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Technology

What’s Behind so Many Businesses Switching Their Phone Systems to VoIP?

b2ap3_thumbnail_voip_is_great_400.jpg The office telephone has been a staple in the business environment for generations, but the extent that each organization uses their telephone will vary. Factors like the number of users, telephone handsets, and wiring required will influence how much use you get from your telephone solution. However, these questions don’t have to be as difficult to ask if you consider the many benefits of a hosted phone system.

We’ll discuss some of the best reasons for using a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), and what it can offer your business.

Fewer Costs
A traditional telephone system is provided by your local telephone company. Sometimes these agreements include services that aren’t needed by your organization, like television or otherwise. This can be frustrating, as all you want is the ability to use a telephone, and instead you’re forced to go all-in on some entertainment package that you won’t use.

VoIP doesn’t demand that you sign up for any extra services. In fact, you actually wind up saving money thanks to VoIP using another service that you’re already paying for–your Internet connection. With VoIP, your voice is transferred over the Internet rather than through the traditional telephone lines. Just keep your bandwidth in mind, as VoIP will likely use up more resources than your other network-connected services.

A Simplified Infrastructure
There’s a reason why you take so much time to plan your cabling infrastructure before implementation, and that’s because it’s not easy to make changes once you’ve set your network up. Of course, this also requires that you anticipate growth, which isn’t always easy. For all you know, your business can grow substantially over your first few years in business. How can you anticipate such growth?

While VoIP can’t predict the future, it can help you adapt to change with one-time setup costs. You won’t have to tear down walls or run new telephone lines just to accommodate new employees. All you have to do is contact your VoIP provider and add new users to your system.

More Flexibility
How many phone numbers do you have? Chances are that, as a business owner, you have your personal cell phone number, as well as your in-house number for company affairs. You wouldn’t be the first professional to think that it would be extremely convenient to have all of your numbers on one single device. Thankfully, VoIP offers a solution for this dilemma, too.

With VoIP, you and your employees have a great way to access your work-related phone numbers and contacts. Since VoIP can be used on desktops, smartphones, and even the traditional telephone handsets, it’s a customizable experience that lets you use your phone solution in the way you prefer. Plus, the extra accessibility allows your employees to be productive off the clock too, which can be great for getting ahead.

No matter how you look at it, VoIP can be a valuable investment for your organization. To get started, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.

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Technology

Don’t Worry, Your Samsung Phone “Winking” at You is Just a Cool Feature

b2ap3_thumbnail_samsung_smart_stay_400.jpg If you’re a Samsung smartphone user, have you ever seen a little eyeball symbol appear at the top of the screen? You might notice that it will show up for a minute, and then disappear again. Since this kind of activity usually makes users question what’s going on with their device, let’s get down to the bottom of this weird occurrence.

To assuage your fears that you’re being watched by some sort of malware or spyware, know that this eyeball icon doesn’t mean you’ve been hacked. Instead, it’s a feature called Smart Stay created by Samsung. When the eye appears, the feature is activated.

What is Smart Stay?
Smart Stay uses your front facing camera to tell whether or not you’re looking at the device. While this sounds a bit creepy, the camera can use your face to keep the screen from turning off while you’re looking at it–like, say, when you’re reading an article on the Internet that’s particularly long. This actually overrides any screen timeout settings, so it’s a great way to finish off whatever you are reading without having to press a button every now and again to keep it lit up.

To change the settings of Smart Stay, you just go through to Menu > Settings > My Device > Smart screen. All you have to do is uncheck the Smart Stay box to turn it off. Depending on how helpful you find this feature, you might actually prefer to keep it on.

How You Know You Have Something to Worry About
While Samsung’s Smart Stay isn’t something to worry about, there are other symptoms of hacking attacks on your mobile device that you want to keep in mind should the need arise. Depending on the type of problem, the symptoms will vary, but keep the following in mind if you suspect something out of the ordinary.

  1. Unfamiliar charges on your carrier’s statement.
  2. Data access patterns that you don’t recognize.
  3. Your battery drains quicker than normal.
  4. You find apps that are downloaded from a third-party app store.
  5. Strange notifications start appearing, especially related to finding and downloading new apps and games.
  6. Your device has been rooted (aka jailbroken).
  7. Your antivirus has been disabled.
  8. You actually see the hacker’s remote actions of opening apps and navigating your phone.

If you ever have reason to suspect that your phone has been hijacked, make sure that the first thing you do is turn off the device’s Internet connection and power it down as soon as possible. Once you’ve done this, consult your trusted IT professionals at COMPANYNAME. We can remove the threat before it causes any more damage to your device.

A little healthy skepticism never hurt anyone, so be sure to approach issues with your device with a grain of salt. To learn more about how your business can identify troubles with technology, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.

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Technology

What Your Software Has in Common With the Food in Your Fridge? An (EOL) End of Life Date

b2ap3_thumbnail_expiring_software_400.jpg It’s a well-known fact that nothing in this world lasts forever (other than Twinkies), and this pertains to your technology more than perhaps anything else. The same solutions that you’ve been working with for years will also need regular updates and improvements in order to stay relevant to your organization.

When you think about it, making sure that your software solutions are always up to date is sort of like keeping your kitchen cabinet full of foodstuffs that haven’t spoiled. Both the software developer and the food producer offer resources that are absolutely crucial in the modern world, and both create products that frequently need to be replaced in order to function as intended. Both offer sustenance to something or another; yet, how similar are they really?

A food producer will tend to focus on offering delectable foods that taste great and offer nutritional value, while a software developer will work toward creating user-friendly solutions and patching up vulnerabilities. Any improvements made tend to be focused on security, but often times the developer will add new features or improve the user interface to offer a better experience as a whole. Primarily, the patches issued resolve problems that hackers can take advantage of to infiltrate your organization and cause trouble.

These improvements are one of the reasons why you might receive notifications about updates available every so often. In fact, they are so frequent that if you don’t implement them as they are released, you could quickly fall behind on network maintenance.

Returning to the food analogy, let’s take a look at a convenience that most businesses have: a break room fridge. If each of your employees keeps a single cup of yogurt in this fridge, and it goes uneaten, it will naturally spoil. However, if you keep this spoiled yogurt in the fridge, despite it being practically inedible, someone will eventually try it out. This could result in employees getting sick.

Whether it’s poor productivity from being ill all day or software that’s missing critical software updates, the result is the same: the potential for a really bad time. If you have someone whose responsibility is to “restock the fridge,” you can keep your organization from being exposed by the sudden, gut-wrenching sickness of a hacking attack.

COMPANYNAME can be the ones to keep an eye out for anything that needs updates or patches on your network, and better yet, we can do all of it ourselves without interrupting operations. This keeps you from taking valuable time out of the day to do it yourself, and you can know for certain that your software solutions are being handled with the care they deserve. To make sure that your business’s network security doesn’t reach its expiration date, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.

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Technology

Productivity Suffers Without a Cohesive IT Plan

b2ap3_thumbnail_outsource_your_it_management_400.jpg There are right ways and wrong ways to do many things, and managing IT is no exception. Many businesses, especially small ones, are left susceptible to issues and vulnerabilities in their network. What’s worse, these are often networks that are supported by an IT “expert.”

Whether it’s due to budget constraints, a lack of workable time, or any other reason, companies frequently settle for substandard solutions when it comes to making changes to their IT. Oftentimes, they’ll try to bury their issues underneath a relatively updated infrastructure without doing anything to resolve the underlying problem. Either that, or they decide that they can fix the problem themselves, piecing together an unstable solution that almost works.

Observing this has only made us at COMPANYNAME more dedicated to providing a real solution for businesses that resort to these DIY implementations.

Many business, most often small ones, have a few things in common. First, they all experience similar issues with their IT, and secondly, they are usually ill-prepared to deal with the repercussions of these issues. Furthermore, these businesses will frequently neglect their need for standard operating procedures for their employees to follow.

This only opens the business up to greater issues as the employees will resort to processes that they’re personally comfortable with to complete their responsibilities. In the end, the workforce is left in the uncomfortable position of desperately needing change, with the unwillingness to make any changes.

As a result, the already tricky business of running an SMB is only made more difficult. When issues persistently prevent your technology from serving its intended purpose, your employees will be rendered incapable of meeting their responsibilities by a situation that is out of their control.

COMPANYNAME can help put control back into your hands with our variety of IT solutions. From our proactive monitoring and maintenance practices to our ability to block many distractions, we can apply a consistent solution to your entire network, unifying your IT so it will better serve your needs. Call us at PHONENUMBER for more information.

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Technology

These 25 Advanced Driver Assistance Systems Help Make Cars Intelligent and Safer

b2ap3_thumbnail_assisted_driving_technology_400.jpg By now you’ve heard of self-driving cars insofar that you understand that there are engineers from all over the United States and abroad working with AI to develop systems that can create safer traffic conditions and cut down on emissions with efficiency. But what you may not know is that there are many drivers concerned at the development and deployment of these autonomous systems.

The Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation at the University of Michigan conducted a study that found that over one-third of all drivers are “very concerned” about riding in a self-driving car, while two-thirds of respondents are “very or moderately concerned”. It doesn’t seem as if the public is necessarily ready for this technology to be deployed; even though there are places where it has been shown to reduce traffic incidents substantially.

A car is many consumers’ “biggest” purchase, and with the car a person drives inexorably tied to their social status, people are not in a big rush to give up purchasing and driving cars without paying much mind for a car’s practical and safety information. With an autonomous vehicle, the driver’s role is now taken over by a computer, a completely terrifying prospect for some folks.

The reality is, however, that these cars are far and beyond more reliable than any human-driven car could possibly be. That’s because the human mind isn’t capable of the accuracy of these computing systems. Today what you see in lieu of full-on automated driving, are car manufacturers using some of the technologies developed for that purpose to improve the manual usage of the automobile. Marketed as advanced driver assistance systems (or ADAS), many newer cars offer some or all of the following options:

How many of these systems have you recognized on your family car?

These options have been slowly implemented as driver-assistance options. By using them incrementally rather than as part of a completely automated system it allows today’s drivers to avoid accidents while still getting the function out of their purchase.

One way that the automotive industry is currently taking advantage of ADAS technology is to have it assist drivers when needed. This is a much different approach than using it to fully automate the entire driving experience, and one that produces some confusion by drivers who are used to doing things a certain way behind the wheel.

Toyota’s “Guardian Angel” program is one example of a major car manufacturer working ADAS technology into a car to improve safety without negatively altering the driving experience. This program has the AI learn the driver’s habits as to give feedback while the car is being driven. Some ADAS options do take over the control of the car in times where motorists typically struggle with the goal to leverage the technology that’s available to improve safety and limit the amount of vehicular-related deaths (currently about 30,000 per year in the U.S.).

One caveat to successfully creating software that aids in the driving experience is that developers have to have an understanding of practical situations to interrupt a driver’s control of the vehicle. The CEO of Toyota Research Institute, Gil Pratt, went on to talk about this very subject to CIO magazine. “Your car may someday warn you several times about a particularly dangerous driving habit you have before taking control of the wheel. Autonomous driving capabilities are measured on a government scale of zero to four, with zero being no automation, and four being fully automated. The focus of most of the discussion among car makers today is how far up the scale they should go and how quickly. There’s a lot of discussion in the industry whether we go incrementally up the scale or whether we jump.”

It is important, especially with the public’s overwhelmingly negative perception of automobile automation, that these features are accurately assessing live situations. Up to 20 of the most visible car manufacturers have accepted this step-by-step approach to automobile automation as published by CIO, “The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) announced earlier this year that 20 automakers have pledged to make automatic emergency braking (AEB) standard on their cars by 2022.”

What are your thoughts? Are you willing to ride in a self-driving car? Can you trust your safety and that of your family to assisted-driving technology? Share your thoughts in the comments section below, and be sure to subscribe to our blog.

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Technology

Is New Hardware Procurement on Your IT Budget?

b2ap3_thumbnail_hardware_cost_400.jpg Depending on how long you’ve had your current workstation, you might start to see performance problems. Eventually, you’ll start to see issues that could cause downtime and lead to wasted assets. Therefore, you need to have a plan in order to replace your hardware before it fails. What’s the best way to do this without breaking your budget?

The answer is easy, and it’s called hardware procurement. This is way to help your business commit to regular hardware refreshes without spending an exorbitant amount of cash doing so. Through hardware procurement, you can get replacement servers, workstations, network components, and so much more without having to pay for them up-front.

How it Works
Purchasing new hardware can often be a financial problem, especially for big ticket items. You might be in the red for months following a hardware failure, or even up to a year. Still, even if it’s expensive, hardware refreshes are borderline necessary if you want to make sure that your business doesn’t fall victim to the eventual hardware failure, which can cause data loss. The question, therefore, is how you can accomplish all of this without breaking your IT budget.

Let’s Get Started with an Assessment
Are you unsure about investing in hardware procurement? COMPANYNAME can offer you a complete assessment of your IT infrastructure. This tells us if you have any outdated hardware components that are running in a way which might threaten your network with downtime. Furthermore, we can build you out an IT roadmap that helps you plan out your hardware refreshes for the next five or even ten years. This is crucial if you want to make sure that your organization can best implement new hardware in the long run.

Routinely updating your hardware is an important part of keeping your network secure, as well. Older hardware may not be getting the proper security patches and updates, which could put your business at risk of hacking attacks, in addition to the amplified risk of hardware failure. You don’t have the luxury of waiting until something bad happens to you, as the threat is omnipresent and could happen at any time.

To learn more about hardware refreshes and network audits, reach out to COMPANYNAME at PHONENUMBER.

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Technology

Samsung Galaxy vs Google Pixel, Which is Best for You?

b2ap3_thumbnail_smartphone_comparison_400.jpg When it comes to Android mobile OS-run smartphones, consumers may wonder where the value is when they see so many name brands charging premium prices for their flagship devices. Two of the most popular devices, the Google Pixel and the Samsung Galaxy s7, seem to be in a league of their own in the Android market. Today we do a brief comparison:

Google Pixel & Google Pixel XL
Brand awareness plays a major part in whether or not a device is economically viable. In the past, Google has released their “flagship” devices under the Nexus monicker, and users have found them to be the cleanest Android-run devices on the market. The Google Nexus brand has been manufactured by several companies including Huawei, HTC, and LG as Google doesn’t find that the cost of starting their own smartphone manufacturing outfit to be viable. This time around Google once again partnered with HTC to create their newest namesake device, the Google Pixel.

Designed and marketed as the first truly Google phone, the Pixel comes in two sizes: one with a 5-inch display and a 2,700 mAh battery, and a larger version called the Pixel XL that features a 5.5-inch display and a larger 3,450 mAh battery. Otherwise the two devices are identical, making the choice between the smaller and larger versions more of a matter of preference than a deliberation between specifications.

Both devices feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor with 4GB of RAM, and a 12.3 dual-LED camera, that is now considered by industry professionals as one of the best camera experiences available on a smartphone today. They both are made from aluminum and glass and come with a rear-mounted fingerprint reader for security.

The Pixel comes in three colors: Quite Black, Very Silver, and Really Blue. Customers can choose a device with an ample 32GB of onboard storage, or a 128GB version for those users in need of more storage space for their media. The device is available for all major carriers and can also be purchased on the Google Store, where financing is available.

Google Pixel
Dimensions – Aluminum & Glass design, 5.04 oz
Display – 5” AMOLED, 1080 x 1920 (~441 ppi)
Particulars – Android OS v7.1 {Nougat}, Qualcomm Snapdragon 821, Adreno 530, 4GB RAM, 32/128GB Internal Storage)
External Memory & SIM – None, Nano-SIM
Cameras – Rear facing: 12.3 MP, front facing: 8 MP
Battery – Non-removable 2,770 mAh
Other Information – Rear-mounted fingerprint reader, fast charging enabled, NFC enabled
Google Pixel XL
Dimensions – Aluminum & Glass design, 5.93 oz
Display – 5.5” AMOLED, 1440 x 2560 (~534 ppi)
Particulars – Android OS v7.1 {Nougat}, Qualcomm Snapdragon 821, Adreno 530, 4GB RAM, 32/128GB Internal Storage
External Memory & SIM – None, Nano-SIM
Cameras – Rear facing: 12.3 MP, front facing: 8 MP
Battery – Non-removable 3,450 mAh
Other Information – Rear-mounted fingerprint reader, fast charging enabled, NFC enabled

Samsung Galaxy s7 & Samsung Galaxy s7 Edge
If there has been an industry leader in the smartphone space, it has to be Samsung. Not only do they manufacture some of the most popular (and powerful) smartphones on the market, they produce components for several of their competitors’ devices. In a testament to their overwhelming popularity, of all the smartphones purchased in the first quarter of 2016, nearly a quarter of them were made by Samsung. Only time will tell if those numbers are sustained after their flagship smartphone, the Galaxy Note 7, was recalled and discontinued after hundreds of them were distributed with violently faulty batteries.

The Galaxy s7, however, is probably still the best smartphone on the market. The s7, and it’s sister product, the Galaxy s7 Edge, come with Super AMOLED displays, the most advanced chipset of any phone on the market and 4GB of RAM. If there is a feature you would like to see on a smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy s7, and s7 Edge, have it. They are dust and water resistant, they feature an always-on display, a great performing battery, and a return of expandable storage capabilities up to 200GB.

Like the Samsung Galaxy s7, the s7 Edge features a 5.5-inch Super AMOLED display, but the Edge features a rounded edge-to-edge design that some may favor. Each device features a fingerprint reader for security, fast-charging, and NFC for use with data transfer and payment platforms. It comes in six colors: Black, White, Gold, Silver, Pink Gold, Black Pearl, and Coral Blue; and, is available on every major smartphone carrier.

Samsung Galaxy s7
Dimensions – Corning Gorilla Glass 4 back panel
Display – 5.1 inches, 1440 x 2560 pixels (~577 ppi pixel density)
Particulars – Android OS, v6.0 (Marshmallow), upgradable to v7.0 (Nougat), Qualcomm MSM8996 Snapdragon 820 Exynos 8890 Octa,, 4GB RAM, 32/64GB Internal Storage
External Memory & SIM – microSD, up to 200GB (dedicated slot) – single-SIM model
microSD, up to 200GB (uses SIM 2 slot) – dual-SIM model
Cameras – Rear facing: 12 MP, Front facing: 9 MP
Battery – Non-removable Li-Ion 3000 mAh battery
Other Information – Fast charging enabled, NFC enabled
Sumsung Galaxy s7 Edge
Dimensions – Corning Gorilla Glass 4 back panel
Display – 5.5 inches, 1440 x 2560 pixels (~534 ppi pixel density)
Particulars – Android OS, v6.0 (Marshmallow), upgradable to v7.0 (Nougat), Qualcomm MSM8996 Snapdragon 820 Exynos 8890 Octa, 4GB RAM, 32/64/128GB Internal storage
External Memory & SIM – microSD, up to 200GB (dedicated slot) – single-SIM model
microSD, up to 200GB (uses SIM 2 slot) – dual-SIM model
Cameras – Rear facing: 12 MP, front facing: 5 MP
Battery – Non-removable Li-Ion 3600 mAh battery
Other Information – Fast charging enabled, NFC enabled

With the smartphone space becoming more and more convoluted, each of these devices provide a substantial upgrade over last year’s smartphones, while providing users the specifications and usability they seek in a new product. Their superior build-quality and industry-leading internals provide consumers the value they seek when shopping for the best smartphone for their dollar.

For more information about the latest mobile technology, call us today at PHONENUMBER.

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Technology

4 Options for Backing Up Your Data. Which is Best?

b2ap3_thumbnail_backup_and_recovery_400.jpg It’s every business owner’s worst nightmare; they wake up to find out that their entire data infrastructure has been wiped out by some unexpected natural disaster or hacking attack. The only way to guarantee that your business’s future remains intact is to have some sort of data backup and recovery system, just in case of the worst.

However, if you’re unfamiliar with data backup solutions, you might not know where to start. We’ve outlined several options that your business has, as well as which ones are the superior choice.

Local Data Backup
Most organizations will immediately think of local data backup as their first option. While it’s a great way to avoid the risks of not having any data backup at all, keep in mind that it’s far from the ideal solution. Two types of local data backup solutions are magnetic tape and external hard drives. These allow you to keep a copy of your business’s data on-site in the event of a disaster, but it’s not a guarantee if you want to ensure the recovery of your data.

Imagine for a moment that your business was struck by a disaster so great that it eliminated pretty much everything that your organization had stored in your office. Fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, or floods all have this destructive capability. If this were to happen, your organization would be left without a trace of data to go off of. Furthermore, you also run the risk of malware infections, user error, or hardware failure when hosting your data backups on-site.

So… what’s the next best thing?

Cloud Backup
The next logical step would be to host your data off-site, and the cloud allows for just that. If your in-house infrastructure were to be rendered obsolete or incapacitated by some sort of disaster, you could restore your data quickly and efficiently through the use of a cloud backup and restoration process. Plus, you can forget about the potential user error that could arise from having to manually set and restore through tape backups.

Multiple Data Center Backups
Before going all-in on a cloud-based backup, you should ask them how many data centers that they use to store your data. Ultimately, you want your organization’s data to be stored in as many different locations as possible, as this improves the odds that your data can be located and restored. Basically, if the data can’t be found in one data center due to some sort of internal problem, you’ll know with certainty that at least one of them has it.

Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR)
For organizations that are serious about business continuity, an enterprise-level Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution is the best option to ensure the preservation of your mission-critical assets. BDR works by taking a backup of only files that have been changed since the last backup was taken, which allows it to take multiple backups throughout the workday instead of just one large backup after-hours. These backups are then stored in the cloud for future access.

BDR can also restore directly to a device, or to the BDR hardware itself, depending on just how bad the disaster is. This keeps downtime to a minimum and helps you get back in business as soon as possible following a disaster. If you have nothing to restore your data to, a backup device with all of your data can be sent to your office’s location overnight.

Are you ready to get started with BDR? To learn more, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.

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Technology

Tip of the Week: Easy Ways to Train Your Staff About IT

b2ap3_thumbnail_business_it_training_400.jpg You might wish that your employees know more about IT and its inner workings, and you’re not alone. SMBs often suffer from a lack of IT talent, and they might try to supplement this lack of proficiency by training employees on how to do basic computer tasks required to work effectively. Thankfully, you don’t have to rely on just your knowledge and that of your employees when it comes to maintaining your technology.

You can augment your employees’ IT knowledge with the following services offered by IT providers.

An IT Help Desk
One of the best ways to supplement your organization’s in-house knowledge of technology troubles is by taking advantage of an outsourced IT help desk. Basically, this is a phone number or live chat system that your employees can utilize when they need help with specific technology problems. This strikes a unique balance between allowing your employees to get their own support, and giving them access to help when it’s needed most; allowing them to learn more about IT without letting them perform advanced procedures on their own.

If you want to use a help desk as a training tool, you’ll want to make sure that your IT service provider is remotely accessing your employees’ workstation during this process. This helps the service provider guide them through the steps one-by-one, without letting them make big mistakes that could derail operations. Once an employee knows how to do something in particular with minimal effort, they’re less likely to waste time on the same process in the future.

When this interaction is remote, it is typically more cost effective than having a technician go on site.

Focused IT Training
Training is an accepted part of the office environment, and one of the most valuable lessons that you can provide for your employees is technology best practices. Every so often, require that your employees review basic IT protocol, such as how to make secure passwords, how to handle sensitive information, troubleshooting common technology problems, and so much more. Ultimately, your goal should be for your employees to walk out of the training session with the sense that they’ve learned something new about how best to work for your organization and how to handle its technology with care.

In fact, some IT providers can provide all-you-can-eat help desk support for end users, while providing training materials, best practices, and more. We figure that the more educated and effective your staff is, the more growth you will experience. To learn more, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.

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Technology

Explaining Managed IT to Busy Business Owners

b2ap3_thumbnail_managed_it_service_agreement_400.jpg As a business, you focus on providing a specific good or service to your area. This means spending a considerable amount of time trying to make your organization the go-to SMB for that particular service. All organizations specialize in a certain craft, but sometimes their skills may fall short of their needs in areas that lay outside this expertise. Outsourcing is a simple way for businesses to leverage skills that aren’t part of their expertise without taking the time to learn the skill themselves, and it’s an invaluable part of any business owner’s strategy.

Let’s use managed IT services as an example. While enterprises might have the budget and workforce to accommodate managing on-site networks and hardware, it’s unlikely that the SMB does as well. Technology maintenance requires careful attention to detail, which can only be offered by trained professionals who understand the importance of their task. IT maintenance and management isn’t something that can be learned overnight.

While the benefits are significant, the major roadblock for organizations isn’t implementing a new IT management model; rather, it’s their limited budget. They struggle to resolve problems with their IT systems without breaking their budget, and the typical break-fix IT company isn’t devoted to saving them any cash on technology repair. Instead, a managed service provider tries to take proactive measures to prevent issues from happening in the first place.

Comparing the two solutions side by side gives more than enough reason to forsake break-fix IT services. If you can prevent problems from happening in the first place, why wouldn’t you? When a server or workstation breaks down, countless files and hours of productivity are lost, making recovery difficult, if not impossible.

Managed IT allows for fixed monthly payments, taking the unpredictability out of managing technology. Unlike break-fix IT, which capitalizes on your business’s technology breaking down, managed IT services aim to prevent this from happening in the first place; saving your business money in the long run. You’ll find that when you experience minimal trouble with your IT, the possibilities are quite literally endless. You can invest more time and money into your business’s other aspects.

To learn more about managed IT services, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.