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Even Small Businesses Need a Big Security Solution

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One of the main benefits of a small business is that it’s small. You can make decisions quickly regarding all sorts of matters. Your workforce isn’t nearly as large as other organizations, meaning that you’re a closer, tight-knit group. However, one of the misconceptions of small business is that they’re not as susceptible to hacking attacks, which can be a dangerous assumption to make.

The reasoning for this is simple: hackers don’t care who you are or what you do. They don’t care if you’re a large business with thousands of employees, or if you’re a small startup in the suburbs of your hometown. They don’t care if you’re in the healthcare industry or if you’re just a small goods manufacturer. All they care about is stealing your data, and if you don’t take measures to protect it, you could be dealing with a major issue that can’t be swept under the rug and forgotten about.

All businesses rely on their mission-critical data to function, and all businesses have information that’s valuable to hackers. For example, most companies have a human resources department that collects information about employees and potential new hires, including Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and so on. On a more personal note, your business’s finance department holds payment information for both your clients and your own business, which could be catastrophic if it were to fall into the hands of hackers.

However, even though hackers will use variable tactics to infiltrate and infect a network with viruses, malware, spyware, or other threats, they often don’t target specific data. In fact, hackers often don’t target specific businesses at all, and instead will send out widespread scams designed to infect any and all who are foolish enough to download a file, or click on a suspicious link. These threats are most often found in phishing emails (scams that are designed to get a user to visit a malicious website, download an infected attachment, or click on a link) that executes a malicious payload. A small business like yours will rarely experience a direct hacking attack specifically designed to infiltrate your exact systems.

Due to this oversight, your business can make significant steps toward proper cybersecurity practices by implementing security solutions that are designed with the enterprise in mind; specifically, a firewall, antivirus, spam blocking, and web content filtering solutions. These security measures are all necessary if you want to minimize your business’s exposure to online threats. They can keep your team from accessing malicious websites, keep threats out of your system, and eliminate the majority of spam that hits your inbox. Furthermore, a powerful antivirus can swiftly destroy any threats that do manage to infiltrate your system.

With a small business, you still need to implement security solutions. There’s no getting around that. What you can do to make it easier on your organization is to contact NuTech Services. Our skilled technicians understand the everyday difficulties that come from managing technology, including optimizing security. Ask us about a Unified Threat Management solution that includes all of the above-mentioned services, and don’t forget to inquire about remote monitoring and maintenance that’s designed to detect and resolve abnormalities in your systems. To learn more, contact NuTech Services at 810.230.9455.

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Use Conference Calls? Here are 3 Reasons to Drop Your Phone Company and Go With VoIP

b2ap3_thumbnail_new_voip_400.jpgConference calling has evolved with the years, and it’s a crucial service that’s needed by modern businesses. You probably find yourself in more meetings than you’d like to be in, but compared to the days before Voice over Internet Protocol existed, you have it pretty easy nowadays. In fact, VoIP is such a great tool that every business should look into its advantages.

VoIP is capable of transmitting your voice over the Internet, making it fantastic for communicating with both your internal team, and for your external communications. In fact, VoIP can be a great alternative to meeting face-to-face if your office has limited space available for meetings. Here are three benefits that your business can reap from using VoIP as your primary conference calling system.

VoIP Uses the Internet
Do you remember those days when you would have to conduct meetings over the phone if there wasn’t space available for a real-time meeting? Conference calling used to be, literally, a pain in the neck. Now, though, the Internet makes it infinitely easier to communicate, and VoIP capitalizes on this fact. By using the Internet to transmit voice signals, you can use your connection in a similar manner to traditional telephone systems. The biggest difference is that you won’t have to deal with all of the complex landline cabling that makes adding new extensions and lines so irritating (and expensive).

In general, cable companies tend to package together several services that your business might not necessarily want or need, which means that if you want to use their landline telephony services, you’d have to go all-in on something that you won’t need. With VoIP, you don’t need to worry about this. All VoIP needs is your Internet connection, so you won’t have to worry about unreasonably high charges… including long distance. If you find that you do need more services, VoIP solutions are flexible enough that you can easily add them as required.

This also means that limitations for trunks (the number of physical phone lines you have leaving the building) are a thing of the past. As you grow, your phone system won’t limit your team from making outbound calls.

VoIP Provides Mobility
Traditional phone systems are limiting in nature. You’re limited to your desk or office, and even if you have a cordless phone you can only travel so far from the receiver before it stops working. VoIP solutions utilize a web application or desktop software that transfers your voice over the Internet, so as long as you have access to the web, you can take full advantage of anywhere, anytime access. You can even use your smartphone with your VoIP solution, which makes it feel just like any normal telephone service. Depending on the VoIP solution, you can also just use a headset on your desktop or laptop.

If you choose to integrate VoIP, you could even let your team work remotely. By doing so, you’re opening your business up to untold opportunities for cost savings and increased productivity; not to mention the fact that your employees will be much happier and fulfilled with their daily duties.

VoIP Has Add-Ons
One of the best features that VoIP presents is its versatility with add-ons. VoIP often comes with video conferencing software, which allows users to emulate face-to-face meetings via video chat. By taking full advantage of VoIP and its various add-ons, you can essentially replicate an inter-office communication solution, even if your team is scattered across the country (or the world).

VoIP can change the way your business communicates for the better. NuTech Services has the skills and expertise required to help your business integrate VoIP, from planning the implementation to the setup itself. For more information, give us a call at 810.230.9455.

5 Tips for Saving Money on your IT

Saving a little on your technology can go a long ways, but cutting too many corners can lead to additional problems and expensive downtime. Here are a few ways you can cut costs without creating long term issues.

Don’t be Afraid to Replace

Got an older PC that’s causing you a lot of issues? Older technology is typically more expensive to run, and after a while, it’s cheaper to simply buy a new desktop than it is to continue pouring money into something that always seems broken. It’s a great time to buy workstations, and if things are tight you can even buy refurbished desktops to keep costs low.

Enforce Energy Efficiency

If you reduce the amount of energy your technology uses each day, your utility bill from the electric company will decrease as well. Switching to LCD monitors (if you are still using old CRT dinosaurs), and enforcing company-wide policies to turn off monitors or put workstations to sleep at night can make a big difference.

Stop Dealing with Vendors

You hired your employees to work, not sit on the phone with a PC manufacturer because your hard drive crashed. Businesses waste money by paying employees to go around in circles with vendor tech support all the time. IT firms like NuTech Services build relationships with vendors and are able to get things done faster. This means issues get resolved quickly and your employees don’t need to deal with less-than-helpful support.

Stop Paying your Phone Bill

Yes, you heard us right. Cease paying your phone company by switching over to a VoIP solution instead. Small businesses save up to 80% on their telephone communication expenses, so the investment pays for itself quickly. Many VoIP systems allow your users to take their phone and use it anywhere, giving you increased flexibility and functionality.

Get Proactive Monitoring and Maintenance

Nearly all day-to-day IT issues can be completely prevented with just a little bit of maintenance. NuTech Services offers these services to our clients, reducing the amount of downtime they experience. Traditional computer support only fix computer issues when they arise. NuTech Services provides proactive monitoring and maintenance to ensure fewer issues plague your business.

Disaster Recovery and Why it Matters to Michigan Businesses

When you mention the term ‘disaster recovery,’ most people think about the big ground-shattering events like earthquakes, fires, floods, tropical storms, etc. While these natural events are certainly disasters and devastating in their own right, smaller things can constitute as a disaster for your business, and they aren’t seasonal.

Let’s look at the definition of disaster.

dis·as·ter

A calamitous event, especially one occurring suddenly and causing great loss of life, damage, or hardship, as a flood, airplane crash, or business failure.

To NuTech Services, a disaster is anything that involves a major loss of data or major downtime. When one of our clients experience a server malfunction that leaves most employees sitting idle unable to work, that is a disaster.

The Cost of a Disaster

Downtime is a very terrible expense to not try to avoid. Try this simple formula for yourself:

Number of Employees Affected by an IT Outage X Average Employee Hourly Cost (NOT WAGES)
+ Average Company Hourly Income X Percentage of Income Lost Due to the IT Outage

This simple formula will tell you about how expensive every hour of downtime is for your company. The hardest value in the formula is understanding the percentage of income lost. Not all companies might have a figure, but you will want to consider it as you do the math. This doesn’t include the cost of repair, consultation, parts, or any of the remediation required to get things back up and running.

Disaster’s Harbinger

Disaster can strike from any direction. Hard drives can go, data can be corrupted, hardware can fail, and networks can go down, and systems can become infected with viruses and malware. User error can cause disaster, as well as theft and other malevolent activity. While companies should take precautions to safeguard themselves against threats both external and internal, and managed maintenance can prevent a lot of foreboding issues, having a solid disaster recovery plan can mean faster turnaround when there is devastating downtime.

Employing a disaster recovery plan starts with the data – your most important IT asset. Computers can be replaced, hardware can be repurchased and software can be reinstalled. Your data is the culmination of countless hours of work by all of your employees ever. It’s no wonder why most businesses that suffer a major data loss go out of business within the first year. You can lose your credibility, and things go into disarray. Data needs to be backed up.

Your backed up data should be archived regularly offsite. Most importantly, your backup solution needs to be easy to test, and tested regularly. You don’t want to find out your backups are corrupted when it is too late.

The time to put together your company’s disaster recovery solution is now. Contact NuTech Services at 810.230.9455 to talk about solutions for safeguarding your data and your business in the event of a disaster, large or small.

Let’s Talk Tablets

Tablets are definitely becoming a staple in the consumer electronics world. For the longest time, the tablet PC was an expensive, clunky device that just didn’t wow consumers. Some businesses had adopted tablets back in the day, but they were difficult to use, hard to support, and they simply didn’t perform for the price tag. However, like many consumer electronics, Apple reinvigorated the tablet market with the original iPad, and now it would seem tablets are here to stay. The question is, are they right for businesses?

Tablet devices are very similar to modern day smart phones. In fact, in most cases, the apps you run on the phone usually translate to the apps ran on the tablet. You get the basics; email, web surfing, streaming video, calendar, note taking, and more, but the difference is you get all that on a larger device. Ask yourself if you would like that basic functionality that your smart phone gets with a larger playing field, and you’ll have a pretty good inclination of you want to jump on the tablet bandwagon. However, the future of tablets is looking even more robust; Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system is being built for both desktops and laptops and also tablets. This means you’ll get the same OS you would run on a desktop PC on your handheld tablet. Although the hardware in a tablet isn’t quite as beefy as what you’d find in a desktop, dual and quad-core CPUs and integrated graphics and generous amounts of memory are found in the cutting-edge devices, so expect tablets in the not-too-distant future to be major contenders to laptops as far as mobility and compatibility.

As for the tablets on the market now, there are plenty to choose from. Let’s take a short look at a few of the leading contenders.

iPad 2

The Apple iPad established itself as the gold standard for tablets. The device is sleek, well designed, easy-to-use, and boasts a great set of features and capabilities. With it being the most popular tablet device, it also has the most apps developed for it. Remember, you can’t just take software that works on your desktop and put in on a tablet; so you are limited to the apps available. Fortunately the Apple App market place is very extensive, and often enough when a developer makes software for tablets, they start with the iPad. The iPad2 starts at $499.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

The Galaxy Tab is essentially the iPad’s closest rival. Instead of using Apple’s iOS, the Galaxy Tab is powered by Google’s Android 3.0 Honeycomb OS. If you own and like your Android smart phone, you’ll feel right at home with this tablet. Android’s App marketplace is continually growing, and while it isn’t as massive as Apple’s, it’s getting very close. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10,1 is also $499, although some carriers offer a 4G mobile version for a little bit more.

Amazon Kindle Fire

Amazon’s foray into the tablet world is a little smaller than the 10 inch tablets mentioned so far. The 7-inch tablet is also cheaper at $199, and packs quite a bit of functionality using Amazon’s multimedia ecosystem. The Kindle Fire lets you surf the web, read books, watch streaming videos, and more. Since the Kindle Fire has just come out, it’s a little too early to decide if it has what it takes for business use, but the low price makes it very attractive for multimedia and ebooks.

Nook Tablet

Much like the Kindle Fire, the Nook isn’t really built to perform. At $250, the tablet is more geared towards handling ebooks, email and other basic multimedia.

Toshiba Thrive

Not the prettiest tablet of the bunch, the 10 inch Thrive is thick and heavy. However, it supports a full USB port, HDMI and SD card slot, making it easier to connect with other devices. The Thrive runs Android, so email, web surfing, and basic productivity tools are easy to come by. The Thrive runs at about $379.

There are dozens of other great tablets out there; many of which are provided by mobile carriers such as Sprint, AT&T and Verizon. Be careful when shopping around; most of the time carriers want you to commit to the device for two years – a long time in an emerging market. Not sure what tablet would be a good fit for your business? Give us a call at 810.230.9455.