteous and more comfortable for them to keep it out of the office. This often results in lost productivity for the simple necessity not to spread the illness and not to distract coworkers with sneezes and sniffles.

Now, the option to work from home allows them to keep that illness out of the office and take care of themselves without interrupting their normal workflow. They can even be reached at the same number and share in the call hunting pool while sipping tea and not getting their colleagues sick. Colleagues and clients alike can stay in touch with employees who are home sick while keeping the office safe from spreading illness.

Flexible Work Options for New Parents

Similarly, your employees who take parental leave for a new baby or need to stay home to care for a sick child don’t have to fully tap out of work. There’s no denying that new babies need a lot of care, especially in their first year of life. But not 100% of the time needed at home actually needs to be non-productive. In fact, many parents are missing work long before their child is old enough to trust in the care of a babysitter.

Being able to work from home with VOIP means that responsible parents can log in and get some work done whenever they have a few moments. Since their job is being held for them anyway due to parental leave, this is wonderful for both professional parents and employers. All the hours where the child naps peacefully or plays quietly, parents can log in, turn on their phones, and be at work without having to physically come into the office. Recovering mothers with access to VOIP and other collaboration software often start logging hours again while they are still recovering physically and bonding with the new infant.

Accessibility for Handicapped Professionals

Remote work also provides accessibility in another way. Physically handicapped professionals often have trouble adapting a standard office to what they need to work comfortably. And businesses don’t always have the resources to provide the accommodation that a handicapped professional needs. But home offices can be highly optimized for comfort and convenience. Handicapped professionals have already spent years perfecting the chair, desk, equipment, and environment at home to accommodate their needs, and often look for remote work opportunities to take advantage of that.

In the modern age, skilled professionals with a significant handicap find it much easier to seek find the remote positions that work best for them. By introducing remote work to your policies through VOIP and other cloud software, you open up your ability to hire highly talented people who can only work comfortably when working from home.

Reliable Business Trip Connectivity

Lastly and quite interestingly, VOIP also makes business trips much smoother than they have ever been before. An entirely different style of remote work, roles that require a great deal of travel can stay connected to the internal company cloud phones. Once, traveling for business was a lonely and stressful experience. Employees were cut off for hours, sometimes even weeks at a time. Able to only get work done remotely that might be turned in at the end of the trip. With email, collaboration became possible. With cellphones, it was easier to touch base.

With VOIP, they can remain an extended part of the office culture; continuing to collaborate on projects and communicate with team members fro the same number and interface that they use every day in the office. They can stay in touch with both colleagues and clients through familiar channels. And even if their phones and devices break on the road, any computer terminal with a headset jack and high-speed internet can connect to the VOIP number.

Technology is the leading force of transformation in today’s employment culture. While the war for talent makes good professionals invaluable, technology makes it possible to connect and collaborate from anywhere. Contact us today for more insights on the mobile workforce and connecting with great professionals far and wide.

4 Complete Data Disasters where Backups Can Save Your Business

Data Backup, , ,
technology, data, backups, IT, information technology

Cybersecurity crisis, natural disasters, accidents – backups can protect your data from all of these.

When you set up the backup recovery system for your company network, it’s hard to imagine what you could possibly need it for. Sure, sometimes an employee accidentally deletes an important file and maybe one of your servers crashes at an inconvenient time. But when will you ever need to recover your entire network all at once; every server, every endpoint device? Well today, we have the answer.

A comprehensive backup recovery system is essential because there are real-world situations where your entire office or every computer in your network might be irrevocably damaged. These are data disasters that you never see coming, but they happen statistically often enough that no business should gamble their entire digital existence on it. Let’s take a deeper look at four of the surprisingly common situations where a complete backup recovery system is exactly what you need. Just in case you need to start over from scratch on wiped computers or entirely new hardware.

1) Ransomware

Ransomware is one of the most notorious types of malware out there, a combination of a direct hacker attack and a virus that attacks your entire business network. If ransomware accesses even one of your endpoint computers or devices, it can infect, encrypt, and essentially destroy every file on your entire business network. And because you can’t trust hackers to fulfill their word or even know how to decrypt your files, best possible answer is to wipe every affected device to factory settings and restore. But if you have a comprehensive backup recovery plan in place, recovering from a devastating ransomware attack can take less than a day of wiping and recovery.

2) Natural Disaster – Earthquake, Tornado, or Flood

Natural disasters happen from time to time. Hurricanes ravage coastlines, and tornadoes ravage areas too dry for hurricanes. Cities on fault lines are always at a certain amount of risk and, every now and then, the sky opens up and rains for weeks on end. It’s never a good idea to gamble against nature. If some incredible act of nature knocks out your office building or floods up to the second floor, that doesn’t have to be the end. With cloud-stored complete backups of your system and settings, you can install on new hardware with barely an interruption to your business or the services offered to clients.

3) Office Fire

Even more common than natural disasters is the common building fire. A fire doesn’t even need to devastate an entire office building to destroy every computer in your office or on your floor. They can be started from faulty wiring, a dirty break room stove, or a space heater left on and forgotten over the weekend. When you have a comprehensive backup ready to go, even an office fire that consumes your local servers and all your in-office workstations can be recovered from.

4) Corrupted Software Update

Lastly, and unfortunately the most common of all, is what happens when you update a piece of software and something corrupts along the way. Depending on the software update process, this can potentially ravage your entire data system or large swaths. Databases can be wiped out. Your entire tech stack can be corrupted by one failed upgrade that propagates itself throughout the network.

While you could try to meticulously roll back the failed update and correct every piece of data it damaged, it is often faster simply to wipe the affected programs and databases and restore from your most recent backup. Which won’t be a problem as long as you have a managed backup recovery system ready to go for exactly this kind of data disaster.

The key to surviving anything from targeted hacker attacks to powerful natural disasters is cloud backups. When your backups are remotely stored and protected, you will be able to not only restore and recovery whenever needed. You’ll be able to restore and recover in a whole new place, a new office, and even if every scrap of your old installation is destroyed. Contact us today for more backup recovery insights!