MSPNetworks Blog

Artificial intelligence has taken the world by storm, and the advent of emerging technologies has many small businesses thinking about how they can utilize it to cut costs, improve operations, and eliminate unnecessary or repetitive tasks. Let’s take a look at three ways your business can leverage artificial intelligence to the best of its ability.

We should first start by outlining what we mean by “artificial intelligence.” In the business environment, AI and, on a more broad scale, machine learning, is when automated technology performs tasks normally accomplished by human workers with an emphasis on taking data and applying it to specific scenarios in which it can learn or identify trends. It is expected that the AI industry will exceed $390 billion by the year 2025, so it’s safe to say that this technology is not going anywhere. Your business has much to gain by thinking about how it might apply it in the near future.

Here are just a couple of ideas for how you might be able to use AI for your business.

Streamline Certain Tasks and Operations

Businesses often have a lot on their plate. Between managing resources and maintaining operations, it can often feel like an overwhelming balancing act where spending too much time on one thing leads to not spending enough on another. Some tasks require more time and focus than others by virtue of how complex and thorough the work must be, such as vetting new hires or assisting customers in need.

Consider some of the more lengthy or time-consuming tasks out there. Most businesses need to search for top-tier talent to keep themselves competitive, which means sifting through mounds of resumes, cover letters, and other documents for job applications for qualified candidates. This process can be automated through the use of artificial intelligence. Another aspect that can be automated and improved through the use of AI is customer support. Customers often ask the same questions, and if AI systems can learn from and build their foundation of knowledge based on interactions with consumers or clients, they can provide your organization’s employees with more time to focus on innovative new ideas and workflows.

Improve Data-Driven Analytics

All businesses collect data in some way, shape, or form, but the way that this data is used will vary by industry. In fact, some organizations don’t fully utilize the data available to them; either they collect the data and don’t know what to do with it, or they collect the data and don’t have the tools to adequately act with it. Either way, AI gives businesses the opportunity to make full use of this important asset.

AI allows your organization to use any data it collects to its advantage through predictive modeling. By extrapolating data for trends, AI is able to take its best guess at what the future could hold for your business. Through the use of AI, organizations can leverage available data to make educated decisions about their futures; this ensures that the organization can move forward in an informed way that is both in line with its business model and progress-driven.

Cut Costs and Increase Efficiency

We have all heard the horror stories related to AI and how it is stealing jobs away from qualified human beings, but this is the wrong mindset to approach this technology with. While it might be concerning to laborers in unskilled industries, the truth of the matter is that most workers can stand to benefit from AI to a certain extent. Let’s reframe this perspective; instead of saying “AI is going to steal my job,” you can instead say “AI will make my job easier.” Suddenly, the prospect of implementing an automated system is not so scary.

When looked at through this lens, it’s easy to see the value that AI presents and the opportunities it poses for not just simple tasks, but more complex ones as well. Even if AI cannot fully automate more complex tasks, the fact alone that it can help make certain aspects of them easier to manage should be reason enough for celebration, as any technology that can make running your business and managing your workload easier should be given full consideration. And you know what they say… less time wasted means more profit!

Now that you know about some of the ways that businesses can use AI to their advantage, the only question remaining is this: how are YOU going to leverage artificial intelligence? What ideas do you have for this exciting technology? Be sure to let us know in the comments below.

When we talk about the cloud, what springs to your mind? The cloud might sound like a business buzzword, but in reality it’s one of the most important components of a technology infrastructure, especially in today’s online environment. Considering the ongoing pandemic and unpredictability that the situation brings, you don’t want to wait any longer; you should have started thinking about implementing the cloud yesterday.

What is Cloud Computing?

When we talk about the cloud, it’s mostly in the context of cloud computing. Most people utilize cloud computing on a day-to-day basis in at least some capacity, whether they realize it or not. Most email solutions these days are stored in the cloud, so anytime you access your Gmail account, you are using cloud computing. Cloud computing is essentially when data lives in an online environment. This makes the data available through some kind of account or portal, improving accessibility and flexibility in general. It’s a great way for businesses to keep operations going even while out of the office.

That being said, most businesses will have to ask themselves whether a public or private cloud is the ideal solution.

Public vs Private

When considering cloud computing, you will find that these services can be broken up into two major categories: public and private. Each of these have their own advantages and disadvantages. Let’s dive in.

Private Cloud

It’s perfectly fine for businesses to host their own private cloud infrastructure. In fact, many organizations already do this. They have servers on-premises that they manage and maintain, allowing their workers to access the data found on them through approved mobile devices. The private cloud allows for many benefits that the public cloud does not, including greater control over your data and the ability to customize every little piece of your infrastructure. On the other hand, it is saddled with the costs of building, managing, and maintaining a complex server infrastructure, as well as securing it from would-be hackers.

Public Cloud

For those who do not have the capabilities to store, manage, and maintain an entire infrastructure of cloud servers, we have the public cloud. The aforementioned online services that many consumers use run on the public cloud. The public cloud is online space that is partitioned off per user, meaning that you and only you have access to your data, despite it being located in the same place as other users’ data. While this makes the cloud infinitely more accessible and easier to utilize, it does come with some drawbacks. Since the space is managed by a cloud provider, you might not have as much control over your data as you would like. This also extends into security; you might want to implement more powerful data security measures (especially since it is the public cloud), but you’ll be unable to do so.

This presents a difficult position. Do you skimp on security and customization, or do you bite the bullet and build an infrastructure that is impossible to manage and maintain on your own? Well, neither. We do have one other option for you.

The Solution: A Hybrid Cloud

Small businesses are in a unique position regarding cloud computing. They might not have the capabilities to manage and maintain their own private infrastructure of cloud servers, but don’t want to compromise on their ability to protect their resources or implement a solution that only solves one of many issues they are experiencing. This is why a hybrid cloud solution is often ideal for small businesses.

The way it works is simple: you essentially “rent” server space in a data center, allowing you to do what you will with it. The space is managed and protected by the service provider so that you don’t have to. It’s a great compromise that makes services more accessible to small businesses without losing out on the imperative security that is inherently unavailable to those utilizing the public cloud.

MSPNetworks can help your business implement a quality cloud solution specific to your individual needs. To learn more, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

A lot of business is being conducted over the Internet right now, in terms of communication and transactions alike, which makes a business’ capability to remain connected to its clientele even more important. Now is not the time to wonder if your business is as connected as it should be, which means that you need to know how much bandwidth you have available—and that what you do have is sufficient.

Does Your Business Have Enough Bandwidth?

Obviously, if your business is experiencing bottlenecks, the answer to this question is no. Unfortunately, many organizations will simply adjust and adapt to these inefficiencies and “make it work” (to a point, at least). Despite this, you need to be sure that you at least know how much bandwidth your business should have to meet its needs.

In addition to this, it is important to be sure that your Internet service can support your needs. With so many options—including Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), Cable Modem, Fiber, Wireless, Satellite, or Broadband over Powerlines (BPL), and more—you need to know if your capacity is sized to match your consumption, and that you’re getting all you can for your investment.

MSPNetworks can help you figure this out by evaluating your broadband needs and work with your ISP to ensure you’re getting everything they should be delivering.

When it comes to your broadband, here are some important things to keep in mind:

Run a Speed Test

A speed test is a great way to establish your current access to bandwidth and whether it is sufficient for your productivity. An internet consultant will have plenty of testing tools to use, but you should also take a moment to visit speedtest.net or another speed testing utility to help inform your conversation with them.

Here are some measurements to examine:

• Ping, or latency, is how you measure the reaction time of your connection. For instance, how quickly a webpage can recognize that another tab has been opened. Issues here could come from your Internet service provider (ISP), an improperly configured firewall, router, or modem, and your overall bandwidth. A ping of about 20ms is good, as a lower ping indicates a better-performing connection.
• Upload and download speed are another important consideration, as the speed of the data that you push out of and pull into your computer will help you evaluate your bandwidth. As downloads are typically more common than uploads in the business setting, it is normal for bandwidth to be more focused on downloads.

How Wi-Fi Will Factor In

Wi-Fi is a significant utility in any office, especially with the mobility that so many offices rely on nowadays—particularly when personal space is as large of a concern as it is now. This makes the prospect of losing connection in the office such an issue.

Unoptimized wireless can seriously hinder business productivity, and these issues are only worsened by insufficient bandwidth. Productivity issues are often the inciting factor behind the use of shadow IT, where these obstacles lead employees to install and utilize unapproved software without your knowledge.

Does Your Business Need More Than You Have?

If its bandwidth is insufficient for its needs, your business simply won’t have the capability to support its services sufficiently for your customers. In this way, your bottom line could be seriously impacted by any holdbacks—especially with so many of your customer-focused services being based online.

Your broadband is what also allows your team to work productively. Today’s popular conferencing solutions require a large amount of bandwidth to work effectively, and while VoIP isn’t all that resource intensive, it does require some reliable bandwidth availability. Without the resources to support your processes, they are guaranteed to become a problem sooner or later.

Lean on Us for Help with Your Connectivity

It isn’t a secret that the Internet plays a mammoth role in modern business, in such a way that a prepackaged, one-size-fits-all strategy just won’t sufficiently fill. With MSPNetworks in your corner, you’ll have a resource to turn to so that you are sure to get the connectivity you need to compete and grow.

For any assistance with your company’s use of technology, give us a call at (516) 403-9001 today.

It isn’t often that you’ll hear a managed service provider say something like, “There’s no school like the old school.” In many ways, however, the basic principles of a solid business IT strategy haven’t changed all that much… despite the momentous changes that we’ve witnessed in terms of the technology we use. Let’s consider some of these principles, and how they’ve changed over time (if at all).

Securing Your Hardware Solutions

Restricting access to your business’ essential hardware solutions is certainly not a new idea. Even when on-site network and storage infrastructures were the way of doing things, these elements were restricted to employees who needed to work with the equipment—and had the key needed to get in.

Of course, these hardware solutions can be expensive to procure, run, and maintain, particularly for a small business. So, rather than investing the time, space, and energy into supporting these processes, businesses have instead shifted to procuring cloud services. This gives the subscribing organization access to the computing resources required for their needs, while freeing them of the associated responsibilities.

This also helps secure the business’ hardware, as the important stuff is tucked away in a provider’s data center. Since it is stored there, it is under their care and protection… certainly an effective means of restricting access.

The Purpose of IT

Let’s make something clear: information technology was never to be—and should never be—seen as a luxury investment for a business to make, or to simply be procured for the sake of having it. Rather, every new solution brought into your business needs to have an operational benefit.

Therefore, a business should not look to its IT resource to constantly be adding to its solution set, but it should also anticipate that the IT resource will do more than just keep their operations going. Instead, there needs to be a concerted effort by IT to establish how a new technology or approach to the business’ processes would provide some observable, positive results. In this regard, any IT resource that an organization leans on should be considered a consultant: an expert voice providing beneficial feedback and input—not just the reason that the computers work.

Threat Management

The typical processes for a business’ IT threat management have gone through a few iterations. Initially, a lot of these processes were responsive in nature—if a hacker could potentially get in, throw a few restrictions and password requirements into the mix. As time passed and threats developed further, this restrictive approach was amplified.

More recently, this has seen a bit of a shift, although keeping a network secure is still a priority. Nowadays, however, the solutions that are being utilized themselves feature greater security features, with more emphasis placed on educating users to better identify threats. After all, the employees a business hires are going to inherently be one of its bigger security liabilities without some understanding of how they make a company vulnerable.

Clearly, while the available technology we have access to has improved, the practices we’ve developed have needed to in kind. MSPNetworks is here to help you implement the technologies and processes that can make your business operate to its highest efficacy. To learn more about the solutions we can help you put into place, and how to leverage them to their full potential, call (516) 403-9001 today.

The annual Consumer Electronics Show is one of the best looks at some of the best consumer technology that is coming down the pipeline over the next couple of years. Most of the technology won’t be readily available for a few years, and a lot of it may not even come to market, but one aspect of the event that is interesting is that for the first time it is completely virtual.

Every January, massive crowds show up in Las Vegas for CES. Since March of 2020, however, there have been many conferences postponed or moved online in attempts to avoid having massive crowds in one location. Despite the technology available to make this work, it radically depreciates the value of a conference. Today, we will briefly discuss the conference’s role in business, how CES 2021 will work, and some of the tech coming out of an all-virtual CES.

Conferences and Their Role In Business

Conferences have an important role to play in business. Not only does it give multiple businesses the opportunity to show off the goods and services they’ve been working on, it also gives their people the opportunity to see what their competitors are doing, network among their industry peers, and to learn about the new innovations that are happening inside their market. For many businesses, they are some of the only opportunities available to gain the exposure they require to keep going. That’s not to mention the workshops and breakout sessions typically given by industry leaders and experts.

CES 2021

As we all know, the COVID-19 pandemic has made large gatherings rather tricky (and very risky), so many conferences have tried their best to forge ahead virtually. CES 2021, which is one of the largest conferences attended by technology professionals every year, had to move to the Internet. You may think this would be fitting for an expo of innovative technology, but it has come with some logistical challenges.

How do you get 1,800 companies to coordinate online with 150,000 attendees? Streaming video. Companies from all over the world who normally would have a station in Las Vegas, are instead focusing on introducing their products and services virtually. Here are some of the trends of the three-day exhibition.

COVID-19 Technology

Obviously, people are having a hard time getting a handle on the COVID-19 pandemic as infection rates are up across the globe. Not surprisingly, there was a fair share of COVID-related devices. There were smart masks that connect to your phone and monitor your breathing and the quality of air in your immediate area. There were numerous introductions of touchless appliance fixtures using both motion sensor technology and voice recognition. There was a robot designed to use UV-C light to destroy viruses on surfaces, and a wearable air purifier.

Television

TV innovations are always popular with CES attendees and a virtual conference doesn’t change that. One of the most innovative televisions was from LG, which introduced a 55-inch transparent TV that is built into a bed frame. They also introduced a 48-inch bendable display that can curve on demand.

Smartphones

CES 2021 saw two separate companies come out with new rolling displays for smartphones. LG introduced their rollable phone, they are calling LG Rollable as of now, that they plan on launching this year. Chinese company TCL also came out with a rollable phone that extends and contracts the display as you need it. 

5G

Everyone knows that 5G is probably the most important technology for 2021 (besides arguably COVID-19-themed tech), and despite what telecoms have been marketing, the technology is just now starting to be implemented. Companies discussed how 5G will improve the speed of society and provide new options for telemedicine and education. 5G is one of the core technologies needed to build smart cities, which is gaining plenty of traction as the technology gets deployed.

Autonomous Vehicles

Fueled by 5G, one technology that has been emerging for some time, and that had a prominent place in CES 2021 is the driverless car. This is one of those “future” technologies that is very close to happening. There was even an event that explained that the tech is so close that people should start talking about the rules of governing autonomous vehicles.

Despite having to do it over the Internet, CES 2021 went off as planned. It may not be ideal, but it proves that innovation can’t be stymied by a global pandemic. Did you see something interesting from CES 2021? What do you think is the most impressive tech coming out of CES 2021? Comment below and return to our blog for more useful technology content.

Making solid business decisions can sometimes be confusing. Not that you try to make anything other than good decisions, but a lot of business is, and has always been, trial and error; and, you may know this from experience, error happens to be a big part of it. Today, we thought we would discuss what goes into good technology decisions and how many times it comes down to the results. 

How to Make Good Technology Decisions

Making the right decisions in regards to your business’ technology has to do with multiple factors, but one sticks out: What do we do? It seems simple enough, but when you are choosing technology you are probably going to run into technical people that don’t speak your language or salespeople who speak your language a little too well. This will confuse the vast majority of people. It’s not as if there is a guide that can help you match the specific technology to your business; you will have to rely on people to help you do that.

Our consultants at MSPNetworks understand that there is a balance that needs to be considered when advising our clients on how to make the right technology decisions for them. The balance is between cost/complexity and effectiveness at meeting the goals you’ve set out for your business. Here are a few tips that can help you make the right technology decision, regardless of the situation.

Start with Security

Like any highly guarded place, all technology that you add to your infrastructure has to pass through security clearance. You should start every IT decision with the notion that you need to have the tools in place to protect it. If you don't, any decisions you make probably won’t help as much as they will hurt. 

Be Optimistic, but Prepared

Why else would you make strategic IT investments if not to improve your ability to turn a profit? In that regard, any IT investments you plan should be targeted to solve a problem your business currently faces. That’s not enough, however. To ensure any IT purchase you make works for your business, you need to protect it. That’s why we suggest that if you don’t have a dedicated backup and recovery platform in place, you need to prioritize that before you spend another cent on your business' IT. A backup system that builds data redundancy and has a cloud-hosted option is the best. Our BDR service utilizes both network-attached backup with a device that uploads your backed up data to an offsite data center. This will help you be prepared for any eventuality and will make any IT investment that much stronger. 

Work to Build a Knowledge Base

Another consideration that will help you make the best IT investments is to understand what you are getting into before you get into it. By researching solutions to your business problems you will be able to ensure that any IT decisions you do make are made for the right reasons and that you are getting technology that fits into your business plans. The more knowledge you have about the processes you need technology for, the better and more sound your decisions will be. 

Technology can solve a lot of today’s most pressing business problems. If you would like to talk to one of our knowledgeable IT professionals about what technology you should be targeting, how to successfully implement it with the technology you already have in place, or if it’s time to retire a piece of technology, give us a call today at (516) 403-9001.

When looking to improve your business via the use of technology, it helps to keep a few basic tenets in mind. Let’s review some strategies to help reinforce their importance.

Consistently Utilize Uniform Tools and Processes

Picture it this way—while it is perfectly possible to transfer data from Microsoft’s solution suite to Google Workplace (and vice versa), it just isn’t nearly as convenient for your employees to do so… and since this transfer is entirely in their hands, there is a high potential for user error and other issues to slip by.

The same goes for how your internal data is handled. Without established storage conventions or an established storage space shared amongst your team, things are bound to go missing or be inaccessible to others who need it. By establishing and enforcing standard operating processes, you better enable your team members to stay on the same page and working cohesively.

Prioritize Security

Your team members all need to have a well-developed appreciation for the importance of data security, particularly when using the tools discussed above. From password requirements to multi-factor authentication to phishing awareness and more, you need to make a concerted effort to keep focus on the consequences a data breach could have and how the security safeguards you have in place can help protect the business and its data.

Numerous other tools and solutions exist that allow you to lock down your business more effectively. However, your team members also need to buy into these ideas. Encourage these practices and policies by performing regular evaluations of your team and giving them feedback based on their responses.

Promote Mobile Solutions

Finally, mobility is an important part of a business’ processes, so the capability to bring your work around with you needs to be promoted throughout your operations. This will help your business to be more flexible, responsive, and productive wherever and whenever the opportunity presents itself.

MSPNetworks can provide the tools needed to enable all of these practices. To find out more about what we can do for you, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

The strangest year in our lives is coming to a close and the holidays figure to be just as strange. With the COVID-19 pandemic still roaring away, there probably won’t be a lot of the events that are typical this time of year. That doesn’t have to ruin the time of year, however. Today, we thought that we would take a look at five cool tech gadgets and services that won’t break the bank, but will also be a cool addition under the tree or for your secret santa. 

#1 - Ember Temperature Control Smart Mug²

It’s probably an understatement to say that people like their coffee. It’s probably more correct to say that people need their coffee. Even if you don’t like coffee, you probably like hot drinks. For anyone who likes hot beverages the Ember Temperature Control Smart Mug² is a great choice. With this device you can set how warm you want to keep your beverage and it stays that warm for over an hour; enough time to finish that cup of joe that would have gotten cold and been thrown out. 

The mug has a built-in battery and comes with a charging coaster. The Ember Mug² comes in 10 fl oz or 14 fl oz options and can be found on Amazon for around $110.

#2 - Google Nest Hub

The days of the smart home have just begun. Despite being available for a few years now, people—many of which have spent most of this year at home—have begun to install smart gadgets in their homes. Eventually this is the way everything is going, so if you know someone who, like millions of other people, are starting to piecemeal a smart home, the Google Nest Hub is a great tool. 

The Nest Hub is marketed as a digital picture frame, but unlike the one you got your Grandmother for Christmas in 2010, the Google Nest Hub provides the ability to watch videos via YouTube or Netflix and, best yet, it functions as a controller for all of your home’s smart devices and accounts. The Google Nest Hub can be found in the Google store for around $90.

#3 - Wireless Headphones

Another gift that has been around for a few years now, but is to a point that even modestly-priced options have some value. There are a lot of different kinds of wireless headphones. There are on-head headphones, there are earbuds, there are even wireless headphones built into glasses and hats.

Some of the most popular options for high-end sound include: Bose SoundLink around-ear wireless headphones II, Apple Airpods 2, and Google Pixel Buds. Some more affordable options we like include: Anker Life Q20 and the Xiaomi Airdots S.

#4 - Streaming Subscriptions

These days, seemingly everyone has some type of streaming service that they pay for, but getting them all can be really expensive. If you know someone who would like the content on your favorite streaming service, you can give them a gift. In fact, some will give you the option to pay for a year subscription for a discount. 

Some of the most popular are: Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube Premium and more. As more and more companies get into the streaming service game, it will be nearly impossible to have all of them. Depending on the service you gift, you are looking at about $80-to-$150 for a year’s worth. Personally, we’re pretty excited about HBO Max, since Warner Bros. is releasing all of their 2021 theater releases on the service on the same day they hit theaters. 

#5 - Courant Wireless Chargers

Most modern smartphones come with wireless charging capabilities. Even Apple finally put wireless charging in the new iPhone. There are chairs, cars, and many more items that provide wireless charging today. If you are looking for a sleek and useful wireless charger, the Courant Catch:3 is one of the best on the market. Not only does it provide a wireless charging station it also provides a place to store your stuff. The manufacturer also offers dual charging hardware and simple mat chargers. 

Solidly made and ready to go right out of the box, it can bring some style and function to any room in the house. 

This may not be a typical holiday season, but that doesn’t mean that the joy of giving gifts needs to get impeded. What gadgets or services are you looking to give the people in your life? Leave suggestions in the comments section below and check back to our blog for more great technology information. 

Let me ask you a quick question: when was your critical business technology last updated? When do your software licenses expire? When did your printer last have any maintenance performed on it?

If you’re unsure of the answers to these questions, you need to have a better handle on your IT inventory. Let’s go over why, and how we can help.

Here’s the thing: for your IT to work to your favor, you need to maintain total control and awareness of it. You effectively need to know everything about every piece of hardware you possess—when it was purchased, who initially set it up, when and by who it last received maintenance.

After all, your IT required some significant investment on your part… doesn’t it make sense to invest in protecting it? Keeping a record of this kind of information is a very important part of protecting it, as this record can help you form your decisions in the future.

MSPNetworks can help you there. Not only do our professional IT technicians expertly deploy and manage the solutions our clients rely on each day, but we also maintain detailed documentation of every component of their infrastructures as well as a running record of all the actions we take to keep them up and running efficiently. Using advanced diagnostic tools, we identify and mitigate any shortcomings, ensuring your systems are fully updated with all appropriate patches applied.

Of course, doing so will cause us to generate extensive documentation. For instance, here are some of the records we keep:

• All network-attached devices you have, from your networking devices to every company-owned endpoint and peripheral that attaches to it.
• The proper configuration for each of these devices.
• The date that each of these devices was installed.
• The licenses that your business needs to maintain, and the status of the ones you have.
• A comprehensive history of any service that each of these devices have received.

Tracking this information helps to guide us as we manage our clients’ critical technology solutions so that we can deliver the greatest benefit to their operations. This record also assists our staff in identifying and diagnosing future issues that could potentially impact a client’s IT.

Experience These Benefits in Your Own Business

If you would like to find out how managed IT services could assist your operations, reach out to our team. MSPNetworks is always available to answer your questions and give you more information about our services. Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 today.

Let’s be real. For most small businesses during this period, it’s been extremely difficult.  If you were somehow able to sustain operations during this time, you most likely had to make some serious alterations to the way that you normally do things. Today, we’re going to take a look at some of the technologies that you probably already have, and how you can change the way you use them to benefit your business as concerns spike over COVID-19. 

Working With What You’ve Got

When the pandemic first hit, and many states mandated that businesses close or move their operations offsite, not many people had the foresight that the situation would last as long as it has. Of course, the situation was new to almost every living person, but as far as business goes, many organizations chose to close up shop and wait it out. As the days turned into weeks, however, it became evident that if they didn’t do something they could stand to lose it all. For those businesses, and the businesses that went to a remote workforce right off the bat, the transition was filled with issues. How can I pay my bills? How can I get everyone set up with the technology they’ll need to be productive? How can I ensure that my staff is capable of being productive from home? What other choices do I have? 

For most businesses that chose to lay off their workforce at the outset of this thing and suspend operations, they were given a lifeline from the paycheck protection program (PPP) and were able to function at a limited capacity for many weeks. Does this mean they didn’t struggle? No. But with the subsidy, many hired back their best workers and made it through by replacing the productivity they would get from their additional staff with automation. Since payroll is a major expense for any company, in times when you need to keep your finances as liquid as you can, automation helps. 

Many of the automated tools that were added included payroll processing tools, operations management tools, and invoicing tools. These tools are designed to keep businesses from having to deal with actions that usually take up time and money, and are often outsourced. Other parts of the typical business, including employee collaboration, supply chain management, and project management can be improved dramatically through the use of automated tools. 

Security In Uncertain Times

Another part of the business experience that has seen less attention due to all the other things that are going on is cybersecurity. In fact, despite more business being conducted online than ever before, cybersecurity spending is conclusively down. It was actually one of the first places small businesses looked to cut when they realized that they were going to see a drop in revenues.The cybersecurity industry, which as a whole has been growing at about five percent per year for the past eight years is only expecting growth of just over one percent this year. 

If you are relying on a remote workforce, it stands to reason that you would want to provide them with the best chance to succeed. The numbers suggest that many organizations, despite reducing their overall cybersecurity outlay, are holding fast to their endpoint and intrusion protection spending. This means that with the uncertainty of when--or if--the world will return to normal, businesses acknowledge that by securing their network endpoints, their organizational risk goes way down. 

We should mention that no automation is going to stop cybercriminals. While newfangled IT solutions use AI to better identify and eliminate threats, most of the threats that will be a problem for your business in the foreseeable future will be from phishing scams. If your workforce works remotely, this risk is exacerbated by the fact that most people work from their personal devices and not from company owned hardware when they are out of the office. You will want to keep your phishing identification training strategies going and keep them frequent. The last thing that you want is for a remote employee to trigger a major malware attack on your company’s network because you didn’t properly train them. 

The future of business is one that is done over the computer. That much is clear now. If you need help with your business’ technology, you want to talk about what strategies are best, or if you just want to make sure you are doing the right things, call our knowledgeable team of IT technicians today at (516) 403-9001.

For the months that COVID-19 has been around, everyone has done all they can to hold on to their business. They have closed down, they have closed their offices and forced their employees to work from home, they have borrowed money and scaled back or eliminated their 2020 plans. It would be nice if all that sacrifice would pay off, but the frustrating reality is that there is going to be a lot of sustained discomfort for a lot of business owners. Let’s take a look at some things small business owners should consider as they reopen their businesses. 

Navigating the New Normal

Small businesses make up a large percentage of today’s functioning companies and employ a moderate amount of the workforce, so their importance to the economy is unquestioned. The problem facing many small businesses today is a lack of capital to meet the expenses their operations demanded before people started getting sick and the stay-at-home orders came down. There isn’t the demand, there are health questions, and ultimately, not enough money to go around.  

Most small businesses have already canceled their planned investments for the year. This alone has an effect on the whole economy. Vendors, who may or may not work for small businesses will feel the pinch. Recessionary business is not easy to navigate for anyone, but there are things you should do if you want to navigate the economic downturn.

Honest Assessment is the Key

The ability to take an honest look at where your business stands will be the most important factor to getting the help that you need. Familiarizing with your profit/loss statement and how it compares to 2019 should be your first step. Hard numbers may lack nuance, but they tell most of the story. Take a look at your business’ assets and the operational costs that go along with them. Unfortunately, big drops in revenues mean that you will ultimately have to take a long look at your human resources. When everything is on the table, the next steps will hopefully become clearer. 

After everything is laid out, assess the damage the pandemic has caused your business. Can you afford to sustain your business the way it was before the shut down? If so, good for you, your business is in the minority. In fact, according to the NFIC only five percent of small businesses have prospered during the pandemic. Apparently, they make masks, toilet paper, and hand sanitizer. 

Get the Help You Need

A big part of navigating this period for the small business is getting the help you need to stay afloat. Most governments have some sort of economic relief package in place for small businesses to utilize. In the US, the Cares Act has made several programs possible including the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which provides low-interest loans of up to $10 million to eligible businesses. If there is help to be had, it is a business owner’s responsibility to seek it out.

If your business doesn’t qualify for government assistance, it can be really difficult, and if you are initially denied funding, you need to keep looking. There are many places to get the help you’re going to need. Long nights are a part of owning a business, and today it’s important that you work on mitigating risks to your business’ future.

Use Automation to Your Advantage 

The worker’s “worst enemy,” automation can and probably will be a big part of your business for years to come. Your business probably already has the tools in place to be able to use automation in some way. When you automate some of the repetitive and menial tasks, your staff can focus on revenue-generating endeavors, improving productivity. The technology professionals at MSPNetworks can help you decide where automated tools best fit in. 

Your business is going to have to adjust and you are going to make some hard choices to get through the pandemic in one piece. If you want to talk to New York IT experts about how technology can play a big role in the sustainability of your business, give us a call at (516) 403-9001.

With more people than ever working from home, their ability to receive the support they need to keep their devices in top working order is crucial. As a result, many businesses have turned to managed IT service providers to maintain their employees’ computers. MSPs like us utilize a tool called remote monitoring and management software (RMM). Let’s discuss what it is and why it is so useful for managing your company’s IT. 

Consider the following scenario from the perspective of one of your employees:

You’re working from home, trying to get your tasks done for the day. There’s still plenty to do on your schedule, and you’re swiftly approaching deadlines for many of your responsibilities. Suddenly, your trusty laptop starts crashing, and try as you might, you can’t seem to get anything working.

So, what do you do?

This is obviously a challenging situation on numerous levels. Not only are you unable to get any work done, you’re also isolated away from whatever support resources are usually present in the office. As a result, any issues you may encounter are made much more challenging to resolve.

However, this fortunately doesn’t have to be the case.

By working with a managed service provider like MSPNetworks, you can benefit from the improvements that modern solutions can provide to the IT support process. Rather than encountering a problem and waiting around for it to be fixed, you can continue working, confident that the MSP has any challenges handled.

Using the technology at our disposal, we can remotely keep track of your computers, even while your workforce is working remotely. Should an issue arise, our team of trained IT professionals will detect it and do everything within their considerable abilities to mitigate it. Often, we can have the issue sorted before you even realize that one was present, all thanks to our use of remote monitoring and management software.

Of course, to leave the benefits at that would be to sell an MSP short. In actuality, the nature of remote monitoring and management can provide a much wider range of benefits, such as:

• Low-profile RMM solutions can be configured ahead of time and installed in the background, doing even more to preserve productivity. Once installed, our software can help protect the data of both your clients and your employees by ensuring that critical patches are professionally installed, and that a technician is always just a few clicks away.
• The management portion of our software can be used to attend to assorted support matters beyond troubleshooting, enabling us to install and manage the software that your users will need, such as VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol telephony), productivity solutions, and other business-essential tools.

At MSPNetworks, we can assist you with all of your IT needs, regardless of where your employees are currently stationed, enabling your team to accomplish more during a time that would once have made work impossible. To learn more about our services, give us a call at (516) 403-9001.

Productivity is—generally speaking—the core goal of any modern software solution. Today, we wanted to go over a few tools that can boost your productivity and efficiency right now.

Cloud Collaboration and Storage

As many people continue to work remotely, many businesses have faced the challenge of supplying these employees with the resources needed to be productive. Plus, there needs to be some consideration into how their home networks differ from the one in the office, particularly in terms of their security.

Cloud solutions can offer the security and access that your team members need to collaborate on their work. So, if your workplace still isn’t using the cloud to its fullest potential, you should prioritize these changes.

Instant Messaging

With instant messaging tools in their toolkit, any team can more easily conduct the brief conversations that so often take place throughout the day. Instant messaging is more efficient, which helps those involved in these messages keep their productivity levels high. This is thanks to the conditioning that we have all received from messaging and texting in our daily lives.

The other benefits of messaging include its availability. With workstations and mobile devices alike supporting instant messaging solutions, your team is essentially guaranteed to have access wherever they are.

Project Management

As your team is divided amongst their homes, a project management solution can help to keep them productive. As they are no longer working in the same place, your team members may start to lose the sensation of being part of a team. As a result, your team may start to slip out of collaborative habits. A project management tool can help prevent this by showing your entire team how their activities play into the overall success of the business’ endeavors.

Video Conferencing

Finally, your communications are greatly benefitted by a video conferencing platform of some kind. This solution can enable your remote workers to participate in meetings almost as effectively as they could while at the meeting table, supported by capabilities like screen-sharing and other collaborative features. While it isn’t a perfect replacement for in-person collaboration, it is about as close as we can currently get.

To learn more about these solutions and the processes of implementing them, reach out to the professionals at MSPNetworks by calling (516) 403-9001.

As an owner of a small business, there are a whole lot of issues that you have to confront every day. Besides the normal issues, there are always situations that pop up without warning. When your business is small and more easily manageable, they are easier to steer one way or another When your business starts growing rapidly, however, turning things around can get more difficult. This can turn into roadblocks to progress. Today, we will look at some of the issues that a small business owner will encounter when their business grows fast.

How Big Is Your Business?

Entrepreneurs have a tendency to look to other business owners to find what works and what doesn’t. Of course, your business functions independently and will react its own way to any solutions you enact for its problems. Once you get to a point where your business has moved out of the tinkering stage and you’ve figured out the best way to move forward, you should have a pretty good idea about what to expect. With such a high percentage of businesses failing before they can see any substantial growth--or because of prematurely investing in your business’ growth--it is important to know where your revenue is coming from and how to forecast its continued expansion.

For the small business owner, this takes more than working in your business. It takes working on your business. Unfortunately, it is a luxury few small business owners have time for. That’s why you have to make time to do it and begin to delegate responsibilities early. That way you can spend more time making sure that your business is moving in the right direction rather than doing things that keep you from doing so. 

How IT Fits In

IT plays a huge role for small businesses, but as a business grows, it becomes even more imperative. This is because IT presents solutions to solve operational inefficiencies. All businesses feed off of their ability to produce goods and fulfill services in a timely manner. The more IT a business comes to depend on, however, the more IT your business will likely demand.  

Small businesses may start out with a server or two, but as it grows into a medium-sized company, the infrastructure demand will grow rapidly. That’s not to say that there will be a huge shift in the way that you use your IT as you grow. Most medium-sized businesses still utilize the same technology, just on a much, much larger scale. 

Management of Growth

Some entrepreneurs have a difficult time when their role shifts from team leadership to company leadership. In fact, many businesses see a plateau in growth due to a reluctance to innovate and properly delegate responsibilities. The fact is that once your business gets to a certain point, your main value should be leadership, not proficiency at completing role-specific tasks. In fact, if you are too involved in the day-to-day running of your business, and you have hundreds or even thousands of subordinates, things can get pretty dicey. It can even stall a business at a time when it should be advancing and looking to break into new markets and diversify its revenue streams.

The ability to hire people with complementary skills--and to trust those hires to do good by you--is an important part of business growth. Sad to say that most entrepreneurs favor hiring people that are like them, but the most successful companies work because they have the different perspectives needed to create products and services that people want, fulfil those roles efficiently, and know how to move business forward.

Lean on Outside Experts

Sometimes, when your business gets to the point where it isn’t functioning as a small business anymore, the best thing to do is to scale up or back. The easiest way to accomplish this is through outsourcing. There are people in all manners of work that you can lean on to do a job that you wouldn’t need a full-time employee for. These services typically come with favorable financial terms and can be contracted until they complete a job and then let go when they are no longer needed without the problems that accompany turnover in human resources.

At MSPNetworks, we work with small and medium-sized businesses as an outsourced company, and we believe that we provide substantial value through our managed IT services platform. If you would like to talk to one of our consultants about getting what you need to keep your business moving forward, call us today at (516) 403-9001.

If you are an entrepreneur, changing the way that you look at your business can be pretty difficult. Many businesses start out with not much more than a ray of hope, so if your business is doing well, you must be doing something right. When demand makes you think bigger, your technology spend becomes a major priority. Let’s take a look at some of the changes a growing business has to make. 

You’ll find that a lot of businesses succeed because the people running them are able to adapt to the challenges tossed their way. Whether that is learning from particular case studies or an intuition that makes you know you were made for this, you know that problems come from every angle. Technology smooths those angles out. Here are a few tools worth talking about:

Hosted VoIP

Voice over Internet Protocol, further to be referred to as VoIP, is a telephone system, sure, but really what it is, is a financial correction. Why continue to waste money that could be better spent advancing your business? A VoIP system is a telephone system that uses your company’s bandwidth to deliver enterprise level call, text, and conferencing services. 

A cloud-based, professionally maintained VoIP system can solve a lot of communications problems many could see with traditional phone systems. They include:

• Price - VoIP customers have the obvious cost reduction of eliminating their reliance on the telephone company. 
• Scalability - A VoIP system makes adding and removing lines easy. A new phone can be up and running within minutes. 
• Mobility - VoIP systems typically come with soft phone options that can turn any smartphone into a VoIP phone. 
• Options - Any option a traditional telephone system can have, a VoIP platform offers. With VoIP you can get comprehensive communications tools that can be integrated with your business’ other operational systems. 
• Hardware - Hosted VoIP systems typically use top-of-the-line hardware systems to ensure reliability. 

A new Hosted VoIP system covers a lot of your business’ communications and can be a great tool for the growing business. 

CRM

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an end-to-end piece of operational management software that can function as a liaison between a business and their customers or potential customers. The CRM comes in many forms but their purpose is always to streamline and facilitate action on the operational end and offer support on the consumer end. Some of the features found in the CRM include:

• Contact management 
• Lead management 
• Relationship tracking
• Account management
• Quote and purchase management
• Procurement/Vendor management
• Workflow automation
• Sales process automation
• Service automation
• Campaign management 
• Business analytics

...and more.

Why do you need these options? Because as your business grows, you will have less and less time to do all the things that need to be done. So as the amount of oversight that is needed to ensure that your sales team are doing the right things, your marketing team are doing the right things, your production staff are doing the right things, customers are getting value, and are properly supported when they don’t, increases, the reliance on automation will increase. The CRM automates a lot of the departmental interoperability, thus delivering an efficient and collaborative workflow that supports administration, staff, and customer, alike. 

The CRM’s tools can be combined with payroll software, supply chain management software, service delivery software, and more to provide businesses the resources needed to support a business’ end-to-end operations. Growing businesses need to focus on efficiency and opportunities, and one of the best ways to get opportunities is by having a significant web presence. 

Online Presence

Brand awareness is extremely important for modern businesses. In fact, it is right up there with convenience as the most important variable that consumers say plays into their decision to choose a product or service. With this in mind, having a web presence is more important than ever. Getting a website made isn’t enough anymore. Today’s businesses not only need to focus their marketing efforts locally using traditional methods, they also need to invest time and effort into their web marketing.

Many businesses have started using social media to start the conversation as it gives a business access to a customer base that they may not have access to in normal situations. The conversation that starts on social media by sharing knowledge via blogs and other pieces of content, responding to user problems with direct interaction, and promoting the good work that you do through case studies and other testimonials, can quickly become a great way to engage an audience that is looking for answers to their own problems. By linking your webpage to your social media accounts, you will increase traffic, which increases sales opportunities. 

If your business is growing, you need to get out ahead of it by accepting that investing in technology is the way to go. If you would like to talk to one of our expert IT consultants about the technology your specific business needs, call us today at (516) 403-9001.

A business’ budget is the biggest authority over it. As a result, each business needs to spend some time adjusting their operational investments to put itself in the best position to reach its goals… a process that a managed service provider’s help can make much simpler. Let’s review some ways that an MSP can help a business get that much more out of its investment into its IT.

To begin, let’s review how you can optimize your costs (particularly your IT-related costs):

• Digitizing and automating your processes to help eliminate waste and boost efficiency.
• Negotiations can be made for services and solutions, allowing you to reduce your costs.
• Streamlined and standardized resources enable more to be accomplished for a smaller investment.

A managed service provider can enable a business to do all three of these things. For instance, here are just a few services that can help you to optimize the technology-related costs that your business generates.

Vendor Management

Vendors are an important player in a business’ operations but interacting with them can take away from the time you need to spend on your other essential tasks. We can take care of these interactions for you, allowing your focus to remain upon your actual operations. This offers a few additional benefits too, as we likely already have experience working with these vendors and can therefore get some better deals with them on your behalf.

Proactive Maintenance

While technology is an insanely valuable tool for businesses, there is no denying that it comes at a high cost to these businesses as they implement it. In addition to the costs required to acquire and implement it, its maintenance can quickly introduce additional and unpredictable costs that significantly add to the total. The proactive maintenance that an MSP provides and the preemptive issue resolution that can be accomplished enables costs to be saved.

Cloud-Based and Remote Services

Today’s business technology is built in such a way that the services and solutions that are available can be more easily scaled to their needs. As a result, a wider range of businesses can use the tools that support healthy operations—with improved support tacked on—in a financially sustainable way. By working with us, these tools can be embraced and used in the most effective way. This ultimately delivers the most amount of value to the business possible.

With MSPNetworks on your side, your business can accomplish more without overreaching its capabilities. To learn more about how our services could help your business function better, give us a call at (516) 403-9001.

A lot of people aren’t aware that working from home is not a recent innovation. It can arguably be traced back over a million and a half years, when our ancestors would work relatively close to their dwelling places. Throughout our history, work has shifted away and back again to the remote methodology. Let’s look back through the years to see the progression of how people worked, based on the technology that was available.

Working from Home Was Largely the Norm

In the years leading up to the Industrial Revolution, especially in the medieval period and the Renaissance, working from home was how people worked. European peasantry lived in structures called “longhouses” with their livestock and workplaces contained inside with them. In fact, it wasn’t until 1760 and the Industrial Revolution that working someplace else was a common option.

Even then, factory managers often operated out of small buildings adjacent to the factory that were built to reflect many of the comforts of home.

The Shift to Office Work

The office as we know it today didn’t come around until the early 1900s, as technologies like electricity, telephony, and typing became available, with Ford Motor Companies adopting the now-traditional 9-to-5 workday in 1926.

By the 1960s, clerical work had taken over much of the job market, and with it, an intense obsession with productivity. Managers of the time kept detailed notes of how long it should take to carry out activities that today aren’t even considered. In case you were wondering, turning in your swivel chair should take you 0.009 minutes, as a guide from 1960 dictates. The cubicle, the epitome of removing distractions in the workplace, was first designed in 1968.

Technology Helped Encourage Remote Practices

However, in the 1970s, a variety of factors were introduced that made the prospect of remote work more appealing. For instance, rising concerns over the environment brought up the concept of remote work, and technology was developed that enabled remote productivity.

Once the Internet was introduced in 1983, remote work was considered a legitimate option again. With Wi-Fi’s development in 1991 and various professional and governmental innovations over the next few decades, we now have the means to support remote operations for so many—and thank goodness we do.

MSPNetworks is here to help you leverage the various tools that your business can use to support its operations on a remote basis. To learn more about these tools and how you can best use them today, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

While all a business’ technology solutions are important, some are bound to take priority over the others, especially when certain ones become an industry-wide focus. A recent survey evaluated the top concerns of small-to-medium-sized businesses for the coming year. The results of the survey identified a few telling trends regarding the priorities that SMBs hold now, and for good reason.

Techaisle, a market research and industry analysis organization, collected and consolidated data to identify where SMBs and small businesses specifically saw their biggest business issues and their technology challenges and priorities. Let’s bear down specifically on the answers provided by the small businesses to see if your internal priorities and concerns match up to theirs.

Issues

According to the survey, a small business’ largest concerns are all what one would generally expect of any business. Here they are as the survey identified them:

1. Attracting and retaining new customers
2. Increasing profitability
3. Increasing business growth

These were the highest priorities for the survey’s respondents. The areas of least concern, as the survey identified, were: 

1. Improving workplace productivity
2. Improving effectiveness of sales and marketing
3. Focusing on new markets

Oddly enough, these areas of lower concern could directly benefit the efforts of their top concerns if perhaps prioritized more… but I digress.

Priorities and Challenges

Speaking of the priorities that the surveyed small businesses presented, the trends therein were exceptionally clear. Nearly as clear, is how directly these priorities line up with the IT challenges that these businesses face.

Here are the top four priorities and challenges, respectively:

1. Cloud / Cloud security
2. Mobility solutions / Customer experience
3. Collaboration / Maintaining current IT infrastructure
4. Managed services / Budget constraints

What this tells us is that businesses largely have the right idea of how they can use information technology to help address their biggest concerns. By adopting relatively new approaches to IT services and their delivery of them, like cloud solutions and managed services, businesses can better increase their profitability and scale upwards through bringing in more people to sign on.

The IT challenges that the surveyed businesses specified are also well-managed by implementing precisely what they have prioritized. It makes sense that, with cloud ranking as their number-one priority, cloud security is correspondingly elevated. Similarly, with customer service standards to uphold, the ability to collaborate with the rest of the team needs to be a priority.

Finally, the budgetary limitations and the maintenance requirements play even more deeply into the adoption of managed IT services, which help relieve both concerns for businesses.

There’s a lot more that a managed service provider can deliver to a business, and we’d be happy to discuss it with you further. If you have any more questions or want to learn more about managed services and what they entail, give the professionals at MSPNetworks a call. Reach out to us today at (516) 403-9001.

With the COVID-19 pandemic causing businesses to rethink their operational strategies, many businesses have had to make a quick digital transformation. Many businesses have accomplished this before the stay-at-home orders, but with employees working from home, we thought this was the perfect time to take a look at four tools businesses can use to improve their work-from-home strategies. 

Analysis, In Real Time

Making prudent and qualified decisions is more important now that it has ever been before. To be able to make informed decisions, many SMBs are looking to their analytics platforms. By being able to look at how aspects of your businesses are functioning in real time, you can quickly change strategies that need to be changed in order to keep your business running efficiently.

Additionally, many analytic systems can be structured near the edge of an organization’s computing network, giving them more insight into how data is flowing in and out of their network.

Other benefits include:

• Managing location data - Directs decision makers’ strategies by determining the relevant data for multiple locations.
• Anomaly detection - Helps decision makers detect outlying data sets to avoid impulsive decision making. 
• Improved marketing - Assists decision makers to make decisions based on demand when it otherwise wouldn’t be noticed.

Voice Over Internet Protocol

VoIP is one of the most useful tools for teleworkers. It provides strong communication options, highlighted by an enterprise-grade telephone system, for pennies on the proverbial dollar. Additional available options that can help remote workers such as instant messaging, text messaging, and audio and video conferencing make VoIP a powerful tool for businesses looking to sustain levels of productivity with workers out of the office. 

Automation

One of the best tools for cutting costs is process automation. A lot of businesses are trying to effectively identify processes within their workflow where they can automate mundane or repetitive tasks. By having the type of consistency automation brings to these types of tasks, businesses can utilize their human resources on more revenue-building assignments.

Tasks that can be automated include:

• Tasks that involve moving information around
• Frequent and mundane, but necessary tasks
• Tasks that frequently interrupt focus on business-critical tasks

Making the investment to automate parts of your business will assuredly save your organization money. Best yet, by automating these tasks now, once operations return to normal, you will keep seeing the cost savings you do today. 

Online Sales

There are a lot of businesses that have implemented some semblance of ecommerce prior to this event, but if you haven't, or if you have a limited ecommerce platform, you could see a major bump in revenue from investing in your ecommerce platform. In retail, companies are seeing double and even triple times the sales through their ecommerce solution than they did only a few short weeks ago. Prioritizing your online sales will go a long way toward keeping revenues up while your storefront is closed.

For the small business these can be lean times. Knowing what technologies and strategies to implement will go a long way toward getting you through this period. For more information about technology and how it can work for your business during the COVID-19 period, call MSPNetworks today at (516) 403-9001. 

With the COVID-19 outbreak forcing businesses into unenviable situations, it’s probably not surprising that business owners and decision makers are looking at what expenses they need to cut in order to keep their businesses afloat. Today, we’ll discuss the trends we are seeing and how managed IT services can be a godsend in situations like this.

Inevitable Cuts

While technology has helped millions of businesses from all over the world stay relevant during the pandemic, we’re seeing that IT is one of the elements of a business that is seeing the most spending reduction. After all, most businesses have to cut some costs just to make everything work. Furthermore, analysts are saying that after the outbreak ends, the remaining recession will actually cut IT expenses by two or more percent for the next year. For an industry that has seen spending rise by five or more percent for each of the past eight years, that is problematic.

To sustain profitability businesses will need to free up as much capital as they can during times like this, and many businesses including ones that operate in the hospitality and manufacturing industries are already seeing massive declines in revenue. This suggests that their 2020 and 2021 spends will probably be less than their 2019 spends. 

This means that many businesses will be cancelling their planned technology projects, especially if they are non-essential. They are using this capital to improve their liquidity and to fund the transitions necessary to support their newly remote workforce. 

Telework and How Managed IT Services Can Help

If your business is looking to make some cuts to your operational technology, choosing the right IT service provider can be a great solution. Not only will you be able to maintain your current IT infrastructure, but a managed IT service provider (MSP) can help you find and implement the solutions you are going to need to get through this situation. 

Let’s start with the remote workforce. Before the pandemic only around eight percent of full-time workers were able to have the flexibility to consistently work from home. With states mandating people stay at home during this situation, telework has exploded. If your company was one of the few that provided telework options before the stay-at-home orders hit, you probably have had a much easier transition to supporting a completely remote workforce. Most businesses, however, didn’t, and are seeing that setting this up properly isn’t terribly cheap.

The challenges of supporting a staff that works remotely aren’t necessarily the same as you would have envisioned. Many businesses didn’t provide the work-from-home flexibility out of the fear that they would lose substantial amounts of productivity (and therefore revenue). While this is still somewhat of a concern, most workers that work remotely understand what their responsibilities are and go above and beyond to ensure that they aren’t the weak link. It's been said multiple times over the past several weeks, but if you have an employee that does not work well from home, it's a pretty good bet that he/she wasn't working that well from the office, either. 

One consideration that does have to be made, however, is how to secure your endpoints and data-in-transit. If this wasn’t already a main consideration of your disaster recovery policy, it will be now. Working with remote access and virtual private networks can go a long way toward mitigating the risk your company will see. An MSP can quickly help you find solutions that will not only keep your data safe and protect your existing infrastructure, it can provide you with new and affordable tools to leverage to keep your business compliant of the regulations your business falls under. 

What’s more, with the use of a state-of-the-art monitoring and management platform, the trustworthy MSP continuously monitors your network and infrastructure to ensure that everything is working properly, efficiently, and securely. In times like this, when there are files coming in and flowing out of your network, knowing that you have professional technicians versed in contemporary knowledge of threats and inefficiencies, alike, can be a huge benefit for your business.

Finally, an MSP does all this (and more) for a fraction of the cost of paying an onsite IT department (who would be working from home right now anyway). An MSP will help you reduce downtime, keep your network and infrastructure working effectively and securely, and do it for a static monthly cost. This allows you to cut your IT support costs and have a number that won’t change from month-to-month.

If you would like more information about how managed IT services can help your business in this time of crisis call MSPNetworks today at (516) 403-9001.