Information Technology Archives - NuTech Services LLC

Apr, 2021

Should IT’s Role Be Expanding in Your Business?

Every business’ goal is to turn enough of a profit, and some businesses are better at it than others. One way that modern businesses can improve their revenue generation is by utilizing technology to cut down on inefficiencies and fuel productivity through collaboration. Today, we’ll take a look at some of the ways that businesses can expand their business through technology.

Communications

Finding the right tools to help you expand your business’ technology profile is important. We’re pretty confident that any business can utilize new communications technologies and it would improve their overall technology profile. Today’s tools include cloud-hosted solutions like a Voice over Internet Protocol telephone system, email, video conferencing, and cutting-edge collaboration apps that integrate all of the above into one productivity-fueling solution.

Some communications platforms are unified, which means that they all work together to give your business the reliable and dynamic communications tools to ensure that the investment is providing fast and strong returns rather than just costing your business money without any boost to efficiency or productivity.

Automation

When looking to expand the role IT plays in your business, the first place you should look is how you can use it to automate some of the more problematic parts of your business. When we say problematic, we mean the parts of your business that don’t necessarily produce any revenue, but need to be completed regardless. Automation lets business owners accomplish more by allowing them to utilize IT to complete tasks that are repetitive, while also gathering data. Some systems will gather data for analysis later, but other solutions that utilize artificial intelligence will merge the benefits by gathering data and using it to streamline the processes that have been scheduled for automation.

Some of the parts of your business that can be improved by utilizing automation include:

Inventory
Security
Supply chain management
Sales and marketing
Customer relationships

…And more.

The use of automation can streamline processes, help create procedures, and help build your business by allowing your people to work in your business instead of on your business.

Security

If there is one part of your business that should be expanding it is its cybersecurity. Not for nothing, but all it takes is one major data issue to completely destroy your customers’ confidence in your business. Not to mention the corruption of your IT if malware or other issues get onto your network. Since nearly half of all cyberattacks are carried out against SMBs, and nearly two-thirds of all SMBs have experienced some type of cyberattack in the past 12 months, it stands to reason that making additional investments in your business’ ability to stave off hackers (and other cretins who are trying to steal your data and infiltrate your network), is a good idea. Some of the best ways to make a coordinated investment in cybersecurity include:

Regular risk assessments
Comprehensive staff training
Penetration testing
Network, server, and website audits
Additional software investments

These actions can help you avoid the following costs:

Theft (money, service, data)
System corruption
Regulatory and compliance fines
Legal fees
Loss of customer confidence
Loss of intellectual property
Damage to reputation

Security has to be a priority for every business. If you are considering expanding your cybersecurity program, procuring the tools you need to automate some of your business’ most repetitive tasks, or gain some of today’s most helpful collaborative tools, contact the IT professionals at NuTech Services today at 810.230.9455.

Mar, 2021

Building a Reliable Remote Workforce with Managed IT Services

Remote work has been a popular topic for a few years, but over the past year, with so many people forced into working from home, a lot has been written about it. Today, we wanted to briefly talk about some of the technology that is suggested for the remote business, and what we can do to help you support remote workers.

What Tools Do You Need for Remote Work?

If your business is going to effectively (and securely) support remote workers, your IT infrastructure needs to include:

Secure, encrypted access to your office network (via a VPN, or Virtual Private Network).
Communication tools, such as Voice over IP, video conferencing, and instant messaging.
Employees need devices at home that can reliably perform the tasks required of them.
Security awareness is still a critical piece, even when working remotely.

What About IT Support?

Heading into last March the prevailing sentiment around the business world was that businesses were better off operating from a brick and mortar location than having a truly remote workforce. The loss of productivity was the major consideration, but there were (and are) questions about how to support a remote workforce; especially one that is effectively BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).

Once the pandemic hit, many businesses, afraid as the realities of the time started to kick in, jumped into the remote workforce pool with both feet. Many of these businesses were not prepared to do so. While it is true that a remote workforce demands that a business leans on the IT, many businesses simply weren’t set up for this eventuality and it hindered their ability to do business.

At NuTech Services, our professional technicians were ready to help businesses transition from on-site to remote and we’ll be here to help transition back when our clients decide it’s time. We prioritize flexible and scalable solutions that promote productivity, operational efficiency, and most of all, security. Without a plan to promote those three ideals, you just have pieces of technology that are constantly in jeopardy of corruption, failure, and misuse.

Our comprehensive support strategy is deployed in three ways. They are:

We Get You the Tools – Not only do we use cutting-edge tools to monitor your existing hardware and remote connections, we also can procure the necessary tools that your business would need to get the most out of its human resources.
We Thoroughly Monitor and Manage – Using those cutting-edge tools, we are able to completely monitor and manage your business’ network and infrastructure, ensuring that if something were to gain access to your network, that it is removed before it becomes an operational problem for your business.
We Follow Through – In our business, we realize there is absolutely no room for error. Our team, that is made up of technicians and business consultants, can help put you in the position to actually fit your IT management and support, to your business’ current needs; and, while keeping an eye on the future IT needs of your business.

Sure, our main purpose is to keep your IT working as intended and eliminate downtime, but we can also provide you with powerful consulting tools, best-in-area technology procurement, and professional installation of IT tools that can absolutely transform your business. If you would like to talk to one of our consultants about getting the IT and the IT support your business needs right now, give us a call today at 810.230.9455.

Nov, 2019

How IT is Driving Innovative Developments

Any healthy market economy relies on innovation. The simple act of making bright ideas even brighter helps boost economic efficiency and growth, creating a higher standard of living. Business processes are being transformed through information technology. Here, let’s look at how some of these shifts are shaping up.

Innovation Technology

Information technology systems are the foundation of the many processes that a lot of businesses rely on. These systems enable you to store data efficiently, putting it to use and interfacing with it collaboratively – but as these systems are so crucial, they must also be properly monitored and maintained.

After all, without its technology, a business that relies on said technology isn’t going to be able to accomplish much.

This has been a driving force behind innovations to technology – boosting reliability, introducing transformative tools, and advancing both business and society at large. However, since this isn’t particularly easy to put into practice, various industry thought leaders have been actively attempting to transform a variety of considerations, including:

Applications
Infrastructure architectures
Service delivery
DevOps
Production operations
Security
Compliance

This has effectively been accomplished by developing solutions to meet assessed needs. As a result, new solutions are being thought up to help expand IT from its role in support to actively promoting key business tasks.

Leveraging Cognitive Computing Investments

Cognitive computing is the processing of business data through a combination of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other powerful computing resources. With these systems, patterns can be recognized, data mined, and language processed far more efficiently than without. With more information, businesses that leverage cognitive computing can see considerable benefits:

Enhanced business agility via quicker decision making
Consistent process scaling to meet operational and budgetary demands
Improved business performance and efficiency

Using these technologies also allows you to support various other aspects of your operations, both internally (filling out your operational structure) and externally (automating customer retention efforts). By making a business more “intelligent,” these investments can provide a competitive advantage, as well as more diverse means of generating revenues.

Smarter Security

A data breach can be catastrophic for a business – and attacks happen far too often today to be ignored. Quite a few tools have been developed to help block out these threats, as well as improve internal data security initiatives.

Of these tools, many leverage AI and machine learning to adapt a cybersecurity policy to better match the threats a business contends with. However, these systems aren’t impervious to threats, which means that business owners need to identify their potential risks, including:

Remote access – With the rise in remote workers and other mobility enhancements that allow data and applications to be accessed from outside the network, the connections that enable this access need to be secured.
IoT – The Internet of Things has seen an explosive growth in popularity, but with the unfortunate side effect of bringing insecure endpoints into your business. You need to have a strategy to minimize the risks they present.
Regulatory requirements – Some businesses and industries have additional rules that they must abide by passed down by the government. You must ensure you are meeting any conditions that apply to you.
Hackers and cybercriminals – While businesses now have access to better tools, so do hackers. This requires you to remain vigilant in your network security.

It is also important to mention that this list is far from comprehensive – there are many more threats out there to resist, avoid, and otherwise defend against. Today’s tools are the most effective way to accomplish this.

To learn more about how you can adopt technology that helps your business succeed, reach out to the IT professionals at NuTech Services.

Jun, 2016

Every Business Owner Must Understand These 4 Fundamentals of IT

It makes no difference how your business’s administrative chain of command is set up. Everyone should have a basic understanding of how your IT works, as well as its related responsibilities and functions. Here are four easy ways that you can educate yourself (and your staff) on how your IT department works, be it internal or outsourced.

Know Who to Contact for Support
You should be aware of who your point of contact is for your IT department. If you don’t, your employees probably don’t, either. Therefore, you need to lead by example and share this information with them in the event of technical difficulties. Doing so allows your team to cooperate with IT and improve operations, so that minor technology issues don’t evolve into major problems that could have a drastic effect on your working operations.

Working with Vendors
Businesses often have several vendors for each of their various hardware and software solutions, which can make dealing with them unnecessarily complicated and frustrating. You should have an understanding of who to contact within these vendors if you’re experiencing an issue with their products. Basically, by being aware of information pertaining to your organization’s relationship with its vendors, you can’t go wrong.

Basic Security Best Practices
Every single one of your employees should understand how to keep your organization’s infrastructure secure. There’s no getting around the importance of data security. Your information is sacred, to the point where your organization can hardly function without the data you collect on a daily basis. Here are three best practices that should be followed to a T:

Employees should use long, complex passwords.
Employees should use two-factor authentication.
Employees should be able to identify potential online scams.

Managing Laptops and Mobile Devices
If you have employees who bring their own devices to the workplace, a trend known as BYOD, then you should be taking responsibility to manage these devices. Mobile devices that haven’t been equipped with a mobile device management solution in accordance with your BYOD policy, could potentially become a liability. There needs to be oversight into how mobile devices access and use your corporate data, and to restrict the flow of data for security reasons.

This may seem like quite a lot to remember, but don’t worry; NuTech Services has your back. Most of the above problems can be solved simply by having an IT technician whom you can rely on. We provide outsourced IT services, including consultation, vendor management, and mobile device management policies, all so your business can function properly without a hitch. For more information, give us a call at 810.230.9455.