29
May, 2020
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Chrome Adds Color Coded Tabs and We’re So Thankful

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Google Chrome is adding a cool feature over the next week or so (it may already have been released for you). The next feature is sure to make a big difference for some and will be non-descript for others. Let’s unpack colorful tabs in Google Chrome.

Adding More Organization Into Your Chrome Browser

Admit it, you have a tendency to use too many browser tabs. At any given time, you may have 5-10-20 browser tabs open. If you use more than one screen, it could be more. Way more. Most users use their Chrome browser for so much of your online life that you hardly pay attention. Then you wonder why your PC is running slow. The truth is people use a lot of browser tabs, and they are better off for it. 

Google, knowing their users’ behavior better than most companies has come up with a new feature that will allow you to assign a certain color to a browser tab and then group them together with like-colored tabs. This feature will be rolled out to users in this update. 

The update should be coming this week, but it will hit everyone at different times (Google is deliberate about their updates). You may already have the feature in your Chrome browser. When it does come it will be as a default browser update, and will be a change for all Chrome users. All you will need to do is right-click on tabs, group them together, and assign a color.

Are you a tab-hoarder, or a tab-minimalist? Is this feature going to help you? Leave your comments below and be sure to return to our blog for more great information about technology.

27
May, 2020
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Tip of the Week: Keyboard Shortcuts for Convenient Browsing

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With its all-purpose functionality really coming to the forefront in the office, your Internet browser is likely one of your most used computer programs. Considering that so much of your time is spent using the Internet, we thought it would make sense to share a few shortcuts to make it more efficient for you.

If you want to try them out as you read along, make sure you open a new browser window… we don’t want you leaving this page before you read all of them!

Jump to Address Bar: Ctrl+L

Let’s say that it’s the beginning of your day, so you are checking your email for the first time. Afterwards, you know that you need to go to a particular website. Windows offers a quick shortcut that selects and clears the address bar so you don’t have to even stop typing before you move along. To make the jump, simply press Ctrl+L.

Quickly Add the Dot Com: Ctrl+Enter

Let’s use an easy example for this one, like the official website of the 1996 movie Space Jam. Visiting this website is as easy as typing in “www-dot-spacejam-dot-com,” but this shortcut allows you to just type in “spacejam” instead. Pressing Ctrl+Enter will automatically add the “www-dot” and “dot-com” in for you.

Open a Search in a New Tab: Alt+Enter

Of course, a lot of searches come about as something else is being done online, and that something isn’t always something you can navigate away from. If you’re trying to open a new website up or perform a search in a new tab, pressing Alt+Enter rather than just the latter will open what you typed in a new tab.

These two shortcuts also work together, so pressing Ctrl+Alt+Enter after typing “spacejam” would add the missing domain information and navigate to it in a new tab.

Open Clear Browsing Data: Ctrl+Shift+Delete

Finally, when you’re all done browsing the Space Jam website (or whatever else you may have used these tips to do), you can more conveniently open your option to clear your browsing data.  Pressing Ctrl+Shift+Delete will bring you to the requisite screen for you to press the button.

Before you navigate away from this page, make sure you subscribe to our blog for more useful tips and time-saving best practices!

25
May, 2020
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Three Facets of Security to Focus On

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When it comes to a business’ cybersecurity, there is no magic bullet to solve every problem. No miracle cure, no panacea, no Staples “that was easy” button. Instead, you need to deploy various means of protecting your operations. Let’s discuss how your business’ security needs to be shaped in three different environments: your physical infrastructure, your cybersecurity solutions, and your employees’ security habits.

Physical Security

First on our list is the oldest kind of business security, the (sometimes literal) gun behind the counter that helps to dissuade potential attacks. It is only too easy to overlook the fact that data theft can be as simple as someone taking a hard drive, rather than hacking into it. Of course, we aren’t suggesting that all businesses should have an arsenal at the ready. Instead, technology provides assorted alternatives that should be implemented to deter attempted intrusion.

Maintaining your access controls, installing surveillance, and otherwise keeping a closer account of who is present in your business can all be considered ways to improve this security. This not only helps to keep sensitive materials safe from unauthorized access within your business, it will also help protect your investments and assets if your business is vacant for any length of time.

Cybersecurity

Of course, we can’t neglect to mention your business’ cybersecurity protections. With over one billion malicious programs out there (as of this writing) poised to attack, there are far more threats than you could handle without technological assistance. Make sure that you have this assistance protecting every aspect of your business’ technology:

  • Updates and patches serve to resolve security issues inherent in your software solutions.
  • Spam blockers help to filter incoming messages to stop threats from exploiting your email.
  • Firewalls allow you to secure your Internet connections, and web filters prevent your users from accessing risky or time-wasting websites.
  • Password requirements and multi-factor authentication enable you to keep access to various accounts secure against various threats and social engineering efforts.
  • If work is to be done outside of the office, a virtual private network can help protect your data as you communicate with the office outside of the defenses installed in the workplace’s infrastructure.
  • Turn to an external resource to perform a comprehensive security audit. Not only will they be able to determine your weaknesses, they can help you implement the tools to remediate them.

Security Awareness

Finally, it is extremely important to remember that your biggest vulnerability can easily be your employees themselves, as human beings are the most prone to mistakes and are the easiest to fool out of your business’ operational resources. Make sure that you are training your entire team on the security practices and awareness that everyone involved needs to maintain, continuing via evaluations and repeated education as needed.

Emphasize the importance of certain concerns, like:

  • Password Hygiene
  • Data Security Practices
  • Secure Processes
  • Access Control Standards
  • Social Media Use
  • Conformity to Policies

For assistance with all of this, turn to NuTech Services. We have the solutions to support your security efforts, as well as the rest of your operations. To learn more—or to get started—reach out to our team by calling 810.230.9455.

22
May, 2020
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Managed Services Have Never Been So Beneficial for Businesses Before

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With less than half of 2020 behind us, many of us would already like a re-do of this year. With a global emergency impacting the personal and professional lives of so many, businesses are struggling right now. For these organizations to survive, they will need to get the most out of every business investment. When it comes to their essential technology, we recommend investing in managed IT services.

Why Managed IT Services

COVID-19 has managed to close wide swaths of businesses and organizations as people try to stem its spread by avoiding as much contact with others as possible. Any small business owner would understandably be hesitant to make any large shifts in their operations, but it also needs to be understood that the shift to managed services can help relieve many of the challenges that businesses are currently facing—as well as those that may pop up afterwards.

Businesses Can’t Operate if Their Employees Aren’t There

While many businesses truly need to have their employees physically present to function, there are a great many that feasibly could operate on a primarily remote basis, provided they had the right tools. This approach would work well for those who are labelled essential right now, as it could help minimize the number of people present at the workplace and drastically improve social distancing efforts.

By working with a managed service provider, businesses have a resource to help them reach the safest working conditions for their teams. Any personnel who don’t explicitly need to be onsite could be provided the means to remote in, with these solutions managed by the provider for maximum uptime.

Proper Support Services Introduce Additional Risks

That leads us into the next benefit that managed services offer: the support that a managed service provider delivers is primarily using remote monitoring and management tools. This means that if an issue should arise for one of your remote team members, there is a very good chance it can be resolved without either your users or the technician even getting up from their seat.

Managed services will even help you avoid these kinds of issues in the first place with the same remote capabilities. By proactively monitoring for threats and other problems, your provider can spot many of them before they realize, taking the steps to prevent your employees from having any difficulties. As an MSP, NuTech Services does this kind of thing every day, and while we can’t catch everything, you can be sure that we will catch the vast majority.

Support Services are Expensive, Especially Now

You may be thinking: so, you’re proposing that I make another investment into managed services when my business is clearly going to experience some tough times?

In some ways, yes, but in the given context, consider it more of insurance instead of an investment.

Let’s say you continue to use the same IT services that you always have, essentially paying per incident to keep your business operational. Doing so gives you no consistency, and therefore is impossible to predict and budget for with any accuracy.

Managed services take a different approach: extensive coverage under an all-encompassing subscription fee. Out of fairness, we should mention that there may be an occasional out-of-scope need, potentially creating the need to adjust these fees slightly. Accepting this relatively rare circumstance, working with an MSP allows a business to accurately budget for their information technology services.

There are many more reasons that a business should strongly consider the services of a managed service provider, especially in these challenging and disconcerting times. If you have any more questions to ask, we are here for you. Reach out to us at 810.230.9455.

20
May, 2020
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Tip of the Week: What Happens when a Laptop is Left Plugged In?

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Laptops have proven to be one of the more useful gadgets for businesses and business users. Not only do they hold their own in performance against a desktop, their portability is another consideration that cannot be ignored. However, this portability means that they are at least somewhat reliant on their battery, which begs the question: can they be left plugged in otherwise?

For this week’s tip, we’ll dig into this exact question.

How Working from Home Has Impacted the Use of Mobile Devices

Here’s the thing: with stay-at-home orders and other measures being put into place across the country, a lot of people aren’t as mobile as they once were. As a result, the mobile devices that would travel with them back and forth to the office have effectively become temporary desktops in their homes… and as such, are spending more time plugged in than not.

So, Is This a Problem?

That depends on a variety of circumstances, the first of which being the age of your device. Not all that long ago, leaving your laptop plugged in could overload and damage the battery (which was not a good thing by any means). Today’s batteries, made of either a lithium-polymer or lithium-ion, won’t behave that way. Instead, once a device’s battery reaches full power, any additional power brought in will instead power the laptop itself.

However, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t some concerns to doing this.

Any laptop user has likely noticed that, after their device has been charging for so long, the bottom will get hot. While this is to be expected, too high heat for too long can damage the device, impacting the battery’s performance. One study, performed by Battery University, indicated that leaving a laptop that’s fully charged plugged in at different temperatures can bring down the battery’s capacity over time.

Therefore, to answer whether it is safe to always leave your laptop plugged in, the verdict is now yes… so long as it is in a cool and well-ventilated area. Otherwise, you’re apt to run into problems.

NuTech Services is here to offer you other useful advice for managing your technology properly, even while your team is working remotely. To learn more about the services and solutions we can provide, reach out to us at NuTech Services.

18
May, 2020
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How to Move to the Cloud in a Hurry

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The cloud has long demonstrated its many benefits to a business’ operations, but perhaps never so much as it has now. With so many people remaining in their homes, the only way that any business (essential or not) can get anything done is to adjust to remote operations—something the cloud is especially useful in. If ever there was a time to take advantage of the cloud’s capabilities, it would be now.

After all, by leveraging the cloud, a company can take advantage of up-to-date and reliable solutions and resources with no added maintenance needs, and the cloud’s flexibility is extremely well-known. Whether your employees are working in the office or from home, the cloud allows them to access and collaborate upon the same documents with the same resources.

Here, we’ll go over the steps you need to take to adopt these capabilities in a hurry, with the help of an MSP like NuTech Services.

Planning and Identifying Priorities

Unfortunately, the cloud implementation process typically isn’t known for its speed, as there are many considerations that must go into its planning. If certain processes aren’t followed, steps are missed, and the entire thing can be delayed. Therefore, it is best to have a resource by your side to assist you through the process.

This means that it only becomes more crucial that your implementation is well-thought-out and planned, starting with identifying and prioritizing what is to be moved. Take the time to consider this and make these calls with the help of your technology resource.

Our advice: start with your most important transitions (naturally) and that which will be simplest to migrate, and then focus on the remaining workloads afterwards. Working in phases like this make it more important to lean on a trusted resource for assistance, as it will make it more complicated to do.

There also needs to be a dedicated effort into training a staff to prepare them for the capabilities that cloud solutions deliver and the complications that may arise.

NuTech Services can help deliver all of this, and so much more. Talk to us about it by calling 810.230.9455.

15
May, 2020
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Nine Tools Every Business Should Have Invested in Today

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Over time, technology has developed to make processes more efficient and more productive for businesses of any size, offering greater benefits to those that put them to use. Let’s go over three critical needs that businesses have, and three technologies that can serve each.

Business Communications

With so much relying today on shared information and collaboration, the capability to communicate internally and externally is something that any business needs to have. Small businesses especially have greater access to the tools that can provide this capability, such as: 

  • VoIP – A Voice over Internet Protocol solution is a great way for a business to acquire comprehensive phone services and features for a much more sustainable cost that the traditional means of telephone services.
  • Messaging – Messaging can take many forms, from email to instant messages, and plays a vital role in keeping a business in touch with its various internal parts and with other entities outside of it.
  • Cloud collaboration – Cloud technology can provide a variety of business utilities, including the collaborative benefits of sharing documents and cooperatively working on them in real-time.

Productivity

Most businesses would rank the ability to produce more in less time as their ultimate goal, making solutions that facilitate this extremely useful for them to adopt. If this is one of your priorities, consider the following:

  • Cloud storage and applications – This benefit of the cloud allows your employees to access the documents, data, and other cloud-based tools from anywhere they can access the Internet, freeing them to be productive as they operate remotely.
  • Remote access – If you have elected to maintain an on-site infrastructure, remote access tools can give your employees remote access to the hardware they need to stay productive. 
  • Automation – Rather than relying on your employees to handle each step of your processes, automation enables your employees to focus on those aspects that require the human touch, while rote steps are handled much more efficiently by your solutions. As a result, more can be accomplished in less time.

Security

We’ve mentioned the operational aspects of how technology can assist your business, but perhaps one of the biggest benefits is how helpful IT can be in protecting your business from various threats. Here is just a small sample of what can be accomplished:

  • Access management – Both your infrastructure and the data it holds are valuable, so the fact that the right IT solutions can prevent unauthorized parties from accessing either is a big benefit to any size of business’ continuity.
  • Password management – While best practices dictate that users have a different password to protect each account, this advice is often undermined by the number of accounts that modern users have. Using a password management solution can help prevent this from impacting your business.
  • Firewall and antivirus – While your users need to be able to spot potential threats, it is advisable that you support them by implementing firewall and antivirus to prevent most threats from reaching them at all.

Remember, this has just been a brief list. NuTech Services can help you put technology into place to help you overcome a great many more of your challenges. To learn more, call us at 810.230.9455 today!

13
May, 2020
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Tip of the Week: Three Simple Measures for More Productive Email

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Email is a great tool for businesses to use, but if mismanaged, it can quickly become a major time sink. That’s why we wanted to go over a few ways that you can use your email solution to boost your overall productivity (rather than squander it) in the form of some handy tips.

#1: Interact with it less.

As we established from the very start, email can very rapidly shift from an asset to a considerable time commitment, often multiple times throughout the workday. If possible, avoid getting drawn in by reducing the total amount of time you spend in your mailbox. There are a few ways to accomplish this:

#2: Organize yourself, by organizing it.

Without the proper maintenance, your inbox can quickly become bogged down with messages and make it impossible to find important messages later. Therefore, it is useful to add additional rules and features to your email client, such as:

  • When you’re dealing with a ton of emails, it can be annoying to have to bounce back to your inbox each time you delete, move, or act on one of your incoming messages. Fortunately, there is a way to mitigate this issue through a simple change in your settings.
    • In Gmail, there is a feature called Auto Advance. With it activated, deleting, moving, or archiving a message will no longer send you back to your inbox, and will instead move you to your next message. You can also activate the Send & Archive button, which will give you the option to do both things in one click.
    • When using Outlook, you can change your settings to also advance you to your next message after acting upon its predecessor. Call up your Options (under the File menu option) and select Mail. On that page, you’ll find a section labelled Other, and the specification to complete an action “After moving or deleting an open item.” Select open the next item from the dropdown.
  • Whether you’re dealing with communications referencing different projects or simply receive many kinds of correspondence, it can be difficult to keep them all straight. Sorting these messages out automatically can save quite a bit of time and frustration.
    • In Gmail, you can create Labels, which effectively help you manage different emails from different senders or that reference different topics. By creating Filters via the drop-down option in the Search bar, you can also set certain emails to have these labels applied based on preset criteria. These can even be used to sort through different email addresses you receive in the Gmail client.
    • Outlook also offers a similar function with its capability to create Folders and generate Rules to direct certain messages to them automatically, once again. When an existing inbox message is right-clicked, suggested rules will display, along with the opportunity to create one or to manage the ones you have already created.

#3: Prepare Ahead of Time

We all have those messages that we find ourselves sending time and time again, with minimal details changed between them. Shave the time you spend drafting these messages down by creating a template to start off with.

  • In Gmail, as your message composer is open, click the triple-dot menu at the bottom and navigate to Templates. From there, you have the option to either insert a template you have already created or save what you have drafted as a new template to use later. If you no longer need a template, you can also delete it from this menu.
  • In Outlook, you can create a new template from a message by navigating to File and Save As, then switching the file type to Outlook Template. To use them, select New Items as you are drafting your email and from there, More Items and then Choose Form. From there, select User Templates in File System in the Look In box. Find your template, and select Open.

What other ways do you know to speed up your use of your email? Share them in the comments! For more handy tips, make sure you subscribe to our blog.

11
May, 2020
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How to Safely Use Wireless Internet to Work from Home

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While remote work has gained an understandable boost in popularity, many business owners and technology specialists may still be concerned about how secure the Wi-Fi connections that workers are using in the home are. To waylay those fears, you need to be sure that your employees are using their networks as securely as they can.

To help, we’ll be going over a few best practices that you and your team can implement to improve the security of your remote work when using a wireless connection.

Password Best Practices are a Must

Whether at home or in the office, everyone who works within your business needs to subscribe to good password standards. For instance:

  • Don’t rely on easy-to-guess passwords, passwords that rely on predictable patterns, or other passwords that might be found on “insecure password” summaries.
  • Use a passphrase, or a combination of unrelated, randomly chosen words, instead of a password. Not only are these more secure, they are often easy to remember.
  • Update your passwords regularly, including your network access password. Don’t give out the password to your network if you can help it.

Optimize and Update

While many are in the habit of postponing updates until the performance of their tools begins to suffer, remote access requires the use of secure and effective solutions. 

Here are a few tips:

  • Each employee needs to have a sufficiently secure suite of solutions to protect the devices they are using, as well as their network as a whole. This should include a firewall, antivirus, and a virtual private network (VPN) connection.
  • Each employee should also take additional steps to protect their solutions, such as adjusting and updating their networking hardware and changing the SSID it is known by.
  • Furthermore, all devices themselves should have the latest security updates and patches installed.

Making sure that your entire team is aware of these guidelines–and abides by them–is crucial to your security, regardless of whether they are operating in-house or remotely. For more assistance with your business’ technology and the security that protects it, reach out to NuTech Services by calling 810.230.9455.

8
May, 2020
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The State of the Internet in a Pandemic

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Millions of Americans are suddenly working from home. Students are now learning online. We’re all surviving the quarantine by binge watching our favorite shows on Netflix and Zooming with our friends and family. How does this bode for the Internet, and security in general? Let’s discuss some recent findings.

A Look at the Numbers

Before the pandemic hit, it was believed that roughly 5.2 percent of Americans worked out of their home. That’s about 8 million people, and that number is fairly recent, from 2017. By the end of 2019, we can estimate it was maybe between 5.5 percent to 6 percent.

We can simplify this and say one out of every 20 American workers worked from home before the pandemic.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only a mere 29% of Americans can actually work from home. That takes into consideration jobs that simply require a person to be at the workplace, like many in the food industry, delivery, construction and many more.

At the time of writing this, I have yet to find solid statistics for the number of Americans working from home right now, but there is a general consensus that it’s somewhere around one in five to one in three. 

That falls right in line with what the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows, and we’re talking about the whole of the United States – things are going to feel different in different states and different areas.

How is the Internet Holding Up?

Back on topic, up to a third of all workers are now doing their jobs from home, plus kids of all ages are taking classes and doing their homework online, on top of the normal traffic that we see everyday. I’m talking about Netflix and other streaming services, online video games, YouTube and social media; all of these services are seeing a huge swing in traffic as more people are stuck at home.

Netflix’s usage, which is normally about 15% of all global Internet traffic, has hit all-time highs, and ISPs are seeing record-breaking amounts of Internet traffic all in all. Thankfully, many ISPs and mobile carriers have loosened or temporarily lifted data caps that would have otherwise caused massive expenses for users trying to work from home (Interestingly, these data caps were supposedly in place to ensure the service functions well. It turns out that in general, the service can still work as intended without them. Let’s hope service providers don’t revert back to the old ways after all this is over).

All that said, it’s not perfect for everyone. Rural users with limited access to broadband are still struggling, and in larger, more populated areas where the infrastructure might be a little older have been bumping into frustrating downtime. Still, all in all, a large part of our workforce is able to get things done effectively while maintaining quarantine, and that’s huge.

Cybersecurity is More Important Than Ever

Here’s the thing; being able to stay in business and keep your customers happy and your employees safe during this trying time is a big deal. That said, you can’t do all of that without also understanding the additional risks you might be opening up to. This isn’t meant to sound like doom and gloom – I want businesses to survive and strive. I want to hear success stories. I want business owners coming out of this with a new perspective on how they operate their business, trust their employees, and bolster their bottom line.

This could be a renaissance for the modern office, shifting the paradigm to normalize a remote workforce. Suddenly, you have fewer expenses, happier employees, and everyone can wear comfy pants more often. Or, maybe we’ll all decide we miss working together in the office so much and never look back. Either way, I digress…

Your business might not be able to see how this all turns out if you don’t secure all those new endpoints. Everyone who is working from home on a personal device just opened up a new weakness in your IT’s armor, especially if you aren’t providing the proper means of accessing company data and applications.

Ensuring that your users are able to work securely is going to be critical, because the last thing you need to deal with is additional downtime or data breaches.

NuTech Services can help review your needs and provide the right solutions to ensure your remote workforce can effectively do their jobs without risking your data. If you need help or advice, give us a call at 810.230.9455 to get started.

6
May, 2020
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Tip of the Week: Stay Positive When Disaster Strikes

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In uncertain times, one of the most important things for any business to do is to stay the course—albeit in an adjusted fashion. To help, we’ve put together a few key practices to work positively to achieve this end.

Involve Your Team

In a crisis event, you need to have your team at your side (even if they must physically stay home) and supporting you. Here are a few ways to encourage this:

  • Keep your team in the loop. Make sure that everyone has the information that they should, as withholding as much as possible will only distract from the goals you are trying to accomplish and make effective communications more difficult. Of course, don’t share information that they shouldn’t hear.
  • Set the tone. As much as you can, maintain control of the situation at hand and make sure everything that you need to complete is still completed. Your employees will probably follow your example, making progress and recovery much simpler.
  • Trust who you’ve hired. There is a reason that you haven’t fired your employees: they can contribute to the business. Allow them to make these contributions, rather than taking on too much yourself.

Evaluate the Situation and Adjust

Of course, a disaster is going to require some deviation from your standard operating procedures. Considering this, you need to be prepared to do a few things:

  • Take stock of your situation. Try to get a comprehensive understanding of how things have been impacted by the disaster, and what is likely to happen as a result. Once you do this, you will be more prepared to shift your strategy as need be.
  • Make the hard calls ahead of time. As you are anticipating the future, figure out what you will need to do to potentially deal with your predicted scenario. Start with the smaller stuff, like how your business hours might be influenced, and move on to the major ones, like how long of a shutdown your business could survive.
  • Adjust to continue operations. Use the technologies available today to figure out alternative methods of completing your usual workflows. Give remote work a try, or open an online store to sell merchandise.

Keep Your Chin Up

Finally, it is important that you and your team maintain a healthy frame of mind as you make these adjustments, never mind deal with a disaster’s other ramifications.

  • Find some normal. Keep yourself grounded and thinking clearly by finding something that helps you disconnect from the influence of a disaster. This can be something as simple as a new hobby, fostering an animal in need, anything that keeps you occupied and engaged.
  • Help. If you have any free time, spend it doing something that can help someone else, even if it’s just writing a card. Even the smallest gesture can make a big difference.
  • Stay informed via reliable sources. With the low barrier for entry that today’s technology provides, it is too easy to find and share incorrect and inflammatory information out there, not to mention opportunistic scams. Make sure you only trust news sources with a lengthy and proven history of reliability… even if it doesn’t make you feel better, at least you’ll know the information is trustworthy.

A big part of what NuTech Services does as a managed service provider is to help make sure that our clients are able to use the tools we give them to make it through scenarios like this. Call 810.230.9455 today to learn more about how we can help, and make sure you are staying safe.

4
May, 2020
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Six Things You Need from Your IT Service Provider Right Now

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While managed services have made more sense for businesses to utilize for some time now, current events have made it even more apparent that this model of IT support is the only feasible option for businesses going forward. However, it has also never been clearer that you need to be selective in who you choose to provide this support.

To help you out, we wanted to go over a few of an MSP’s capabilities, particularly the ones that will assist your business the most during tough times.

Fast Response Times

In this (or any) business disaster, downtime is the enemy. If there is some technical issue that is preventing work from being done efficiently, your business is going to feel the ramifications. Depending on how severe the downtime is, it could impact the likelihood of your business lasting in the long-term. 

Therefore, you need a provider who can return your IT to an acceptable standard of working order as quickly as possible should something happen to it. This means that you need a provider that guarantees that they will respond within a given timeframe and abides by that guarantee.

Disaster Recovery

While many descriptions of disaster recovery focus on disasters like data loss or infrastructure damage, there is no denying that a global pandemic and widespread stay-at-home orders could result in substantial business interruptions. Determine if your IT provider has contingency measures that enable your business to shorten these interruptions as much as possible so that you can resume your operations to an acceptable degree as dictated by the disaster. 

What solutions need to be prepared ahead of time, and what processes will be put in place to mitigate the impacts of a disaster? These are all considerations that your IT provider needs to make and act upon on your behalf.

Employee Support

Many employees are currently finding themselves stuck at home (or reluctant to spend time in a relatively crowded office). With the remote capabilities that are available today, this doesn’t mean that they can’t accomplish things for your business, just as it doesn’t mean that they are left on their own to deal with issues.

While your employees work from home, an MSP can still attend to their IT issues and concerns using the same remote access tools they would in the office setting. As a result, your employees can maintain similar levels of productivity while working remotely. 

Proactive Maintenance

While we’re on the topic, why allow your employees to experience issues at all as they work in what is already a different situation for them? With an MSP providing proactive maintenance for your IT infrastructure and solutions, the likelihood of your processes being interrupted decreases sharply. Many potential obstacles can be nipped in the bud while an MSP is keeping watch.

Budget Planning

Finally, we come to what every business is concerned about right now: their finances. Granted, most of every business’ financial projections have been thrown completely out of whack because of this situation, but even under ideal circumstances there is just no accounting for costly technology issues before they happen. With managed services, budgeting for your IT support—and making any necessary adjustments to that budget—is a much simpler prospect. With inclusive services priced on a predictable scale, NuTech Services ensures that setting up IT services that your business can afford throughout the year is possible. 

The Result: (Relative) Peace of Mind

The fact of the matter is this: you have a lot to worry about right now. If your IT provider or their services are currently on that list, they shouldn’t be. Working with an MSP like NuTech Services allows you to focus on the operations of your business, without worrying about what is going on behind the scenes. Take a major source of stress off your plate by enlisting our services to help you get through the crisis at hand, and to better operations beyond that.

While it is a challenging time for any business to consider making any kind of fundamental changes, a switch to managed IT services is the one to consider. Let NuTech Services help your business. Give us a call at 810.230.9455 to discuss your options.

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May, 2020
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Keep Your Business Going with Strong Continuity Planning

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Much is made about business continuity planning, but there is a knowledge deficit about what exactly business continuity planning entails. Today, we will talk about the basics of the business continuity plan (BCP) and how today’s most successful businesses go about reading their contingency plans. 

A BCP is a plan that will be enacted in any situation that causes the business’ operation to be interrupted. This could be as simple as a deleted file, but it could also be enacted in situations where the health of the business is in grave danger. Having a comprehensive BCP in place helps eliminate the confusion that could further hurt your business when the going gets rough. 

What Should Your Plan Include?

In most cases, people would consider that a BCP is for major, business-killing events. As we mentioned before, however, it’s just not so. The BCP has to be thought out, implemented, and tested regularly to ensure that when operations are interrupted, whether by broken hardware or terrorist attack, that there is a plan in place to get the business back up and running profitably as soon as possible. As a result every situation that could threaten your business’ operational integrity needs to be planned for, even if the downtime you experience is measured in minutes rather than hours or days.

Here are some important elements your business continuity plan should include:

  • Organizational lists – A list of names, addresses, and contact information of people who have access to the continuity plan. This includes making up primary and secondary contact lists for all affected areas of your business. 
  • Staff responsibilities – Each primary and secondary contact will have a set of responsibilities that they need to carry out.
  • Any off-site recovery locations – You’ll need to include the address, equipment inventory, and any other relevant information.
  • Your action plan – This is an in-depth process for returning every element of your business to satisfactory functionality. You need plans for the first hour, the first day, the first week, and for long-term disruption.
  • Primary and alternate suppliers – This is a list of all your current and backup suppliers. Vendors typically play a big role in returning your business to normal. 
  • Customer data – You’ll need a process to inform clients that have personal, financial, or other sensitive information stored with you. This plan will go a long way toward helping you retain your clientele once continuity is restored. 
  • All relevant documentation and insurance policy information – Keeping accurate records will help the insurance process if a claim needs to be filed. 
  • Technology inventory – What technology requirements does your company need in order to retain continuity? Here you will want to create contingencies for remote work, failover, and more. 
  • Data redundancy – You will need to identify the details of your data backup system to ensure that all of your digital assets are backed up and can quickly be restored. 

This may be a basic list of what every business should have in their BCP, businesses with more moving parts will definitely need to have more specific and overarching continuity plans. It is important that no matter how large or small your organization is, that you consistently revisit the plan to update it as necessary. Typically, if a business carries out a BCP autif twice every year, their plan will work the way it was intended to work. Keeping on top of important changes to your business will make this process much simpler and less time consuming. 

Additionally, you will definitely want to test the new parts (and the ones that need it) as much as you can to get a good read on how your business would react if they were ever to enact their BCP in earnest. Ensuring your backup system is working as intended and making sure you have a complete inventory of your hardware and software needs are two critical aspects of a well-implemented plan. 

Operational downtime can happen in any part of your business. It can happen as a result of faulty IT, interruptions in your supply chain, or situations where your human resources are unavailable. Call us today at 810.230.9455 to help you put together a business continuity plan that will keep you in the game even when the chips are down.