Remote Monitoring Archives - NuTech Services LLC

May, 2019

Tip of the Week: Proactive Maintenance Keeps Tech Running Smoothly

Whether they are expected or not, there will always be situations when your business incurs some damage or loss due to natural disasters, downtime, or other issues. You might find that a little preparation could have kept some of the disaster at bay, and it could honestly save you a ton in terms of lost time and resources. In fact, it could save your organization from the brink of disaster.

The Word is Proactive

When something bad happens, you might look back to see what you could have done to prevent the issue from happening in the first place. The word to remember here is “proactive.” Being proactive requires risk assessment, which demands that you analyze the greatest possible threat to your continued existence and prepare for it. In the event that your business’ IT is unable to function as intended, your business would stop functioning. All it takes is a single component failing to leave your employees unable to do their jobs. This is why you need to be as proactive as possible–to ensure that you have plans in place for when your systems inevitably fail.

Proactive IT Maintenance

For the past decade, proactive IT maintenance has been making strides in the office environment. When one of the most important parts of running a business–your IT infrastructure–no longer works as intended, you lose out on profits and shell out for repairs more often. Furthermore, downtime can be a major cost that your business suffers from due to technology malfunctions. If you can keep your hardware operating properly, your network safe from threats, and your business productive, you can eliminate potential problems before they have time to escalate into the expensive kind.

NuTech Services’s proactive IT services provide your business with monitoring and management software. With our expert technicians behind these tools, you can rest easy knowing that we are monitoring each and every critical component of your technology for any telling inefficiencies. This gives you the opportunity to address them before downtime occurs.

Patch Management

Security troubles such as software vulnerabilities can also lead to problems for your business. If you can’t rely on your software tools to get the job done without issue, then you’re doing yourself a disservice. Furthermore, you will need the latest threat definitions and software patches to keep your solutions secure from threats that could derail productivity. A major part of our proactive maintenance platform is deploying patches as they are released, eliminating the chances of known vulnerabilities affecting operations.

For more information on how your organization can be more proactive with its IT maintenance, give NuTech Services a call at 810.230.9455.

Feb, 2018

Preventing Issues is Easier with Remote Monitoring and Management

Do you know who manages and maintains your business’ technology? In most cases, it will be either a small in-house IT department or technical individual, but often times small businesses simply don’t have the assets to throw around on this. More importantly, they often ignore technology maintenance, either because they can’t afford it, or there’s nobody to do the work.

This shortcoming brought about a shift in the way small businesses approach technology management. An internal IT department is certainly one way to resolve this issue, but not all companies can afford to hire dedicated personnel for this purpose. The natural course of action became to outsource the responsibility to a third party, but the way that it’s outsourced can have a considerable impact on how much value is received from the relationship.

For example, if you only respond to issues but do nothing to prevent them in the long run, you will end up spending too much on repetitive repair costs. Conversely, if you take an active role in the prevention of IT issues, you save money by minimizing the damage done by potentially catastrophic problems. Ultimately, your organization stands much to gain from keeping small issues from evolving into major problems, and the best way to do so is by implementing an automated remote monitoring and management solution from NuTech Services.

Remote monitoring and management, or RMM for short, is a tool that allows managed service providers like NuTech Services to take care of your technology solutions without being in your office. For example, we can monitor your business’ network for any security discrepancies or weaknesses in your infrastructure. We can remotely deploy patches and security updates to ensure that your systems are protected.

Considering how this type of solution requires very little hands-on work from your in-house team, it almost counts as an automated solution all its own. We can resolve the majority of issues with your infrastructure without an on-site visit, which lets your business save a considerable amount of capital without paying for traveling costs or other expenditures. It also makes for a much more convenient way of getting the management and maintenance that your network needs, as you won’t have to wait–we’ll administer service according to your service level agreement, and we can do it without taking up any of your staff’s time with an in-house visit.

Granted, some problems will need an on-site visit, but we generally try to keep those to a minimum. We’re all about making sure that your company has the most convenient experience possible with NuTech Services’s services. To learn more, or ask us about our remote maintenance and management solution, reach out to us at 810.230.9455.

Oct, 2017

How Remote Monitoring and Management Can Help Your Business

As a small business, your assets are limited more than you’d like them to be. You have a budget that yearns for more flexibility, and there are only so many hours in the day to accomplish all of your goals. Thankfully, in an era that’s more connected than any that came before, modern technology provides solutions to businesses that need to get a little more value out of their budgets. One of these solutions is called remote monitoring and management.

Imagine having a persistent computer problem that you don’t know how to solve. It’s been bugging you for a while now, but you don’t have an in-house IT department to fix the problem. Imagine having the ability to log into a service portal and put in a ticket explaining what the problem is. A technician will see this ticket, send you a quick reply, and arrange for a time to remote into your computer to solve the issue for you. Imagine how convenient this would be!

Remote monitoring and management is a great tool that allows your business to take advantage of the many wonders of the connected world, all for the sake of keeping your business running as smoothly as possible. We’ll give you a few examples of how your organization can take full advantage of remote monitoring solutions.

Update and Patch Implementation
Have you ever had to install patches and security updates on every single computer in your office? It can be a frustrating and time-consuming task, especially considering how often these updates need to be implemented. Remote monitoring and maintenance allows our technicians to remote into your computers and deploy the patches and updates all at once, without an on-site visit.

Security Monitoring
Have you ever been concerned with network security? You’re probably wondering how you can keep threats out of your infrastructure when you don’t know they exist. One of the best ways you can do so is by having technicians remotely monitor your network for security troubles. It’s not even limited to just threats, either. We can remotely monitor your network for any troublesome developments, like signs of hardware failure, that could create large issues down the line.

Quick and Easy Service
Waiting around for someone to fix your computer wastes time that could be better spent on other tasks. You can take back this time by having a technician remote into your devices in order to resolve issues, rather than waiting for a technician to arrive on-site to resolve them. Sure, there are more pressing issues that require on-site assistance, but most issues can actually be solved remotely.

Could your business use remote assistance from time to time? NuTech Services can help with that. To learn more, reach out to us at 810.230.9455.

May, 2015

How to Monitor Employee Communications Without Taking What’s Said Personally

There seems to be some confusion in the workplace regarding the privacy of digital communications made over a company network. Can an employer read an employee email or record a phone call without employee consent? Is instant messaging a safe place for employees to complain about their jobs? The answer to these questions may surprise workers and business owners alike.

The Need For Everyone to Understand Company Policy
Technically, you as a business owner can legally comb through and read all of your employees’ internal emails and instant messages. However, just because it can be done, doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea. If you do, you’re going to have a bad day and potentially be exposed to messages that will make you look at an employee in a different light. This isn’t fair to the employee, especially if they wrongly believed that their messages were private.

If you know that one day you may go through your company’s IM archives, then you should notify your staff that their messages aren’t private and that they’re subject to investigation. It’s only fair to make this disclosure, and it will help to keep the peace in the workplace.

Employers Must Use Objectivity When Performing Internal Investigations
Here’s a possible scenario to consider: Let’s say you have a problem employee on your hands that uses the company’s instant messaging app to talk trash about you and your business. You suspect them of saying some damaging things, so you decide to investigate their archived messages. Upon doing so, it turns out that this problem employee messaged everybody, including your thought-to-be good employees, in the company and was spreading rumors about you.

What’s worse, the good employee may have been hesitant to engage the problem employee over instant messaging in the first place. The good employee may have only responded to the initial IM from the disgruntled employee as a way of being nice. Take for example this hypothetical IM conversation between two employees; a loyal employee (LE), and a disgruntled employee (DE).

DE: I’m so sick of this policy, it’s unfair and the boss is a tyrant with a bad hairpiece!
LE: There are some policies here that can be improved upon.
DE: This isn’t the first time the boss has messed with me like this, he’s a jerk and I’m sick of everything.
LE: The boss can be strict.

A manager that’s taken personal offense at DE will read this transcript and think that LE shares the views of the troublesome employee. However, a careful reading of the transcript will show that LE didn’t say anything problematic. LE was simply replying to DE in such a way as to appease their feelings, participate in the conversation, and not escalate things by “stirring the pot.” A manager that’s felt personally betrayed by DE will have an almost impossible time seeing LE’s subtle peacekeeping strategies.

For LE, being pulled into a documented conversation like this is a lose-lose situation. If they agree too much with DE, they’ll look like they too are disgruntled. If they stand up for their boss and the company and put DE in their place and even tattle on DE, then they run the risk of being viewed as a brown-noser or a goody two shoes by their co-workers–an influential group that they spend a significant amount of time with.

Every Office Needs a Microphone-Free Water Cooler
This is why employees need an avenue to communicate where they can blow off steam about the workday and speak freely about their jobs, without running the risk of their bosses finding out what was said. At one time, this was the water cooler, but with our society becoming more comfortable expressing themselves digitally, instant messaging may be viewed as today’s water cooler.

Only, an employee might wrongly assume that, since they’re using the same IM tools that they use in their personal lives, that what they say online is private. When messages are relayed internally over the company network, this isn’t the case, and for the health and harmony of yourself and your business, this needs to be communicated to all levels of the organization. Obviously you don’t want to cultivate a poisonous atmosphere where people just stand around and complain about their jobs, but sometimes people that are under a lot of stress need an outlet to vent in order to calm themselves.

Communication is Key
At NuTech Services, we can equip your business with a secure instant messaging and email solution, as well as a digital telephone service with VoIP that will fit the communication needs of your company. We can also help you set up permissions so that you and the network administrator can have complete control and access to all archived messages. Reach out to us at 810.230.9455 to learn more.