Remote Management and Monitoring is Ideal for SMBs
When you experience troubles with your technology, you don’t have time to just sit around and wait for the problem to resolve itself. You need someone by your side to assist with the problem. Yet, many small businesses don’t have the luxury of an in-house IT department that can help its employees resolve problems quickly and efficiently. How can you avoid this common issue and keep downtime to a minimum in the process?
The clear solution to this issue is working with an outsourced IT provider that offers a remote management and monitoring solution. By remote management and maintenance, or RMM for short, we are talking about the ability to remotely access your systems and resolve problems in real time without sending a technician on site. This is a great solution that allows your organization the opportunity to completely cut out the waiting period, and instead get the problem resolved so that your employees can get back to work.
We’ll discuss some of the great ways that your organization can benefit from remote monitoring and management.
You Don’t Have to Wait for Help
Most issues that your team will encounter with its business technology can be solved without an on-site visit. This means that you get your support in a more efficient and less time-consuming manner, allowing you to get right back to work without experiencing crippling downtime. All the technician needs to do is remote into your computer and address the problem in that way. Of course, not all problems can be resolved without an on-site visit, so some more hands-on tasks will still require the journey to your office. Yet, you’ll be able to rest assured that your organization won’t have to put up with an unnecessary waiting time for assistance.
Your Systems Are Maintained Properly
If you don’t have an internal IT department to keep watch over your systems, an outsourced IT provider can provide this valuable service with our RMM tools. We can monitor your systems for any concerning activity, including unexpected hardware failures or the telltale signs of problematic occurrences. By preventing issues from evolving into major problems, you can take preventative measures in a timely manner and limit the damage done by downtime. Plus, we can administer patches and security updates remotely as well, all so you can stay focused on what matters most–running your business.
Your Budget Will Thank You
Why hire an entire internal IT department if you don’t need to? By outsourcing to an IT provider, you pay only a monthly fee for any services rendered, rather than an entire salary for the services of an in-house technician. You can then invest the funds saved into various other more profitable endeavors, eliminating any unnecessary costs within your organization.
Does a remote monitoring and management service sound like a perfect fit for your business model? If so, reach out to us at (317) 705-0333. We’ll work with you to ensure that you get the amount of service you need.
Prioritizing Productivity Is Easy With The Right IT
With productivity being so important in the modern business, it only makes sense that so much of the technology we have now–and will likely have in the future–is devoted to maximizing the amount of work that can be accomplished by one person in a given time. While not everything we will discuss is always relevant for the typical SMB, if your business continues to grow, more technologies will only become accessible over time. Here are a few technology tips to increase your organization’s productivity.
Work Harder By Working Less
One of the biggest barriers to productivity takes the shape of the tiny, menial tasks that every employee has to attend to every day. While it isn’t that these tasks aren’t necessary, it’s just that they don’t necessarily need to be supervised as they’re completed. What’s the best way to make sure that these necessary tasks aren’t ignored, without spending an exorbitant amount of time on them every day?
Automation. With technologies that can perform certain tasks, it frees up a user to attend to other matters. The boost to productivity that an organization can gain from automation is considerable, as twice as much can presumably be accomplished in the same amount of time. So, instead of an employee being tied up by sorting through email, they can continue with a revenue generating task while their email is sorted for them. The same can be said for data backup–automated solutions are more reliable and less prone to user error. Software patching is also a task that can be easily automated by a knowledgeable technology professional so that you don’t miss out on the most recent versions of your mission-critical software.
Using Televisions to Boost Productivity
While they may be distracting in at least some capacity, having a television in the office can actually benefit your workforce’s productivity. As long as you keep their use strictly for work purposes and not entertainment, you might be surprised by how much they can help. For example, you could display important information, such as upcoming meetings, deadlines, or otherwise to keep your employees focused on meeting their goals. These displays might even lead to some healthy competition in the office so see who can be more productive in either the short or long term.
You can also use televisions to add media to meetings. Imagine being able to pull up spreadsheets or slideshow presentations to drive home key factors or numbers regarding productivity. There is even the option for video conferencing, which can help out-of-office employees attend meetings as well.
Implement Better Working Conditions
Employees work better when they feel better. This simple, common-sense statement can be a great motivator to implement smart desks–Internet of Things devices that are designed to track health and behaviors of employees to help them achieve a better working condition. You may have heard that it’s best not to sit in front of a desk all day and to stand up on occasion, and the smart desk is a way to help alert employees when they are in need of a standing session. Health issues can be caught preemptively and resolved, allowing them to remain productive and keep sick time to a minimum.
Even just giving employees the freedom to pick and choose where they want to work can be empowering. With mobile devices like laptops and smartphones, employees can work from anywhere in the office, so make sure that you have a setup that is intuitive for this type of productivity.
Does your business have a plan to leverage technology to ensure maximum productivity? The right technology can be the game-changing factor in this pursuit. To learn more about what enterprise-level technology solutions can do for your business, reach out to us at (317) 705-0333.
Tip of the Week: How To Be Better At Time Management
It would be hard to find someone who has never experienced the feeling of a time crunch, a situation where someone has more to do than they had hours to do it in. This feeling can be reduced by enhancing productivity through better time management. For our tip this week, let’s discuss some methods to improve time management within your office.
Simplify and Streamline
Before you devote your time to completing a particular task, it helps to determine whether or not that task needs to be completed now or if it can wait until later. Focusing on what needs to be done sooner allows you to better plan to fulfill these responsibilities.
In this way, it helps to follow whatever schedule you have in place, committing your full attention to accomplishing what is outlined for you to do. By eliminating distractions around you and focusing on the task at hand, you will be able to complete your duties more quickly and with greater accuracy.
Furthermore, is the current process to complete a given task as efficiently as possible, or are there redundancies and other unnecessary elements involved? Eliminating these elements will only allow you to cut out extra time that could be better spent elsewhere.
Planning for Success
Of course, the key to time management is establishing how much time you have to manage. It helps to put together a schedule to follow that firmly sets important events, such as project deadlines or meetings. This will tell you how much time you have to devote to your other tasks. Once this time has been established, turn a critical gaze toward the rest of your schedule.
Establish which of your remaining tasks need to take priority over the others, and incorporate them into your schedule accordingly. It is also important that you take your coworkers’ schedules into account. If they need you to complete some task before they can carry on with their work, plan to complete that task sooner, rather than later.
Creating a schedule for yourself to follow throughout the workweek is a solid way to not only ensure that your tasks are attended to, but that you can accomplish them at your peak. For instance, if you know you have a meeting on a Thursday and a deadline to meet on Friday, you can ensure that you give yourself ample time in the beginning of the week to prepare for both. You also need to be sure that your high-priority tasks are given a high enough priority to ensure that they are finished on time.
Preventing Resources From Causing Issues
Communication can be a double-edged sword in any office environment. While it is a necessary tool to remain productive, it can quickly cause harm if misused. For example, cell phones. While they are an excellent tool for communicating, they can only serve a limited use in the professional environment–even as a component of a Bring Your Own Device productivity strategy–and can therefore become a distraction above anything else, wasting precious time.
Yet not every issue with your company’s time management are caused by a human habit. Oftentimes, mismanaged IT can lead to serious issues that will prevent the company’s employees from properly doing their jobs and thereby from being productive.
All’s not lost, however, as Catalyst Technology Group can provide the tools to ensure that your IT is in top shape, freeing you to focus on spending time on improving the other components of your business. Give us a call at (317) 705-0333 for more information.
Your Cheat Sheet For Server Care
Servers are responsible for the distribution and storage of your business’s data infrastructure, as well as the deployment of important applications and data. However, if your organization is responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of these server units, you’ll be tasked with having the knowledge of how to keep them in optimal shape. We’ll discuss some of the ways you can better take care of your server units, as well as the optimal solution: server hosting.
Temperature
Server units produce quite a lot of heat, which can be problematic. If your server units overheat, substantial damage can be caused to them. This can potentially lead to data loss and hardware failure, both of which are expensive to deal with. To compensate for this generation of heat, you’ll want to ensure that your organization’s server units are exposed to some sort of air conditioning. It’s recommended that you store your servers in an environment that falls somewhere between 64.4F and 80.6F with proper air flow.
Energy
Server units also consume a considerable amount of electricity, so be sure to connect them to equipment that protects them from power surges. Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) can go a long way toward keeping your servers around for much longer. These devices can keep your servers from being overwhelmed by a power surge, and they can protect your devices from unexpected power downs in the event that its connection to electricity is cut off. Basically, the UPS sends a signal to the device and provides enough power for it to shut down naturally before any damage is done to the device’s components.
Regular Maintenance
You need to take care of your server units so that they will last for as long as possible. They are expensive pieces of hardware that need to be maintained. If you fail to do so, you might wind up prematurely paying for new hardware when you could have gotten more mileage out of your current infrastructure. Keep the machines free of dust, and be sure to keep an ear out for any strange noises, like metal scraping or otherwise. Furthermore, you should have a system set up so that you’ll notice if there is an issue that needs addressing.
Outsourced Server Hosting
Thankfully, all of these are solved by outsourcing your organization’s server hosting to a managed service provider. We’ll host your server so that you don’t have to take care of it. Furthermore, all the costs of operations associated with a physical server unit, like air conditioning and electricity, are lifted from your shoulders in favor of a predictable monthly rate. Since your server infrastructure is virtualized on our infrastructure, you’ll be able to maintain maximum uptime while receiving all of the critical maintenance. We’ll monitor your server for any inconsistencies that need to be addressed.
To learn more about server management and hosting, reach out to us at (317) 705-0333.
Is VoIP A Part Of Your Business Yet? It Should Be
What is your business’s preferred method of communication? It’s usually email or some type of telephone solution. Especially for a telephony solution, you need to make sure that your communication infrastructure is designed specifically for your organization. To this end, a traditional telephone system could be holding your business back from achieving its most lofty goals.
Take a moment to think back to when you first implemented your in-house telephone system. You undoubtedly had to run a ton of wires to every single desk in your office just to have a phone at every workstation. There is also the contract that you had to sign with your local telephone company. Perhaps you signed up for a plan that included services you didn’t want or need, which is causing strain on your budget and prevents you from pursuing greater opportunities. And you can forget about adding new users to your phone system, as it would likely be a bigger pain than it’s worth. How can you take full advantage of a telephone solution, when the telephone companies that provide such a solution are so out of touch with the needs of a modern business?
The ideal approach to telecommunication in the business world is one that doesn’t place so many restrictions on its users and promotes flexibility. VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol, can use your business’s Internet connection to send and receive voices. Due to this, you stand to benefit considerably from the implementation of a hosted or in-house VoIP solution.
VoIP Cuts Costs
There are so many costs associated with implementing a traditional telephone system in your office. Considering how VoIP uses your Internet connection–something that you already pay for–you can save a bit on operational costs and eliminate waste. Your only concern is that your network’s bandwidth isn’t substantial enough to handle this extra burden, so you’ll want to work with an IT provider to ensure that this new benefit doesn’t become a liability.
VoIP Simplifies Your Infrastructure
Running cables and wires all around your office takes a huge amount of time, especially if it’s to be done right. This time eventually transforms into labor hours and costs. Since VoIP doesn’t require any additional wires installed in your office, and all you need is an Internet connection, adding new users is simple as can be. All you need to use a VoIP solution is the device itself, like a desktop or a smartphone, the VoIP application, and an Internet connection.
VoIP Offers Extra Features
VoIP allows your organization to take advantage of much more than just telecommunication. Depending on your business’s needs, VoIP also offers services such as video chat, instant messaging, and more. Adding these solutions to your VoIP client is possible, but if you would prefer separate applications, we also offer a Unified Communications and Collaboration system.
Regardless of your business’s needs, VoIP can offer your organization something that can benefit its operations. To learn more about VoIP, reach out to us at (317) 705-0333.
Best Practices for Data Backup and Disaster Recovery
Have you considered the process in which your organization takes data backups and restores them following an emergency? The value of data backup and fast recovery can’t be ignored. Unless you take proper precautions, you could potentially face a situation that threatens the very existence of your business.
To emphasize the importance disaster recovery, consider this example. If your office were to catch fire due to an electrical problem, your legacy could erupt in flames alongside it. Even if you evacuate the building and save your employees, your technology will suffer and burn with the building. Some networking components might survive, but you’ll be lucky if anything can be salvaged from an event like this. This is why every business needs a data backup system in place.
Natural disasters, like floods, hurricanes, and thunderstorms can all cause problems for you as well. Therefore, you need to take care with how you manage your technology and your data. Even the slightest mistake could lead to large amounts of data loss. Therefore, the question of whether you will suffer from some sort of disaster isn’t if it will happen, but when it will happen. You need to take measures now to avoid suffering from disasters in the future.
Many organizations that have considered data backup and disaster recovery may not have the most optimal solutions implemented. If anything, they will have magnetic tape backup, which has long been considered the industry standard. Unfortunately, the many flaws prevalent in tape backup make it unappealing for SMBs. Since they are so resource-intensive, they must be performed after hours, and only one backup can be taken during the workday. This means that you could lose up to 24 hours worth of data in the event of a disaster–not exactly the ideal way to manage disaster recovery.
Plus, since some organizations will keep their tape backups located on-site or on their in-house infrastructure for convenience, a fire could simply destroy them along with the rest of your assets. A hacking attack could also target any digital backup files stored on your infrastructure, placing them at risk of corruption or theft. Naturally, the best way to handle data backup storage is to store them offsite, but this can complicate the actual disaster recovery process. What is the ideal way to store data while also allowing for great recovery time?
One way to solve these issues is to reach out to Catalyst Technology Group and ask us about our cloud-based backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solution. Since BDR takes smaller backups as often as every 15 minutes, your data loss is significantly reduced, if not mitigated completely. BDR only takes backups of files that have changed since the last time a backup was taken, ensuring redundancy without causing trouble for operations. The possibility of user error is also eliminated, as the backups happen automatically rather than manually. Your data will then be sent to a secure offsite data center for storage until the day you will inevitably need it. The data is then recovered via an Internet connection directly to the BDR device until you’ve found a replacement server unit to fulfill the role. It’s just one way that enterprise-level technology can help your SMB thrive.
To learn more about data backup and recovery, reach out to us at (317) 705-0333.
Expert Consultation Can Be Revealing
Consultation is available from every business that offers a service. For a small business owner who can’t afford to pay the high-end consultation rates that some organizations require, how do you go about getting the expert opinion to help push your business in the right direction? And what do service providers even mean when they throw around the word, “consultation?” We’ll explain this and more so that you can make the best decisions for your business.
Consultation allows organizations that are suffering from a problem to discuss these issues with a professional so that the ideal solution can be found and implemented. Think about it in terms of going to the doctor and being diagnosed with an illness, and given a remedy; or, going to the dentist to get a toothache taken care of. The result is often an instantaneous solution, or at least a relief, to the problem at hand. For business that is having trouble, on the other hand, there’s likely a way to solve your problem by using technology to improve efficiency and diagnose operational issues.
In fact, this is Catalyst Technology Group’s bread and butter. Our consultants want to help your business fully leverage the value that technology professionals can offer your business. Our consultants can perform network audits and infrastructure assessments to ensure that you know the best way to approach any operational inefficiency. Plus, you’ll have a better understanding of how you can further improve your workflow, making consultation a valuable investment indeed.
If you want your business to grow, solving detrimental business issues is the best way to do so. You should have a plan to dissolve downtime and eliminate inefficiencies so that your organization can succeed. This plan is commonly referred to as an IT roadmap, and it’s an invaluable tool that you can use to plan out hardware refreshes, software deployment, network security additions, and so much more. With our expertise, you’ll always be privy to the latest and greatest developments in the business technology world. You can then use this information to build the best and brightest IT system that is perfect for your business.
With us on your side, you’ll be sure to know all about the products on the market that can help you get the most productivity and profit out of your business. You’ll want to work with only the best vendors that can provide the most powerful and reliable technology. If you struggle with technology management, we can assist with the day-to-day operations so that you create a seamless, strategic approach to it that works for your organization. In addition to consultation, we can provide the following services for your business:
- Network and server management
- Network security monitoring
- Help desk support
- Hardware repair
- Hosted utility computing, such as cloud computing and hosted communications
- Efficiency software, such as consumer relationship management, resource planning, etc.
- Productivity software
- Physical security solutions (access control, security cameras, etc.)
If you want to get more value out of your technology investments, there is no better chance to do so with consultation from Catalyst Technology Group. To find out how you can better leverage technology to your business’s benefit, reach out to us at (317) 705-0333.
Managed IT Protects Your Business And Your Budget
When it comes to maintaining and managing technology properly, larger businesses traditionally have the advantage over small-and-medium-sized ones, as they have greater financial resources. In fact, many small businesses will postpone these activities to help preserve the flexibility in their budget. What these businesses need is a way to leverage the benefits of proactive IT maintenance without breaking the bank.
Small businesses face considerable difficulties when trying to maintain their IT. First of all, since they generally have fewer employees, the workload is heavier for each resource. This leads to IT management being postponed in favor of other, seemingly more important concerns. However, this strategy accomplishes little more than putting the company in a more precarious position. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that hiring the personnel that could help you better manage your IT is often prohibitively expensive.
If neither option is practical, business in this position should turn to option three: managed IT services.
Managed services are a much different approach than what many would perceive as the typical IT service process, referred to as break/fix. Let’s say one of your pieces of hardware isn’t operating correctly. Once you report the issue to your IT provider, they dispatch someone to your location to resolve the problem, and you’re left on the hook paying a bill for that one specific call. You lose the capital, but also the potential revenue from the downtime you have experienced. This reactive approach therefore is quite a bit costlier than the increasingly more popular managed service model, which takes a proactive stance against technology issues.
At Catalyst Technology Group, we follow this proactive approach, monitoring your solutions remotely so that we can prevent issues from influencing your business, especially before they turn into bigger problems. For instance, under our managed service agreement, we will keep an eye on your infrastructure for any warning of hardware failure so you have an opportunity to replace that hardware before it can have a negative impact on your business.
If this option sounds more expensive than the break/fix approach, consider this: if you combine the loss in revenue that downtime from the broken equipment lead to and the cost of replacing or repairing the broken technology, you are out a significant amount of usable capital.
Compare that to managed services where there’s a chance that your problem could be resolved remotely–leading to a smaller service fee when compared to the cost of hardware replacement–it makes a lot of sense to see what kind of value Catalyst Technology Group’s certified technicians can bring you.
Depending on what is included in your service level agreement, the expenses associated with managed services will essentially always be less than the costs that of break/fix. Catalyst Technology Group can help you to make these changes in your own company, making operations both more reliable and less expensive in the process. To learn more about what managed IT services can do for you, give us a call at (317) 705-0333.
Tip of the Week: Google Drive Is Even Handier With These 3 Tips
Google Drive is certainly a worthy cloud solution, and if you have the good fortune of using it for your organization, you know that it can offer everything from word processing to file storage options. However, there are always hidden features that can help you improve the way you use Google Drive. We’ll walk about three of the lesser known ways to use Drive that can help you better use it for your organization’s benefit.
Use Quick Access
Quick Access is a feature that lets you open your recent files without sifting through your Drive needlessly. You’ll have thumbnails of your most recently opened files on the top of your Drive’s home screen. If you want to turn on Quick Access, check Google Drive’s settings. Click the Gear Icon and select Settings. You need to select Make relevant files handy when you need them. Then all it takes is a page refresh and voila, Quick Access is turned on.
Take Advantage of the Search Function
There is a down-arrow at the top of your Drive’s screen which you can use to search for specific files. You can even filter the search results according to various fields, which include the type of field, the owner, where it’s located, and the date it was last modified, among many others. Proper use of the search function will help you find files more efficiently so that you can stay as productive as possible.
Remove Your Photos for Recent View
Many users take advantage of Google Photos to backup the photos on their mobile devices, but this can make it a little tricky to navigate your Google Drive. When you use Photos in this fashion, your Recent view will be so cluttered that it seems to become impossible to find what you are looking for. To remove your photos from Recent view, just use the Search function to filter out all .jpg or .png files in your Drive. This can work for both your web browser and your Google Drive app.
These tips can help you accomplish more in your workday and better use Google Drive to its full potential. For more great tips and tricks, subscribe to our blog and reach out to us at (317) 705-0333.
Does Your Network Management Seem Unmanageable?
There’s no denying that there is a lot to do in a business environment, and some things take longer than others…or at least they should. Is your business investing enough time into its network management, and all the tasks, processes, and responsibilities that it involves?
Your network is key to your success, as it directly influences the capabilities of your end users. After all, if there is a network issue, some or all of your employees will have a reduced capacity to perform their duties–if they are able to at all. This is only exacerbated by the amount of applications that are migrated to the cloud; applications that are critical to the business’ function. If the network fails, these cloud-based applications can’t be utilized, and productivity grinds to a halt.
Fortunately, this can all be mitigated through proper network management and maintenance. Proper network management can assist a business by helping to improve its internal performance and reliability, as well as helping to keep external threats to the network’s security at bay.
As a few examples of the management and maintenance your network is going to need, please refer to the following list.
- Updates, including those to your operating system, drivers, and your software.
- Patches to your cybersecurity systems to ensure that they are updated and resilient.
- Managing and maintaining antivirus across the whole network.
- Predicting and avoiding hard drive failures.
- Maintaining and testing backup solutions to ensure that data will be preserved.
However, there are still other things to be done as well–after all, your business still needs to be run, and those concerns cover far more than just how well your network is managed. Yet at the same time, with an improperly managed network, there could soon be no business for the network to support.
For instance, if your network fails for an extended period, you will find yourself dealing with downtime. This can be due to an improperly maintained piece of network equipment failing, or from someone in your organization improperly utilizing or configuring a part of the network. Either way, without the network being managed and documented, issues like these are likely to be a common occurrence for your business.
If you find that taking care of business has kept you from properly taking care of the business, there’s a solution for you: entrust the management of your network to the pros at Catalyst Technology Group. We can monitor your network remotely and keep an eye on it to make sure there aren’t any internal threats to your business, and that you aren’t unknowingly sacrificing productivity due to an unknown network issue.
We help ensure that a business’ network is in tip-top shape so that business has the ability to thrive. We could do the same for your business as well. Just give us a call at (317) 705-0333 to get started.