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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 a Data Backup Can Be Used, No Disaster Necessary

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Data backup may not directly help you boost your productivity, but it is a core component of any responsible business’ continuity plan. Each year, thousands of businesses that don’t take threats into account are forced to close their doors because they didn’t have a contingency plan in place. For every business that plans for the worst there are two that don’t, either because they see the strategy as too cost prohibitive, or because they just don’t understand the amount of threats that could put their business in the position where they would need to close.

There are several aspects of a backup and recovery strategy that business owners (who do see reason to implement one) have to square away. By breaking the strategy into three core parts, your organization can secure a positive ROI from a backup and recovery system that, with any luck, you’ll never have to use.

Data Backup
Deciding on a backup platform is obviously the first step in the process. There are several strategies a small business can use to cover its assets. They could use cloud storage, network attached storage facilities that use hard disk drives or tape backup drives, or even a manual system where people protect the data by backing it up to a hard drive and then take a copy with them when they leave. No matter what platform you choose to utilize, you have to understand that if you look at your data as an asset, it stands to reason that you would want to protect as much data as you can. At COMPANYNAME, we offer a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery service that utilizes network attached storage that pushes copies to the cloud in real-time. This not only provides the kind of data redundancy every organization needs, it allows our clients to thoroughly plan their data recovery strategies.

Before we go into recovery, we’d be remiss not to mention that some data simply isn’t important. Small businesses often have a lot of data they collect but don’t do anything with, so it just sits on their infrastructure taking up space. Some businesses look to data analytics to cut down on dark data, but for the small business that doesn’t have a backup strategy, it might just be putting the cart before the horse.

Data Recovery
If you are looking for a positive ROI, this is where it begins. A business needs to establish acceptable parameters for the recovery of their data. To do this, an organization is going to have to establish what are known as their recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). Before we elaborate, we should say that if you are in a position where you need to restore a large portion of your data–whether it be because of malware, natural disaster, sabotage, or blatant negligence–you absolutely have to have these plans made (and tested).

The recovery point objective defines how much data your business could reasonably afford to lose in order to be able to sustain operational effectiveness. Recovery time objective is the maximum time you believe you can go without your data before your business fails. Each figure isn’t static throughout your business. Some of your data is more important than other data, of course, and has to be weighted this way. Therefore, some systems that hold more crucial data will have different RPOs and RTOs than less critical systems.

How the System Provides a Calculable ROI
This is where you can put it all together. How do you calculate the return on investment on systems that you hope you will never ever use?

  • Establish your organization’s hourly realized revenue. To do this you take the amount of revenue your organization has taken in over the past year and divide it by the total working hours you and your staff have logged for that time.
  • Figure out how much you would stand to lose both with and without a backup and recovery system in place.
  • Multiply the hourly realized revenue with both scenario-specific figures you’ve calculated in step 2 and take the difference. This number represents the total avoided loss, in dollars.
  • Finally, plug that figure into this formula to measure your backup system’s ROI:

ROI = (Avoided loss – Cost of backup and recovery system x 100%)

Without a disaster hitting your business, you may think that backup and recovery strategies are a waste of time and resources, but the ROI is clear.

If your business is looking for a backup and disaster recovery solution that can seriously save your business in the event of a disaster–something no ROI calculator will ever tell you–call the IT professionals at COMPANYNAME today at PHONENUMBER.

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Business

Is Break-Fix IT Breaking Your Budget?

b2ap3_thumbnail_managed_services_agreement_400.jpg Most modern businesses rely on specific technology solutions to ensure operations can work as intended. This includes servers for data storage, networks for data distribution, and workstations for employee productivity. Of course, you have to wonder if this is wise; after all, what happens when this technology fails?

Break-fix IT used to be the staple for business technology maintenance. Organizations would use their technology solutions until they broke down, and would only utilize IT when it needed to be fixed. At the same time, companies would have to struggle with downtime–any time when technology isn’t working as intended. This can quickly lead to a time sink in which you’re losing out on possible revenue, all while fixing technology issues that could have been prevented in the first place. These big hits to budgets can make operations difficult even after recovering from downtime.

Managed IT services are an option that modern SMBs have in order to bypass the shortcomings of break-fix IT. Instead of only resolving IT issues as they happen, proactive managed IT aims to take preventative measures to keep problems from happening in the first place. This includes most all solutions that are managed and hosted by a third-party provider, with the intention of removing responsibilities from your in-house team. Unlike your in-house team, who may struggle with managing some aspects of your technology, you can rely on a third-party managed service provider to guarantee that your technology gets the attention it needs.

A good comparison would be comparing an automobile to managed IT services. If your car is making weird sounds, like the engine spitting and sputtering, you’ll naturally want to get it checked for major problems. However, due to the cost of vehicle maintenance, you might choose to forego maintenance. After all, your car still runs, so surely the problem can wait a bit. In this case, it’s better to get the problem resolved quickly before a motor problem leaves you stranded on the side of the road, with both a towing fee and the repair costs.

On the other hand, having your own team of mechanics that can repair and maintain your car for a monthly fee is a better investment, as they will perform the tuneups and the maintenance needed to keep your car in good shape. This is what having managed IT services feels like.

Preventative maintenance can help to keep technology solutions from experiencing hardware failure for as long as possible. No technology lasts forever, so the ideal way to minimize the damage done by hardware failure is to plan for it. By implementing preventative solutions like data backup and disaster recovery, you can limit how much damage downtime causes your organization, and you’ll be able to make the transition to new technology much easier.

Does your business use proactive maintenance to mitigate threats to your business? If not, reach out to us at PHONENUMBER.