A. I hate to answer a question with a question. Do you need an accountant, lawyer, or a business banker? A TMP will help you make the correct technology decisions.
Q.
Do I want to prevent issues before they cause work to stop, or do I just want a “break then fix” solution?
A: Small and Medium businesses have the same technology needs of larger enterprises. Common services provided by Managed Service Providers include network, desktop, security monitoring, patch management and off-site data back-up, as well as technical assistance and vendor management. "Managed Services" TeamCNS DRIVE gives small and medium sized businesses an option to have their IT needs taken care of without the overhead of a full time staff. In fact we can provide you the small level of support for a lot less than a full time staff. We can even show you your savings in real dollars!
Q: Why should I be concerned about being hacked? I am too small or my data has no "black market" value!
A: I hear all the time "We are a small company that fixes widgets, who would want our data?" Well there is your customer list i am sure your competitor would love it, and then if you have every logged onto your personal bank/credit card account how about those passwords. Also, what about your unused CPU and memory. Hackers wanting money are going to go where the money is, but other hackers that want to cause havoc and are looking for anyone not secure. They use your pc resources within your network and can slow your employees down costing you money and time. One other thing is do you have a privacy statement? If you do and you get breached you could be liable for damages.
A: Network monitoring is a practice that MSP’s perform using software and hardware on your network that watches over the network 24 x 7.
Some of the things we monitor are disk errors, drive capacities, Mal-ware Status, login failures, and software update failures. With network monitoring the MSP will know when a hard disk has an issue usually before it causes data loss, or when some hacker is trying to get in. Monitoring your network will help reduce down time -period.
Q: What is the status of my last back-up? Where is my last back-up?
A: Back-up has always been an issue. Media has often not been reliable, someone has to check a log, someone has to swap the media, someone has to take the media off-site, media may need to be secure off-site too, then, they do it all over again tomorrow. This makes me remember a sign from elementary school - "There were once four brothers: Everyone, Someone, Anyone and No-one. They had a very important task to do. Everyone was sure that Someone will do it. Anyone could have done it, but No-one did it in the end. Someone was angry because it'd have been Everyone's job. Everyone thought that Anyone could have done it, but No-one realized that No-one will do it in the end. In the end, Everyone was angry at Someone because No-one did what Anyone could've done." Unknown author
TeamCNS has several backup solutions that take the human factor out of backup. TeamCNS BC Control
Q: Who do I call in the event of a disaster? (Fire, tornado, flood, hurricane, or Hardware malfunction).
Disaster recovery / Business Continuity is something that you need to work with you Technology Management Partner and build a comprehensive plan. Click here and one of consultants will setup a meeting with you.
Make sure your TMP provides pre-purchase advice. (let's say you plan to buy a new copier.) It should be included in your annual agreement with them so there is no hourly cost for you for the consultation. Take my advice on this. If this is the only thing you hear me say today- if it uses electricity and does not heat or cool something or is used for light then ask your TMP before you buy it. I cannot tell you how many times clients go to Verizon and get a PDA phone that does not work with their Server. The techs at the Verizon store know their stuff. The problem is they do not know your stuff. Or - your copier guy – he is going to get you to lease a new copier. Great but before he gives you a new one let us make sure it works with that old Line of Business (LOB) application. This is the least used but highly needed assets a TMP bring to your table. It will save you time and money guaranteed.
What is Vendor Management? In short it is our ability to step in for you with any vendor that services equipment connected to your network. Your copier is an all-in one and you cannot print to it - who do you call? TMP or copier repairman? With vendor management you call your TMP, they spend a few minutes diagnosing it and determine if it is the copier, then your TMP calls that vendor, creates a ticket (maybe even help them diagnose and repair while on phone) and then follow up to insure the issue was resolved. Nothing is more frustration then getting two companies blaming the other company for a problem.
I cannot tell you how many times I have gone into an office to find a dead hard drive. The employee will tell me "it's has be acting weird for about a week and now it won't come on." Sorry everything is gone. (Unless you have a forensic specialist and a ton of money). If you have monitoring tools in place we can usually fix the error before they causes downtime. We are also notified in real time of hacker attempts and security threats.
Anyone have any idea how many updates there are to windows XP? Well there are 3 major updates called Service Packs (one just released) and a little over 100 not included in SP2. With Windows Server 2003, I lost count. Does this mean the product is bad from the start? No. Every time a hole is closed someone invents a new way in. Any building security specialist will tell you that. The question here is do you want to make sure all of your computers are up to date. What about just setting all computers to fully trust Microsoft and enable auto update? Well how do you know if there was an error during the install, or, sometimes patches will break software that worked before. So now everyone is down and it is costing you even more money.
Mal-Ware Management (not just Anti-Virus any more.)
Mal-ware encompasses more than just AV. It is AV but also spyware and Ad-ware, and what about phishing attacks. The bad guys have gotten sneakier, so that means you or your TMP needs to really get to know and evaluate solutions out there for Mal-ware.
This is one of the most important, yet also one of the most neglected areas of computing. Backing up your data should be at the top of your computer maintenance list, right next to Virus Protection. Without data backup or virus protection, you are running the risk of losing your data. And it will happen.
Click here for a free Backup plan evaluation.
