IT Services Archives - Page 2 of 2

Aug, 2018

Why It’s Great that Managed Services are Managed

One of the key benefits of managed IT services is right in the title. It’s managed, meaning that you don’t have to worry about maintaining or configuring your systems. Many small businesses see these kinds of advertisements out in the world but don’t necessarily understand what services are being marketed to them. We’ll take a deep dive into what you can expect from “managed” services for your organization.

Defining Managed Services
Managed services are any services your organization takes advantage of that aren’t managed directly by your company. Perhaps the best example is comparing it to the way the average consumer uses their email. Let’s say you use Gmail as your preferred email service for personal use. Do you manage the mail server running Gmail? Probably not, making the average Gmail user a patron of managed services. If you think about it in this sense, any service that your organization doesn’t manage on its own could be considered a managed service.

In the case of managed IT services, the term “managed” means anything that’s not hosted on your infrastructure or maintained by your on-site employees. This can be anything from cloud-based data storage and web applications to entirely hosted hardware infrastructures that are accessed virtually through the cloud. If you can think it, you can build it–the technology infrastructure of your dreams, without all of the frustration of managing and maintaining it on your own.

The rise of managed IT services has its roots in break-fix IT, where businesses would take their technology to a specialist in order to get issues resolved. This approach meant that they didn’t need employees to maintain the technology on-site, but it also came at a steep cost. Break-fix IT companies would take advantage of businesses that came to them in this fashion, taking care of immediate problems without taking measures for the long term. This meant that businesses would often experience even more issues without addressing the overarching problem, leading to wasted dollars and wasted time.

Now, back to the “managed” part. When a business isn’t managing its own IT, they don’t have to worry about these issues because they are being addressed by a company that A.) Knows how to take care of technology, B.) Takes proactive measures to ensure issues don’t reoccur, and most important of all, C.) Can save your business precious time and resources that can be better spent on other tasks. Imagine having enough time to invest in new outreach initiatives for potential clients, or finally having enough in your budget to not only invest in new technology solutions but implement great ways to increase your bottom line.

NuTech Services specializes in providing small businesses with the managed services they need to stay competitive with larger organizations. Managed services often come at a better price point than hiring an entire internal IT department, making it an attractive option for both businesses that don’t have resources to maintain an on-site infrastructure and those that have enough of a staff to manage one, but not enough to maintain it properly. We can either supplement your current help or function entirely as an outsourced IT provider. All you have to do is reach out and ask what we can do for your business.

To learn more about the managed IT business model, reach out to us at 810.230.9455.

Apr, 2018

How to Properly Assess Your Technology Needs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once these steps are completed, you should be much more prepared to make a decision concerning your technology. Need some more help? NuTech Services is here with the expertise to assist you in assessing your IT. Give us a call at 810.230.9455 for more information.

Jul, 2017

Is Your IT Holding Up Its End Of The Bargain?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are just a small number of the issues you have to be able to trust your IT Services provider to prioritize for your business. If you are looking for a comprehensive partner to protect your business from IT-related downtime, call the certified professional as NuTech Services today at 810.230.9455.

Mar, 2017

Here’s a Cost-Effective Alternative to Onboarding Additional IT Staff

An internal IT department serves two primary purposes for businesses. The first is to keep an eye on your technology problems and resolve them. The second is to plan for the future and implement new strategies that will help your organization function more effectively. The problem for the average small business is that their IT department often doesn’t have the luxury of performing both of these tasks.

The root of the problem is that most IT departments are too busy dealing with technology support issues and requests from employees to innovate. Eventually, this lack of innovation could cost your business money.

Do You Know What You’re Paying Your IT Department For?
By definition, your IT department is supposed to plan methods for your business to improve its infrastructure through any means necessary. On the side, they are supposed to help your organization by providing technical support for your assets. By adhering to this model, your IT department should be able to find ways to improve your technology infrastructure, while providing technical assistance for those who need it. The problem is that, as technology becomes more complicated, the help demanded by employees increases.

While it might seem ideal to approach IT support with an internal IT department, it rarely works out. IT departments just don’t have as much time as they need to really work toward improving anything. Often times, these issues are either recurring or resolved simply by rebooting the system, which is a waste of your IT department’s time.

Is Your IT Department Taking Your Company Nowhere?
While your IT department struggles to keep up, your team will naturally need to make forward progress. However, when all they do is respond to problems without making progress in order to prevent them, it’s easy to overlook the fact that many of these problems can be prevented in the future with a little innovation in the present. Plus, when routine maintenance is foregone for the sake of solving short-term problems, you’ll lose out in the long-term due to decreased performance and security issues.

As you can see (perhaps even from your own experience), an in-house IT department is often more distracted by problems that aren’t even theirs to resolve, which pulls them away from work that could make your business better. As a result, many organizations seek to outsource the IT work of their IT department’s in order to make up lost time. This can include innovation, but more often than not, you’ll find that outsourcing routine IT tasks and technology support to be helpful to your company’s overall goals.

After all, your technicians were hired to innovate, so why not give them the opportunity to do so?

To learn more about outsourced IT, reach out to NuTech Services. We can provide a help desk, network audits, and so many more valuable IT services that will help your organization improve efficiency. Call us today at 810.230.9455.

Jan, 2017

Explaining Managed IT to Busy Business Owners

As a business, you focus on providing a specific good or service to your area. This means spending a considerable amount of time trying to make your organization the go-to SMB for that particular service. All organizations specialize in a certain craft, but sometimes their skills may fall short of their needs in areas that lay outside this expertise. Outsourcing is a simple way for businesses to leverage skills that aren’t part of their expertise without taking the time to learn the skill themselves, and it’s an invaluable part of any business owner’s strategy.

Let’s use managed IT services as an example. While enterprises might have the budget and workforce to accommodate managing on-site networks and hardware, it’s unlikely that the SMB does as well. Technology maintenance requires careful attention to detail, which can only be offered by trained professionals who understand the importance of their task. IT maintenance and management isn’t something that can be learned overnight.

While the benefits are significant, the major roadblock for organizations isn’t implementing a new IT management model; rather, it’s their limited budget. They struggle to resolve problems with their IT systems without breaking their budget, and the typical break-fix IT company isn’t devoted to saving them any cash on technology repair. Instead, a managed service provider tries to take proactive measures to prevent issues from happening in the first place.

Comparing the two solutions side by side gives more than enough reason to forsake break-fix IT services. If you can prevent problems from happening in the first place, why wouldn’t you? When a server or workstation breaks down, countless files and hours of productivity are lost, making recovery difficult, if not impossible.

Managed IT allows for fixed monthly payments, taking the unpredictability out of managing technology. Unlike break-fix IT, which capitalizes on your business’s technology breaking down, managed IT services aim to prevent this from happening in the first place; saving your business money in the long run. You’ll find that when you experience minimal trouble with your IT, the possibilities are quite literally endless. You can invest more time and money into your business’s other aspects.

To learn more about managed IT services, reach out to us at 810.230.9455.

Aug, 2016

It Pays to Outsource Your IT

Technology can be fickle at times. When it’s not working properly, it can hold your business back from reaching its maximum potential. Therefore, in order to maximize your bottom line, it becomes common sense to ensure that your technology is in proper working order at all times. The problem lies in the fact that you may not necessarily specialize in technology management, and don’t have the time or budget to perform maintenance yourself. What’s the SMB to do?

In the past, break-fix IT services allowed users to get the technical support they needed, but at a steep cost. IT companies would tell the user what was wrong with the technology, and offer a price for what it would take to fix it. By nature, this type of IT maintenance is designed to thrive off of the user’s technology failing to work properly. Therefore, from a break-fix IT company’s point of view, there’s no real reason to put preventative measures in place that would save the user money in the long run.

In stark contrast, managed IT services do the exact opposite of their break-fix counterpart, and that’s to save businesses money by preventing issues from developing into costly and downtime-causing problems. This helps organizations keep their IT budgets intact, even if they don’t have a dedicated in-house IT department. Preventative maintenance detects small issues and resolves them in a timely manner, preventing them from becoming major problems.

Here are some examples of effective managed service offerings that can save SMBs money in the long run:

Server Hosting
Your server units are the hardware responsible for the safe storage and distribution of your organization’s digital assets. Therefore, it makes sense that you would want to guarantee that they’re being cared for properly. The problem here is that server maintenance and hosting requires a specific skillset that only a professional technician can provide, and that the SMB typically has a limited IT budget that doesn’t necessarily accommodate hiring new staff members for this purpose. This is often why organizations outsource this responsibility to a managed service provider that can guarantee consistent uptime and the prolonged health of server units.

Network Security
If your business doesn’t know the difference between viruses, malware, trojans, phishing scams, and other common threats, it’s a good idea to have a trained security professional on-hand to manage your network and endpoints. Businesses can outsource the responsibility of maintaining and managing solutions like firewalls, antivirus, spam-blocking, and content-filtering components, that are capable of mitigating threats and limiting exposure to dangerous situations.

Remote Maintenance and Management
There are times when technological issues aren’t immediately known to the user, and they can become disastrous problems later on if ignored. Technology professionals can identify these issues by remotely monitoring statistics like CPU usage, RAM consumption, and other critical factors, in order to prevent them from escalating into major unavoidable disasters. These issues can then be resolved remotely, without the need for an on-site visit from a tech, helping you keep your budget under control.

Backup and Disaster Recovery
Small businesses might be agile enough to respond to threats and disasters promptly, but this is only the case if they’re taking measures to keep their data safe. It’s been shown that businesses that fail to recover their data following a data loss incident, will likely go out of business within one year of the incident. Therefore, you need a comprehensive solution that’s designed to limit data loss and practically eliminate downtime.

If your business has difficulty managing and maintaining its technology infrastructure, why not reach out to NuTech Services to ask about what we can do for your business? To learn more about backup and disaster recovery, network security, and more, reach out to us at 810.230.9455.

Aug, 2015

Overcome IT Performance Issues with These 4 Proven Practices

Is your network running a little sluggish? Computing hardware isn’t perfect and requires a certain level of maintenance in order to keep everything running at capacity. Before you swap out your old server units for new ones, try these maintenance best practices.

Update Your Software
For whatever software you use, it’s best practice to run the most up-to-date version. In addition to providing your system with improved security, software updates will often include fixes to bugs that tend to slow things down (not to mention put you at risk for viruses and other online threats). In order to take full advantage of the benefits of running updated software, it’s best practice to have a solution in place that upgrades your system in a timely fashion. With NuTech Services’s managed IT service, we remotely provide upgrades for your network so that you don’t have to.

Corrective Maintenance
One of the most unpleasant hardware maintenance practices is fixing an issue that’s disabled your system. Performing corrective maintenances like this can be expensive, and breakdowns always seem to happen at the worst possible time. Regardless, fixes like this must be done so your business can function. At NuTech Services, we’ve found that the best way to approach corrective maintenance is to prevent these breakdowns from happening in the first place. This is the route we take with our preventative IT care.

Server Virtualization
Depending on how old your problem-prone server unit is, and depending on if you possess another server unit that runs well and is underutilized, you can migrate the data off your older server unit to your newer, more powerful one. This is a solid practice that will save you money by not having to pay for maintenance on two separate units, as well as free up space. However, it’s important to know what you’re doing before making such a move because over-consolidation with excessive virtual machines on a physical server can lead to deteriorating performance and system instability.

A Hardware Refresh
For network equipment like server units, it’s standard to get three to five years of use out of them before experiencing performance issues that cause you to seriously consider replacing them. Depending on the severity of your issues, you may be able to extend the life and improve the performance of your server with a hardware refresh. This includes installing additional CPUs or RAM, as well as upgrading the storage. It’s a tough call choosing whether or not to go with a hardware refresh or to replace the unit altogether. For this reason, it’s always a good idea to first check with your IT consultant.

Implementing these best practices will minimize performance issues and extend the life of your server units, and NuTech Services is here to assist you with all of these recommendations. Of course, technology isn’t perfect and every piece of hardware will eventually fail. When it does, you’ll have to purchase replacement hardware that meets the needs of your business and NuTech Services can assist you with this too.

For help with all of your company’s technology-related needs, give us a call today at 810.230.9455.

Apr, 2015

Tip of the Week: How to Find the Perfect Outsourced IT Company for Your Needs

A growing company tends to experience a lot of IT pains. This is because growth usually goes hand-in-hand with an expanding IT infrastructure, and your in-house IT staff might not be able to keep up with the increased workload. This is especially painful if your budget isn’t as flexible as you’d like. You decide that it’s in your best interest to outsource your IT, but where should you start looking?

Outsourcing your IT comes with a lot of great benefits, and it should always be considered as a viable option. Compared to hiring a full-time team member, you save money in the long run by taking advantage of easily-budgetable payments. In addition to cost-efficiency, you also need to look for technology competency. Not all of the so-called professionals you meet will have the skills to back up their claims. The solution to finding the best of the best can be as easy as holding a “mock interview,” of sorts with the prospective outsourced IT vendor.

Are They Up-to-Date in the Industry?
It’s only natural that technology professionals keep up with the latest occurrences in the industry, and your prospective business partner should be no different. Are they keeping up with the latest security protocol and backup practices? Are they always trying to use the latest technologies to stay ahead of the competition? If they are, it shows a passion that can be leveraged for your benefit.

NuTech Services is one such business. We stay ahead by following reliable news feeds and staying aware of important findings and trends. We know what a reliable IT staff should concentrate on, and our strategies reflect these trends to help your company take full advantage of its technology.

How Do They Handle Difficult Tasks?
In IT, issues that aren’t a technician’s expertise frequently arise. This means that they might not be entirely comfortable dealing with a situation. How IT staff handle stressful situations like these can make or break their service. Do they research the problem? Do they strive to make clarity one of their biggest and best selling points?

They absolutely should, and NuTech Services knows this better than anyone else. We always work to find the best solution to a problem, even if we’re unfamiliar with it. If it looks like a job that we can’t help you with, we’ll find someone from our list of trusted IT vendors who can assist you to the best of their ability. Their work is a reflection of our company, and since you trust us, you know you can trust them to perform their duties to both your expectations and our own.

How Do They Handle Hypothetical Situations?
Now that you’ve limited the number of applicants to those who know what they’re doing, you can impose hypothetical situations onto your candidates to see who has a thought process similar to your own. This process is perhaps the most important part of hiring an outsourced IT agency. You want to make sure that they have solid business practices by seeing them in action for yourself.

At NuTech Services, you can see our prowess with your own eyes with a IT consultation. This can address any problems or questions you might have concerning your technology. We do our best to explain the problems to you, and make sure that you know all of your options before you commit to a particular solution.

These tips can help you locate a quality IT specialist, but why do so when you have NuTech Services readily available to help you out at this very moment? All you have to do is call 810.230.9455 to get started. We’ll work with you to make sure your technology is working at maximum capacity.