Month: October 2017

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Do You Have a Data Backup In Place?

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Take a moment to imagine the absolute worst disaster scenario for your business. Does it involve a catastrophic event destroying your office building? Does it include key staff being absent from the office for extended periods of time? Does it include your business suffering from data loss or security breaches?

Most businesses that fail to recover their data following a data loss scenario go out of business within a year of the incident. Furthermore, there are a lot of small businesses out there that don’t necessarily see the value in a proper data backup system. Most just assume that they will be able to survive a loss incident, or they feel that a data loss incident won’t happen to them. This is not the right mindset to have for a business owner–especially not one that has the future of their business at heart.

Instead, you need to imagine the worst-case scenario and ask if your business continuity plan includes a data backup solution to minimize damage and downtime. Here are three ways that a cloud-based Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution can help your business survive even the worst data loss incidents.

Multiple Backups Daily
Traditionally, businesses have relied on tape backup for most of their backup needs. Due to the increased strain on your network, tape backups need to be performed during off-hours, and only once a day. The problem with this is that you could potentially lose up to an entire day’s worth of data and progress. Cloud-based BDR takes multiple backups as often as every fifteen minutes, which allows for higher redundancy.

Cloud-Based Storage
There’s something to be said about the cloud and its ability to make data backup storage far easier. Thanks to the cloud, a BDR device can take and store multiple backups in secure, off-site locations for later access. After all, you can’t store your backups in the same location as the rest of your data. What if you were to experience a major disaster, like a flood or ransomware infection, which leads to the destruction of your in-house data infrastructure? When this time comes, you’ll be glad you’re storing data in the cloud and away from the site of the incident.

Reduced Downtime
When your business can quickly restore data in a moment’s notice, the amount of downtime suffered drastically falls. This helps your business stay active even under the worst circumstances. BDR can instantaneously restore your data to the network-attached device, allowing your organization to quickly get back in action following a downtime incident. The BDR device can even act as a temporary server while you make more permanent arrangements.

How does your business protect itself from data loss? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to reach out to us at PHONENUMBER if your business needs help with its technology.

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Tip of the Week: 3 Useful Microsoft Word Features

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Microsoft Office’s Word is undoubtedly one of the most popular word processing software in the world, perhaps even the most popular. Still, there are many people who use Word on a regular basis without putting the majority of its features to use. Here’s three more Word capabilities that you’ll find very handy.

Change the Case of your Text
HAVE YOU EVER ACCIDENTALLY WRITTEN SOMETHING ENTIRELY IN CAPS? It happens to everyone. However, many people don’t realize that you don’t have to delete everything and rewrite it. Microsoft Word has a handy feature that allows users to change the case of your text. You can choose from: Sentence case. Lowercase. UPPERCASE. Capitalize Each Word. and tOGGLE cASE.

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Auto-Update Date & Time
Even though the majority of business correspondences are done digitally, there are still some times when you need to write a good ol’ fashioned direct mail letter. For example, many businesses like to send a welcome message/onboarding letter to new clients. These letters will probably be uniform, with some personalization for each client. Word offers some assistance in making sure the information is updated in the letter. One very handy one when working with templates is the auto-update Date & Time feature.

Under the Insert tab, click the Date & Time button and a pop-up window will appear. Click the date format you want and then be sure to click the “update automatically” box in the bottom right corner. Now the date will automatically be updated every time you open (or print) the document.

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Get Rid of Unwanted Formatting
Most people who use Microsoft Word on a regular basis have had to deal with accidentally pasting text that held the formatting of the document you copied it from. This contagious font will even take over the rest of the document, following the formatting of what was pasted rather than your desired format.

Word has a command that you can use to Clear All Formatting. It can be found in the menu and its icon looks like the letter ‘A’ with a pink eraser. You can also use the keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+Space

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For more great information about the software you use every day, visit our blog regularly.

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Casserly Consulting Blog

How Remote Monitoring and Management Can Help Your Business

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As a small business, your assets are limited more than you’d like them to be. You have a budget that yearns for more flexibility, and there are only so many hours in the day to accomplish all of your goals. Thankfully, in an era that’s more connected than any that came before, modern technology provides solutions to businesses that need to get a little more value out of their budgets. One of these solutions is called remote monitoring and management.

Imagine having a persistent computer problem that you don’t know how to solve. It’s been bugging you for a while now, but you don’t have an in-house IT department to fix the problem. Imagine having the ability to log into a service portal and put in a ticket explaining what the problem is. A technician will see this ticket, send you a quick reply, and arrange for a time to remote into your computer to solve the issue for you. Imagine how convenient this would be!

Remote monitoring and management is a great tool that allows your business to take advantage of the many wonders of the connected world, all for the sake of keeping your business running as smoothly as possible. We’ll give you a few examples of how your organization can take full advantage of remote monitoring solutions.

Update and Patch Implementation
Have you ever had to install patches and security updates on every single computer in your office? It can be a frustrating and time-consuming task, especially considering how often these updates need to be implemented. Remote monitoring and maintenance allows our technicians to remote into your computers and deploy the patches and updates all at once, without an on-site visit.

Security Monitoring
Have you ever been concerned with network security? You’re probably wondering how you can keep threats out of your infrastructure when you don’t know they exist. One of the best ways you can do so is by having technicians remotely monitor your network for security troubles. It’s not even limited to just threats, either. We can remotely monitor your network for any troublesome developments, like signs of hardware failure, that could create large issues down the line.

Quick and Easy Service
Waiting around for someone to fix your computer wastes time that could be better spent on other tasks. You can take back this time by having a technician remote into your devices in order to resolve issues, rather than waiting for a technician to arrive on-site to resolve them. Sure, there are more pressing issues that require on-site assistance, but most issues can actually be solved remotely.

Could your business use remote assistance from time to time? COMPANYNAME can help with that. To learn more, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.