Small to medium size businesses are what keep this country moving. Unfortunately, for many of these business owners, budgetary needs force them to make cuts that the mammoth corporations do not have to consider. These budget cuts can often result in reduced security and sub par IT services that in the long run can end up costing the company even more money.
Recent surveys have suggested that many companies end up spending more time and money recovering from a security breech or IT security attacks. This comes as a surprise to many small and mid-size companies who are under the false impression that hackers and other security threats target larger corporations. It has been discovered that companies that have less than 500 employees are actually more likely to be at risk of an attack than a larger corporation. Of course, this becomes a problem when the larger corporation has the resources to maintain higher levels of security at a time when smaller companies are dealing with restricted or in some cases frozen IT budgets.
The benefits of hiring a managed services provider.
With security a real concern for small business owners, many are making the decision to bring on outside providers to address their IT needs. Managed services providers can offer an affordable solution to small business owners who are struggling to manage an internal IT staff. In some cases there isn't even an IT person on staff, which can be just as costly for the small business when they have to bring in a professional on an as needed basis. Considering the money and time spend recovering from a security attack or breech, more business owners are realizing the cost of not having this level of protection is too high to pay. Here we look at how managed services providers can help business owners level the playing field against those who would infiltrate their security systems.
Increased knowledge- Managed services providers are in the business of technology. They have trained staff who are able to prevent security breeches and spot any activity that could be perceived as a threat. Moreover, they have the expertise to stop threats and prevent the loss of sensitive and private information that can lead to costly recovery measures.
Less expensive than in-house IT- Other IT professionals can provide the same security but it will cost much more to the business owner. What many owners are realizing is paying a flat monthly fee for security and other services provided by msp's is actually much more cost effective than paying an internal IT staff or outsourcing based on incident.
Proactive is better than reactive- The biggest benefit of having a quality managed services provider in your corner is the fact that you are acting in a proactive manner to ensure all of your systems are managed properly. This is less expensive and less time consuming than waiting for something bad to happen and then reacting.
Any small business can benefit from the security provided by a managed services provider. They can do so at a fraction of the cost, therefore eliminating the fear and unnecessary cost of trying to recover from a breech in security or attack.
In a struggling economy, business owners look for new ways to reduce their expenses to save money and resources in order to remain competitive. Could managed printing services offer financial and time savings for a small business?
Small business owners are in a good position to save money and benefit most through managed printing services, since they have a lower profit margin compared to their overhead expenses than larger businesses do. When a printer isn't working effectively in a small business environment, one of the owners, managers or employees must spend time on the phone with an IT specialist trying to troubleshoot the cause of the printer or copier malfunction; as well as find a solution to get it up and running again. When this person is tied up for a long period of time, the business loses the money that would have been made during that time period.
What is Managed Printing Services?
Managed Print Service providers (MPS) monitor your printers and copiers actively from a remote location. They can predict where problems may occur and often prevent it from happening. They work with small businesses to implement plans to identify excessive spending in printers, copiers, and supplies, and to increase productivity by setting up a plan for which type of documents go to which printers in your organization.
Managed printing service providers will also make sure you always have the right amount of ink and paper supplies on hand, which means you will no longer have a closet full of supplies that are never used or run out of the paper you need in the middle of a printing project.
Advantages of Managed Printing Services
In addition to the financial savings gained by small business owners utilizing managed printing services, there are additional advantages of convenience and control. As a small business owner, your time is spent operating and managing the daily activities of your business – there is a good chance that you are unaware how much time and money is wasted on printer or copier related activities. Activities like troubleshooting printers that aren't working properly; using double the amount of paper necessary because you haven't learned to use the “print on both sides” option of the printers; and the time spent ordering and processing purchase orders and invoices for toner and paper supplies.
If you upgrade to more efficient and productive printers and copiers, you can also factor in energy efficiency costs of the newer equipment compared to your current, older equipment, and see the cost savings skyrocket.
When you have an MPS provider handling your printing and copying needs, you won't lose one of your key employees (or yourself!) hours on the phone trying to troubleshoot problems – this is most likely your biggest area of savings in both financial resources and time.
The convenience associated with having an expert handling your business printer and copier needs also means no one on your staff needs to worry about ordering supplies. If there are equipment problems or malfunctions, an expert will fix them for you because it is the responsibility of a managed print services provider.
Cost will be inevitably cut with all of those changes listed above when you let the experts handle these things for you. The end result will be an efficient office when you cut expenses on paper, ink or toner, lower your electricity use and improve employee productivity.
You can reduce your overhead expenses with a managed printing services provider, as well as take back some of your time resources and increase productivity.
Email can be more or less important dependent upon the type of business you have. But regardless of how important it is to your business, if you use email, spam, viruses, malware, and internet usage at work are all issues every employer deals with. The implications of not proactively and properly handling this can be costly and damaging.
One of our clients, a local Indianapolis CPA firm, is very dependent upon emails. Because the client also understood the importance of email and the importance of email and web protection, this particular client elected to purchase our Email and Web Protection Service through MX Logic.
This particular client has witnessed the advantage and positive return on its investment already. Our engineers/office received an alert that this particular client’s email had begun spooling. Due to our proactive and remote monitoring services, we also received an alert that this client’s server was no longer online/seeing the internet. We attempted to contact the client via phone realizing the phone lines were down. By being able to contact her via cell, the client confirmed that their T1 line was down (data and phones) so during this 24 hour outage, MX Logic held their incoming email to prevent the messages from bouncing back to the sender (also called spooling). Without this particular service, this client’s email would have been returned to the sender(s) possibly causing more confusion and panic—especially since phone service was interrupted.
Netwise Resource’s solution is perfect for your organization if you’re looking for a month to month email protection service to defend against spam and/or a web protection service to limit bandwidth-intensive internet usage, malware, viewing of inappropriate content, and decreased productivity due to employees surfing the internet. Our solution has easy activation, requires no hardware or software, and includes no activation fees. Our solution is just another form of disaster recovery, but through email. This service has a 30 day money back guarantee so you have nothing to lose.
Contact Mayrena King, Director of Marketing, to receive more information on our Email/Web Protection and Email Archiving Services. 317-475-9519 ext 3348 or email mking@netwiseresources.com
1. A good IT provider will provide you with proactive support and not reactive support
2. A good IT provider will conduct a network assessment for your organization
3. A good IT provider will be able to tell you your cost of downtime so you understand your “Total Cost of Ownership” for indirect and direct IT costs
4. A good IT provider will conduct vendor management-you shouldn’t have to sit on the phone and resolve issues with the internet service provider, copier provider, etc.
5. A good IT provider will know if cloud based services are a fit for you
6. A good IT provider will find ways to make sure you spend less on hardware and large capital expenditures through virtualization and other solutions
7. A good IT provider is concerned about your backup disaster recovery, has a plan in place for you, and has tested it.
8. A good IT provider will keep you abreast of the technologies available to keep you compliant with the law
9. A good IT provider will earn your business every month-it will be just as easy to enter in to an agreement as it is to exit
10.A good IT provider will feel like your trusted IT advisor and will show you potential problems you didn’t even realize you had!
Netwise Resources has over 11 years of experience as a trusted IT advisor for companies all over central Indiana. Our clients focus on their core businesses while we maintain and manage our clients’ systems for optimal performance and guaranteed uptime. We proactively monitor our clients 24x7x365 and give them unlimited maintenance and support at a flat rate! You too can see what your technology can do in the right hands! Click here to read The Top 10 Reasons Why Your Servers Should Be Monitored
Does your organization suffer from “lack of partnership syndrome”?
What is that you ask?
It’s a popular disease among small to medium sized businesses. Businesses depend upon their critical IT systems to conduct business yet these diseased businesses wait to the last possible moment to call on their IT provider. How do you know if your organization carries the disease?
Several symptoms may be present:
Lack of accountability
Unpredictable IT Costs
Chronic IT issues
Downtime Costs
Lack of centralized management for your systems: copiers, internet, phones, IT, etc.
Slow response and resolution time
Security vulnerabilities
Data loss or theft
Compliance uncertainties
Inability to upgrade or invest into innovation because IT is cost prohibitive
The cause of this syndrome stems from the IT service provider. Traditional IT support providers or “break-fix” IT companies benefit when your organization is down or when something in the network is not working properly. The rate to fix your issue is normally astronomical, it may take a few hours before he or she gets to your location, and everything they do is very reactive. You only see the provider when you’re unhappy and that’s no way to create a partnership!
But there is a cure to “lack of partnership syndrome”. There are companies out there that love their IT provider and have a very close partnership with their IT provider. This is because these diseased-free companies work with Managed IT Service Providers or MSP’s. MSP’s proactively monitor and maintain their clients’ networks at a flat rate. MSP’s give their clients unlimited support and maintenance for a flat budgeted rate every month. MSPs also act as solution providers. MSPs are proactive in their approach to their clients networks and don’t just show up when something is wrong. The cure is simple, all you have to do is understand if you are a carrier of the disease and you’ll feel the difference!
For more information on Managed IT Services, contact Mayrena King at mking@netwiseresources.com or call 317-475-9519 ext 3348.
This week’s gripe: Slow Response & Resolution Time
There’s nothing worse than trying to be productive or trying to meet a deadline and you have computer or network issues! There’s nothing worse than having network and computer issues and still having to pay employees for productivity lost. So you can try and fix it yourself, try to have someone within your organization attempt to fix the issue, or call your tech support. Then you run into more issues. Your tech support person is busy putting out other fires in your company or at another company resolving issues. So you wait and remain irritated and unproductive.
This is a common problem with companies that have internal IT staff or work with "break-fix" IT companies. Netwise Resources has a completely different approach and business model.
Let’s imagine this same situation if Netwise Resources were your IT provider.
As soon as you had an issue, you would know to pick up the phone and call our friendly service desk. Or you would know to send our service desk an email. You would receive an immediate reply to your issue with an automated ticket response or someone that always picks up the phone at our service desk. Your issue would be prioritized accordingly and our engineers would begin resolving your issues immediately. In most cases, your issue would be resolved remotely without any of our engineers ever having to leave our offices and come to your site. Cutting out drive time to your office makes resolution time much quicker for you. If our engineers identify that it’s an issue that’s going to take a little longer to resolve, they would establish a work-around resolution for you, such as a loaner computer.
In addition, our engineers would work expediently to resolve your issue because we sign agreements with all of our clients binding us to pre-determined response and resolution thresholds. We report this information to you monthly so that we are always held accountable by our service level agreements.
If you were a Netwise client, you would love contacting us for any and all of your issues because Netwise clients enjoy unlimited maintenance and support.
Netwise Resources, the #1 Indianapolis Provider for IT Managed Services
After hardware costs, software costs, support, maintenance, infrastructure, upgrades, etc., IT can appear to be one expensive and necessary evil. But we’ve got good news. Because your organization can’t be without technology, there are definitely some ways to approach your IT environment in a more cost-effective manner. And there are also some definite ways to approach your IT that aren’t too smart. Lets discuss these smart and “not so smart” approaches in the next paragraphs.
Company A
In an effort to save money, some organizations have a “friend of a friend” handling their IT, leaving Company A very vulnerable. Company A really only calls on him or her when they need something or have a problem. The problem with the organization that calls on the friend of a friend is you can’t guarantee his or her work, this person has all your passwords, sometimes he or she is not available when you need him because he or she has another job, and there are numerous things Company A should be doing to your network on a proactive basis that the “friend of a friend”, I can guarantee, is not doing. It’s only Company A’s precious data, private information, and the employees’ livelihood right?
Company B
Then there are organizations such as Company B that have a full time person on staff handling their IT. Company B is paying their full time IT person a decent salary plus benefits. If the organization is small enough, usually one IT person on staff can handle everything, but if the organization is larger, usually an IT person on staff is swamped in IT issues, putting out fires, and usually unable to resolve everything that needs to be resolved within the organization. Company B’s productivity is down and frustrations are high. Company B spends around $70,000 a year plus benefits to pay one person to fix issues such as printer jams and small computer issues. Because this 70,000 dollar a year senior tech is busy with printer issues, it leaves Company B in the dust as their competition speeds ahead because they strategically plan for technology and how to incorporate it into their business for a more competitive advantage, something the senior tech at Company B just does not have time for. The 70,000 dollar salary plus benefits isn’t the only IT cost to Company B. Company B also has hardware, software, upgrades, renewals and downtime costs.
Company C
Then there’s the organization that has outsourced their IT BUT they are a break-fix company. They operate similarly to the “friend of a friend”. The outsourced IT company does bring somewhat of an advantage: A team of IT professionals usually with useful and valuable experience, degrees, and certifications held to a standard set in place by the organization that should be able to guarantee their work. Less risk than the “friend of a friend”. This organization calls the outsourced IT company when an issue arises, unfortunately the clock starts running when Company C has an issue, they fix the problem, and then Company C receives an invoice billed at $145 an hour. Yikes! The outsourced IT company has no incentive, nor the tools, to serve Company C in a proactive manner so that less problems, occurrences, outages, and downtime exist. The outsourced IT company hopes you have issues so they can come to the rescue!
Company D
Company D has made the smartest move out of all the companies. Company D has outsourced their IT to a Managed Services Provider. The Managed Services provider gives Company D unlimited maintenance, support, upgrades, onsite support, 24x7x365 server and desktop monitoring, help desk, patch management, data backup, reporting, remote support, and more for one low monthly flat rate a month! The annual spend with the Managed Services Provider is well below the price of a full time onsite staff person. Company D has peak performance and a partnering relationship with its IT company. Company D can now budget and plan accordingly for their IT because it’s a flat rate each month. Company D is happy and has peace of mind because all of their IT needs and more are being handled and they are not being “nickel and dimed” for each new request. Company D no longer has to sit on the phone with the internet provider, or phone provider, or the software company, because the Managed Services Provider does it on Company D’s behalf. In addition, Company D is moving right past its competition because the quarterly business reviews that the Managed Services Provider complimentarily provides, allows Company D to strategically plan the organization’s IT goals as well as receive CIO level reporting and recommendations.
Which company are you?
Netwise Resources, the #1 Indianapolis IT Managed Services Provider
Netwise Resources was pleased to recently help a client that encountered an emergency issue with their data backup method.
This client stated that all of a sudden, after only 3 years, their tape drive had stopped working and that it was going to cost thousands of dollars to replace it, along with the continued purchase and hassle of tapes. If this client had opted with purchasing a new tape drive, they also would have had to wait for the hardware to arrive. This was not an ideal solution as they were already several days with out a recent backup.
Fortunately, we had a solution that was perfect for the situation at hand. This client purchased our NetwiseVault backup and disaster recovery solution. The NetwiseVault backup and disaster recovery solution allowed all of this company's data to be backed up, offsite, the same day they ordered the solution!
In addition, the client will receive managed onsite data backup and a NAS device that will virtualize the servers if for any reason their servers fail. This not only allows for data backup, but business continuity. Through business continuity, this client will never have to wait for days or weeks in order to continue operating.
This particular client will be enjoying managed offsite data backup, managed on-site data backup, the elimination of tapes, backup notifications and alerts, an automated service, and business continuity for one low flat rate a month!
2. Data backup tapes get corrupted or damaged, preventing you from restoring the data you need
3. Tapes are inconvenient and require human intervention
4. Manual backup methods are easily forgotten by staff
5. Remote backup software verifies and searches for any corrupt data
6. With remote data backup, the data is NOT on your site and safe from any form of a disaster that could happen to your building/office
7. Remote Data Backup alerts you if there are issues with your backups
8. Remote Data Backup is usually a flat monthly fee and can be cancelled at any time
9. Often, tapes or hard drives are taken home, making the data vulnerable to just about anything!
10. 93% of companies that lost their data for about 10 days closed down their business within one year from the time of the loss; 50% of them closed down their shops immediately.
The Person that Wears too Many Hats in the Organization
Among the many organizations we come in contact with, this scenario is one of the most common!
There's that one person in the office that has a primary role but knows a "little something" about IT. Let's call this person "Bob". "Bob" is the "go-to-person" and first point of resolution for all IT issues. "Bob" does what he can for the organization but is unsure of his actions. In the meantime, "Bob" is frustrated because his primary role is business development. He can't focus on building business for the company because he's putting out IT fires.
This puts the company at a disadvantage. This company's IT network is at risk, the company is having some issues with downtime and lack of productivity and an employee can't focus on business development while he's being pulled in an area that is not in his field of expertise.
Unfortunately, this company is fine with the status quo, but the company should factor in the following:
1. The true cost of loss of productivity and downtime
2. The cost of the loss of potential business while "Bob" is tied up in IT issues
3. The escalated cost of potential problems down the road with servers, workstations, etc due to absence of server and desktop monitoring
4. The HUGE risk of improper backup of data or lack thereof
5. The lack of a true assessment of the current state of the IT environment
6. The risk of malware, spyware, and viruses that lead to complete and total operational failure
7. The additional cost when an IT company finally has to be called because "Bob" can't fix the issue.
Without the insight and experience of an IT company, this company is at a point of disservice and at a competitive disadvantage by utilizing a resource that only knows "enough to be dangerous" about IT.
These companies often face catastrophic events and "pay for it later". Let your employees focus on their primary skill sets and leave IT to the professionals!
As soon as you had an issue, you would know to pick up the phone and call our friendly service desk. Or you would know to send our service desk an email. You would receive an immediate reply to your issue with an automated ticket response or someone that always picks up the phone at our service desk. Your issue would be prioritized accordingly and our engineers would begin resolving your issues immediately. In most cases, your issue would be resolved remotely without any of our engineers ever having to leave our offices and come to your site. Cutting out drive time to your office makes resolution time much quicker for you. If our engineers identify that it’s an issue that’s going to take a little longer to resolve, they would establish a work-around resolution for you, such as a loaner computer. 
In addition, the client will receive managed onsite data backup and a NAS device that will virtualize the servers if for any reason their servers fail. This not only allows for data backup, but business continuity. Through business continuity, this client will never have to wait for days or weeks in order to continue operating.
This puts the company at a disadvantage. This company's IT network is at risk, the company is having some issues with downtime and lack of productivity and an employee can't focus on business development while he's being pulled in an area that is not in his field of expertise.
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