Tag: Business Computing

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Reduce Setup Costs with IT Consulting

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It’s always exciting when the idea of a business becomes real by finding a space to conduct operations. It’s extra exciting when a business has outgrown its space and has to move into a new space. Whatever situation you are encountering, it can be excruciatingly difficult to affordably move into new offices.

COMPANYNAME can do several things for any business, whether you are a startup or an established company that’s moving or expanding. Our consultants are trained IT professionals; and, as a result, they can work with you to plan an efficient (and connected) use of your available space.

Moving Offices
When your company becomes too big for its britches you have to get some new ones. The problem is that you can’t just move everything over at once over one day; it’s a process. There are things that you can do, however, to make the move less of a headache. They include:

  • Choosing your Internet service provider – Having the necessary bandwidth to meet your business’ needs is crucial to its ability to run efficiently. If your new place of business needs to be rewired it could take up to a couple of months for it to get completed. At COMPANYNAME, we have good working relationships with several area ISPs, and can make sure that when it’s time to move in to your new building, you’ll have access to the bandwidth you need.
  • Property Assessment – While there won’t be any furniture or technology in place, walking through the property with our team to get a sense of where the technology will go can be helpful. This will simultaneously provide a chance to ascertain what will go where, and to make sure that all connections are in place.
  • Plan the logistics – If you expect your business to remain functional during a move, you need to plan how it is going to happen. Who is moving the hardware? Do the phones need to be connected? Is all the furniture there? There are over a dozen vendors you have to deal with when you are moving to a new location and making sure everything is squared away logistically is essential to a successful transition.

At COMPANYNAME, we provide the kind of technological expertise and vendor management services that make us a perfect partner for a rapidly growing company. Call us at PHONENUMBER today to talk to one of our knowledgeable consultants about how we can help make your transition easier.

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Casserly Consulting Blog

How to Properly Assess Your Technology Needs

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Nothing lasts forever, especially not the technology that a business relies on to function. Between typical wear and tear and the always-improving trajectory that the technology industry follows, you will likely need to actively evaluate your needs and what you resultantly need to obtain. Today, we’ll walk you through how this technology assessment should be shaped.

What Should your Assessment Focus On?
As you go about evaluating your technology, you need to consider how it has (and is projected to) affect your business. Looking to the past, anticipating the future, and being aware of the present where your technology is concerned will allow you to make better choices as you move forward.

The Past
For example, take the lesson that philosopher George Santayana coined: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This is more or less a fancier way of saying that, if someone never learns from the mistakes they’ve made before, they’re going to keep making the same mistakes. This is why your technology assessment needs to consider the decisions you have made, and if the results were as you expected.

Were your investments into certain solutions ultimately worth it? Did that new process you implemented see any success, or was it even actually adopted by your workforce? Looking at your past decisions and their outcomes will help you make more informed decisions with a better chance of benefiting your company.

The Present
Of course, there will be other signs of issues around you at any time, so it is equally important to evaluate your technology’s efficacy in the given moment. Are your employees able to use the tools at their disposal to properly and successfully do their jobs? If not, what is the root cause of their difficulties? Where do they see the solutions just being insufficient or problematic?

This insight will allow you to reevaluate if your investments are getting as much mileage as they need to be, and therefore will give you a better idea of how your business’ needs should be prioritized moving forward.

The Future
Speaking of moving forward, you need to do something with all the insights you’ve collected from your analysis of the past and present. Making informed decisions based on what you anticipate the future to hold in technological innovations will allow you to center your solutions around your anticipated needs. While this isn’t an exact science, it is better to at least try to predict an outcome than it is to be blindsided by something you could have seen coming.

Benefits of a Technology Assessment
Running a comprehensive assessment of the technology that you leverage in your business’ operations can provide you with various advantages that you might not have access to otherwise. First of all, an assessment is an excellent way to identify any problems your technology may be suffering, as well as to zero in on your business’ needs, as was discussed above. As a result, a technology assessment also serves as an excellent means of narrowing down possible solutions to these deficits. This enables you to select the solutions that are right for you, reducing the costs incurred by deploying solutions that aren’t a good fit.

How Technology Should Be Assessed
Just as trying to sweep a mess out of a carpet is much less effective than using a vacuum cleaner, just giving your needs a quick once-over before making a change or electing not to will not provide your business with any benefits.

Instead, try a more in-depth method to maximize your returns.

  • Study Workflows – Are your employees encountering problems in their workflow? Ask them what improvements would be welcome and compare their suggestions with the growth plan you have projected for your future. Will their suggestions be compatible with the growth plan you’ve established?
  • Analyze Technology in Place – Working again with your employees, establish what strengths and (more importantly) weaknesses your current solutions exhibit that could influence your workflow. A comprehensive understanding of your business technology will help with the next step.
  • Explore Alternative Approaches – Before you charge ahead and take a chunk out of your finances, take the time to brainstorm other resolutions to your IT concerns and deficits. If a slight tweak to the process can resolve the problem, or more effectively using the solutions you have on hand is all it will take to fix it, wouldn’t you say that’s a better option than making huge, expensive changes?
  • Take Stock of Your Resources – If it happens that you do need a new system or solution, it helps to know what you have going in and have your priorities lined up. If a new solution is too expensive, or your team is resistant to change, blindly implementing it all at once could open you up to problems.

Once these steps are completed, you should be much more prepared to make a decision concerning your technology. Need some more help? COMPANYNAME is here with the expertise to assist you in assessing your IT. Give us a call at PHONENUMBER for more information.

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Using a QR Code to Log In

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Passwords are still an incredibly valuable part of security, but it’s becoming quite difficult to maximize network security through passwords alone. Even if you somehow manage to sell the idea of network security to your staff, whether or not they follow through is another thing entirely. It’s critical that you make it as easy as possible for your employees to stay secure, and that’s where scannable QR codes come in.

Why QR Codes?
By using a QR code to connect to your business’ wireless network, you can improve security. There are several benefits to this approach compared to the traditional alphanumeric password. An alphanumeric password can’t be shared as easily as a QR code, and the last thing you want to do is share your specific Internet access credentials. The real kicker is that a QR code makes things much easier on the side of the end-user. Instead of using a touchscreen to plug in a PIN or password, you can simply use the right app on your mobile device to take a picture of a QR code. It’s a great way for businesses to allow guests access to a wireless network without carelessly handing out credentials.

How to Use a QR Code
If you want to use a QR code to access the Internet, you will need to have a system in place that generates a code. You can use any of various websites or applications that create QR codes for whatever network that you want to connect to, as well as its password. You’ll also want to review any terms of service or other policies before making sure that you want to share this information for any reason.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll be able to download the end result. You now have an easy way to access your Internet without creating a security risk for yourself. Do you have any other security concerns that need addressing? COMPANYNAME wants to help. To learn more, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Tip of the Week: Which Storage is Better for Your Needs?

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Keeping your company’s data safe is extremely important no matter where it is stored. Making the decision to store data in the cloud or in an in-house server is just one consideration you need to make. Today, we will compare these two options to help you select the one is right for your business.

Cloud Storage
There are many advantages to using the cloud for backup and storage. Firstly, the platform is cost-effective because not only are you likely paying for only the space and services that you need, you also don’t have the extra utility and maintenance costs that onsite hardware tends to come with.

Another benefit is the scalability that you can get in the cloud. You can always get just the amount of space and computing services that you need, which is not something that you can expect in the case of an in-house computing platform. By being able to increase and decrease space as needed, all you’ll need to do is notify your service provider, and they will increase or decrease your storage space accordingly.

With cloud-based storage, you also typically improve on your accessibility. Any data stored in a cloud-based storage facility can be accessed through most Internet-connected devices that run an Internet browser (or through an app). Just log into your account and gain access to all the information you need when you need it.

Depending on your business needs, some of the few disadvantages cloud storage brings may not even impact your decision. The big one is speed. If you have a lot of data to store, and your Internet connection is less than stellar, backing up or transferring data to the cloud provider could take a while.

Local Storage
Speed is the one main advantage of storing your data locally, but there are some others. Businesses that rely on in-house computing infrastructures have more options than those that use cloud-hosted solutions–especially since you can just unhook the drive and the data is protected.

By having complete control over the management and design of your in-house computing infrastructure, you can create some pretty useful setups that will save your business money. Not only can you set up multiple virtual machines on one server, you can have full-scale redundancy to protect all of the information on your systems.

Some downsides include the upfront expense of purchasing all the major hardware and software systems needed. Scalability is more difficult, and most damning, if your data is saved, backed up, and protected in one place, if that one place gets hit with any issues, your data could be inaccessible, or worse yet, destroyed altogether.

While you have to make decisions for your business, depending on COMPANYNAME to help you make the right ones is advisable. Call us today at PHONENUMBER and one of our professional IT experts will help you design and implement a storage plan to meet your business’ needs.

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Tip of the Week: Sync Your Inboxes with IMAP

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How many emails do you send on a daily basis? You use it so frequently that you might not second-guess how it actually works. Depending on the way your business uses email, you might be able to optimize the way that it works for your mobile devices. There are two types of protocol that work to varying degrees for your email solution.

The first kind of email protocol is called POP, or Post Office Protocol. This can be seen in a similar way to snail mail. POP works by downloading messages to your device from the mail server through your email client. However, this keeps you from downloading the messages onto other devices. If you want to check your email on your smartphone, the same messages will not be accessible on your desktop–it’s just the way it works.

On the other hand, you have the preferred method of handling multi-device email: IMAP, or Internet Message Access Protocol. IMAP stores the messages live on an email server rather than downloading them directly to the devices. This means that the messages remain on the email server and are accessed by a mail client on any device you use. Any actions performed on the messages are done so through the mail server. This is the best way to use email if you’re hoping to keep your messages in sync across your devices.

Modern email systems generally allow for IMAP, including Google’s Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, and Mozilla’s Thunderbird. Some, like Apple’s iCloud, even default to it. Depending on your business’ needs, you’ll want to implement a communications solution that allows your team to access email on a multitude of devices–that’s where we come in.

If your business is unfamiliar with mobile devices, COMPANYNAME can work with your organization to ensure that your mobile device policy matches up properly with your email client. You want to ensure that any devices accessing company information are secured from end to end. Furthermore, these devices need access to information unimpeded so that productivity can commence. We can work with your organization to make this happen.

To learn more about email, mobile devices, and business technology for a modern workforce, reach out to COMPANYNAME at PHONENUMBER.

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Casserly Consulting Blog

What to Expect from IT in 2018

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As one of the most famous head coaches in NFL history, Vince Lombardi has several quotes that can be applied to success. One particular statement to note is “If you are five minutes early, you are already ten minutes late.” As it turns out, this quote inadvertently refers to technology. The technology industry moves a mile-a-minute and businesses are always looking for ways to innovate and make significant improvements to technology.

In fact, it’s just one small way you can make a big change for your small business’ operations. Here are some of the best developments to look forward to for your business’ IT in 2018, as per some of the most notable IT professionals in the United States.

  • Emerging technology is important. Of all technology observed, security (81%), mobile device management (51%), and big data (49%) are likely to play a major role in future technology development.
    • What this means for the small business: The threat of a hacking attack or data loss should never be underestimated. In order to commit to keeping your business secure, it is best to proactively take steps to keep threats out of your network. Considering how popular mobile solutions have become, you need to include mobile device management in your maintenance strategy.
  • Network security is a focus. Businesses understand how crucial it is that their network data is properly protected. 70% say that securing this data will be their top priority in 2018.
    • What this means for the small business: While peer pressure isn’t usually a good thing, this statistic is the exception. When almost three-quarters of your industry contemporaries are taking steps to improve their security against cybercrime, it’s a good indication that you should as well.
  • Balancing in-house and outsourced solutions. 54% of survey respondents plan to combine internal and external IT support and administration to fulfill their needs.
    • What this means for the small business: Some positions are simply more difficult to fill as a part of an in-house staff. For example, there just aren’t enough security experts for all the vacancies in small businesses, especially when large businesses lure candidates away with more pay, better benefits, and other perks. Furthermore, not many small businesses would likely need a full-time security resource if best practices are followed.

      As a result, many businesses are looking externally for their cybersecurity needs. A managed service provider can provide an outsourced team of experienced IT professionals who will communicate and work with you to meet your organizational technology needs. This allows you to preserve your budget by eliminating the need to hire and train your own internal resources.

  • Increased use of a virtual environment. It is expected that using the cloud and virtualization technologies will lead to a 69% decline in utilizing installed applications on local systems.
    • What this means for the small business: Complicated infrastructures have no place in the digital climate of today, and relatedly, there is a need of scalability to meet the needs of your business and workforce. A virtual environment lends itself to that ability to change, and easily allows you to securely make necessary changes to your data–whether those changes are alterations to user access permissions, the addition of new user accounts, or scaling services.
  • Increase in SaaS. 61% of those surveyed predict that the operating system will gradually become irrelevant as applications move more and more to the browser.
    • What this means for the small business: The move from self-managed applications and software to fully-managed Software as a Service will allow business users to be productive from anywhere, with their solutions maintained for them by the hosting service. This includes installing updates and applying patches as they are released.

How do you plan to leverage these technologies in your business? Whatever your plans are, COMPANYNAME is here with the solutions and experience to help. For more information, give us a call at PHONENUMBER.

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Casserly Consulting Blog

Is Your IT Holding Up Its End Of The Bargain?

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As you design your business’ IT infrastructure, it is important that you look months and years into the future, rather than just what you need in the moment. A good managed service provider will understand that–which makes it your job to find a good one. The following questions will help to more quickly narrow down your search to find the best provider for your needs.

What is included in the service level agreement we would have?
There is nothing that requires all companies to promise or provide the same things. This means that a provider can offer services A and C, but will have nothing to do with anything involving B. The same could just as easily be possible of services A or C. Some providers will have some sort of offering for all services, but offer so little that A, B, and C are more accurately described as a, b, and c. That’s not even taking response times into consideration. It wouldn’t matter if your provider could deliver A through Z, if it took them weeks or days to provide them, rather than hours.

Ideally, you will find a provider that will offer comprehensive services designed to resolve any pain points you may encounter in a swift and professional manner. In order to be sure that you have, you need to know what that provider will provide.

How to you approach network management?
This is an important consideration for a few reasons, first and foremost to ensure that you will not run up an obscene bill on what another provider would include in their basic IT support package. If your management costs are going to hold you back going forward, it makes a lot of sense that your provider can adapt with you to save you some much-needed capital.

Since making a profit is the primary goal of business, the more your organization grows the more agile you need your service provider to be. More technology to monitor and manage, the more time it will take, so choosing a provider that has shown success helping small businesses grow is advantageous.

How will you help us protect my network and data?
An IT disaster is usually a data disaster. Losing data can present all types of problems for your business; and, can happen in a number of ways. Hardware failure, malware, or user error can all result in critical data being lost.

As a result, along with the IT provider’s continuous monitoring and their use of automation to keep everything managed around the clock, an MSP has to be able to have a plan to protect the digital assets a company may have. A good amount of an organization’s data is useful, and having a plan to back it up, and recover it quickly can keep your business going. After all, a staff that is battling downtime from data loss (or any other IT-related reason) is less productive, and less engaged (leading to further productivity and revenue loss).

These are just a small number of the issues you have to be able to trust your IT Services provider to prioritize for your business. If you are looking for a comprehensive partner to protect your business from IT-related downtime, call the certified professional as COMPANYNAME today at PHONENUMBER.

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Cloud

3 Reasons Why it’s High Time to Give the Cloud a Chance

b2ap3_thumbnail_cloud_concerns_400.jpg If you haven’t implemented cloud computing for your business yet… why? We understand that you can’t throw caution to the wind, but it’s really in your best interest to invest in the cloud. Doing so can allow your organization to experience unprecedented periods of enhanced operations and growth in the future. We’ll dispel three of the most common misconceptions about the cloud so that you can make the best decision possible for your business.

Misconception 1: Your Data Isn’t Secure in the Cloud
If you think that security is a problem for the cloud, we understand why you might think that way; especially in light of the many major hacking attacks suffered by organizations far larger than your own. However, in many cases, it’s actually safer to store data in the cloud than on your in-house infrastructure. In a study by Schneider Electric , it was found that 40 percent of participants host their security solution in the cloud, and another 45 percent of participants claim that they will move their security to the cloud in the near future.

Granted, you still need to be careful when you’re considering a cloud platform for your organization’s data. You, or a trusted IT consultant, should take the time to perform a quality analysis of the various risks versus the rewards–particularly in regard to the costs, opportunities, and risk factors. To get a second opinion about various cloud providers, you can look at vendors who might use their services. You’ll be able to see how great their services are from who they associate themselves with.

Misconception 2: The Cloud is Too Expensive
The cloud may have been a rather expensive investment in the past, but that’s not so much the case anymore. The cloud is so varied and commonplace in today’s workplace environment that you will likely encounter different rates for different cloud providers. Furthermore, since the cloud has grown much more common over the past few years, its costs have decreased, allowing more organizations to afford it than before.

There are still other expenses to keep in mind, though, including the cloud migration fees and any other costs associated with doing so. This includes opportunity costs, like time to market, disaster recovery savings, and customer satisfaction. You also need to consider just how much it will take to run an on-site cloud, as well as the maintenance that it would require, like resolving problems, installing new hardware, upgrading applications, and so on.

Misconception 3: You Can’t Get Flexibility from the Cloud
If you’ve made the decision to host data and applications on your in-house infrastructure, then you know that it takes a significant amount of time and resources to make this type of situation work for you. Usually an IT department would handle this responsibility, but it’s not always easy for small organizations to achieve the same level of care as larger enterprises. This is why a lot of organizations choose to host their network resources, like server/desktop infrastructures and data storage, in the cloud. This saves your organization a considerable amount of time and money, and all it takes is a talk with a trusted cloud provider like COMPANYNAME to make it reality.

Are you ready to invest in cloud computing? If so, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.

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Technology

Webinars Take the Excuses Out of Missing Meetings

b2ap3_thumbnail_webinars_for_authority_400.jpg For today’s businesses, displaying your organizational authority is crucial to success. Whether it’s McDonald’s with fast food burgers, Chevrolet with cars and trucks, or Walmart for everything else, the message you put out there is seemingly as important as the services you provide. For small businesses, this becomes even more crucial. For example, if you run a hardware store, you likely can’t compete with the prices of the big box stores, but you can bring to the table something of greater value to the consumer: your knowledge.

In the past, companies would have seminars to introduce new concepts to anyone that had a vested interest, or to present their consumer base a new set of practices. These seminars were great marketing tools for companies to show the consumer that they, in fact, know about the products or services they were selling. As a result, they were great ways to build organic traffic into their stores. This is a classic example of how word of mouth is the best form of marketing.

Cut to today, people are busy, and with social media being what it is, it was inevitable that companies would have to start coming to the consumer, rather than having the consumer come to them. Nowadays, the webinar (obviously taken from the root words web and seminar) has allowed the modern business to interact with would-be customers over the Internet. The webinar is set up much like the seminar with a presentation or course followed by a full question and answers section.

A webinar can be an hour or two, it can be a half-hour, it can be five. There really isn’t any set amount of time, but you have to remember that even if you are constantly at the computer, some of the people you are trying to reach aren’t. Also, no matter how valuable you think the information you have packed into your five-hour webinar is, it doesn’t take much for people, interested or not, to be distracted away from what you are saying. In fact, that brings up one of the main benefits of the webinar, the ability for the user to listen at their leisure. So while you may hold an event at 7 PM on a Wednesday, you can distribute the webinar for anyone to download or stream for as long as you’d like. It’s best practice to keep it between one and two hours, and don’t waste your listener’s time with fluff. If someone gets bored with one of your webinars, the chances decrease substantially that they will ever go to another.

Along with their platform for distributing your company’s knowledge and authority in your industry, webinars have shown to be one of the best ways to close new customers. In fact, Buzzsumo has stated that nearly one-fifth of their webinar attendees turn into paying customers.

The technology used to conduct a webinar is readily available. There are literally dozens of free and paid applications designed to let you conduct webinars. Some of these include GoToWebinar, AnyMeeting, Google Hangouts, and Microsoft’s Skype platform. If you are curious about what it takes for you to educate potential and current customers with a webinar, contact COMPANYNAME’s professional IT staff at PHONENUMBER.

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Cloud

3 Compelling Reasons Why Your Business Should Move to the Cloud

b2ap3_thumbnail_introducing_cloud_computing_400.jpg Businesses are turning to the cloud because it’s designed to make operations easier and save them money. In light of these benefits, organizations that have yet to move to the cloud may be missing out on some serious advantages by continuing to do IT the hard way. If you’re still unsure about the cloud, then consider how these three features of cloud computing can change how you do business.

The Cloud Takes the Burden Off of Running an In-House Network
A business that hosts their data and IT infrastructure in-house is in charge of overseeing every aspect of maintaining their network. This includes everything from putting out fires when things go wrong to procuring new equipment. For many SMBs, what makes this responsibility challenging is the obvious fact that they’re not an IT company. However, by owning all of this equipment an SMB essentially has to take on some very technical responsibilities requiring professional knowledge.

The advantage of hosting your data and applications in the cloud is that you’re essentially outsourcing this responsibility to a cloud provider whose sole job is to oversee and protect your data. This frees up resources to better invest in your business goals, and gives you peace of mind that your data is being handled by professionals so that nothing is being overlooked.

Cloud Offers Flexibility
Today’s business environment makes accessing your work while on the go practically a necessity, and hosting your data can prove to be a complex endeavor when sharing files and information internationally. ITProPortal explains, “Global expansion has increased the need for international data centers, especially as security and privacy concerns lead to strict regulations that vary from country to country… Cloud computing with an established cloud partner with physical data centers across multiple geographies means your data can ‘live’ in just about any jurisdiction, and mitigates this problem.”

Plus, providing your workforce with anytime, anywhere access to their important files along with the ability to collaborate on projects in real-time is a huge bonus that will boost the productivity efforts of your business.

The Cloud is Secure
In the early years of cloud computing, one of the loudest arguments against the cloud was that it couldn’t be trusted because you’re essentially handing over sensitive data to a third party provider with unproven security protocols. However, with the rise of cloud computing in recent years, the public cloud option has undergone security upgrades by leaps and bounds and the data centers hosting your data have vast resources to commit to the security of your data–resources that SMBs lack. Therefore, today’s cloud options give users the security they need without having to sacrifice flexibility.

When all three of these features are considered, going with the cloud allows businesses to do much more for less. This allows SMBs to better distribute their resources toward profit-making initiates, while enjoying the benefits of a professionally maintained IT infrastructure, without having to pay for an in-house IT staff. To get started with cloud computing for your business, call COMPANYNAME at PHONENUMBER.