Coleman Technologies Blog

When shopping around for the right IT solutions for your organization, it’s important to consider these seven critical factors and make sure you have clear answers so you know exactly what you are getting yourself into.

What will it take to maintain it?

This is one of the biggest oversights that we see happen all of the time. A business purchases a brand new piece of equipment or some fancy software to help streamline operations, but they forget to take into consideration the upkeep costs.

Let’s use a common example – a car. When purchasing a car, you know you need to be aware of other costs associated with the purchase. You know every few thousand miles you’ll need to give it an oil change, check the breaks, and rotate the tires. Every year you need to get it inspected. You need to purchase fuel depending on how often you drive it. You need to have it insured. Suddenly the $20,000 Chevy Cruz feels more like a Corvette Z06 to your wallet.

Of course, if you don’t properly maintain your car, it will seriously reduce its life expectancy and bigger, more expensive issues will crop up.

The same goes for your IT. From virtually anything on your network ranging from servers to printers, your equipment needs to be properly maintained and serviced, and the maintenance doesn’t hit nearly as hard as an actual problem.

Ask your solution provider if they factor in maintenance and upkeep so it’s covered in your IT budget. For software, are there updates? Who’s responsible for testing and applying these updates? Who’s responsible for monitoring equipment to detect early warning signs of failure?

How we handle this:

Coleman Technologies takes a proactive approach to maintain your IT investment. We can monitor and maintain all of your computers, servers, and backups to ensure they run as smoothly as possible and the latest updates are installed. We don’t attribute our success to how many computers we work on, but how effective your IT actually is for your business.

Will it scale?

Speaking of success, what happens when you need to add a new employee to your roster? What about the next five, ten, or fifty employees? While not every IT solution can be scaled up indefinitely, it’s important to factor in your expected growth, and be ready for unexpected growth as well. If a remarkably good quarter drives you to add several new positions to the company, having to rethink and rebuild your entire network to accommodate is going to quickly chew through your profits.

While scaling might incorporate some costs, it’s important to have an idea of what that will look like per user, and how much growth your current solution can sustain.

How we handle this:

We truly hope you see growth, because as you grow, we grow with you. We want your IT to be a profit center and improve productivity. When we map out your network, we point out bottlenecks that might need to be addressed before adding new users into the mix.  We’re also able to give you an idea of what each new user will cost, and at what point in your growth you’ll need to rethink your solutions so they can be budgeted out.

Is there anything I can consolidate?

If so, it’s pretty likely your current IT provider didn’t see the full picture of your operations, or they were more in the business of selling you hardware than actually managing your IT. Many businesses need multiple applications running in tandem for their day-to-day business. This might include a Microsoft Exchange email server, a line-of-business application, a data storage/management solution, etc. Many solutions like this don’t need their own dedicated server to run, although they may have been proposed to you that way. Sometimes it might even save a little money in the short term to simply buy and install a new server for a new solution as opposed to upgrading the existing hardware to handle both tasks, but in the long run, consolidating your servers through virtualization can save your business on electricity costs, management costs, and overall support bills.

How we handle this:

Simple, if you are running multiple underutilized servers, we work with you to consolidate them. Depending on the situation, we might recommend it sooner rather than later, or we may suggest consolidating them during your next upgrade to budget for it, based on how effective the result is for you.

How quickly can I recover from an unexpected disaster?

Disasters come in many different forms, from hardware failures to natural disasters. If your office experiences a flood and the majority of your equipment is damaged, the main point of focus needs to be getting back on track as quickly as possible to prevent revenue loss. This might be a more extreme, less common type of disaster, but rapid recovery is imperative no matter the cause of the downtime.

The speed of your recovery depends primarily on how well prepared you are for a disaster. Is your data backed up? Is the backup recent? What type of storage media is the backup on – can it be restored quickly or is it a labor intensive process? Does your backup require specific hardware or can you get back on your feet with temporary equipment while a permanent solution is being implemented? There are a lot of factors to plan for in your business continuity plan.

How we handle this:

A major outage quickly becomes expensive, so we understand that speed is a major factor. We only recommend backup solutions that fully comply with your business continuity plan. Our backup solution utilizes several technologies that allow rapid restore times that aren’t dependent on specific hardware. In fact, if your server fails, the backup solution is able to take its place temporarily. In the event the backup device is lost in the disaster, a new one can be commissioned from the data center and overnighted to your office or temporary location.

Is my data protected from theft?

Ten years ago, keeping your data all in one place was relatively simple. Today, employees are using smartphones, tablets, and laptops to get their work done, and it’s increasing the perimeter of your IT footprint. You want IT support that understands this modern paradigm and can keep you in control of the security of your data.

How we handle this:

Although there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for data management, there are various policies and solutions to control data and access. From BYOD policies and device management to secure VPN solutions that let your users securely access files and applications from anywhere without carrying your data around.

We can also recommend security solutions that protect your data from dangerous threats and outside intrusions like viruses, malware, ransomware, and hackers. Most importantly, we manage and maintain these solutions to ensure they are consistently doing their job and protecting your assets.

What happens when my staff needs support or training?

New solutions require proper onboarding, training, and support. In order to see the value of a technology investment, your staff needs to know how to take advantage of it. Does your solutions provider simply handle the implementation and leave you with the user manual, or do they work with you and your team until you are comfortable? What happens when it breaks? What are the costs of support?

How we handle this:

Our professional technicians aren’t simply focused on the technology aspects of the solutions, but the user experience. We understand that a piece of hardware or software is pointless if it doesn’t serve a greater objective or make your job easier, and we’re dedicated to that end result.

We also don’t leave you high and dry after the solution is in place. Your staff is able to reach out to our helpdesk for technical support, and you can utilize your dedicated account manager as a virtual CIO for managing the lifecycle, budget, and growth of your IT.

What is your SLA (Service Level Agreement)?

Have you ever had to call your cable company or Internet Service Provider to come to your home and fix your Internet, and they tell you they will be there sometime next Thursday between the hours of 10am and 4pm? We hate that too. If your current computer provider treats you the same way and not like a priority, they are potentially costing you a lot of lost time, productivity, and revenue.

We work with you to set clear expectations for response times for the various types of issues you face, ranging from non-critical, critical, and emergency support. There aren’t any hidden loopholes or surprises – we take your business very seriously and consider downtime an emergency.

If you are tired of feeling like you aren’t a priority by your current IT provider, we encourage you to give us a call at (604) 513-9428 and let us give you an example of what Coleman Technologies can do for your business.

Data Value in Business
The first thing that you need to know is that losing data is a very big deal. In fact, there is an entire field of study created to deal with this very issue. Called infonomics, this can put a dollar value on an organization’s data. While some organizations continuously deny that data has a tangible value, it is becoming more evident than ever that those organizations (typically insurance and accounting) have a vested interest in data’s value remaining intangible. Every other business can be sure that their data has monetary value.

With the acknowledgement that the analysis of organizational data can help businesses run a more efficient and profitable business, any standard enacted to properly evaluate this asset would be made to promote a strategy of organization-wide data security. If you need to justify spending capital on a data protection and redundancy strategy, you should be able to ascertain what the actual value your data has to your organization. A few ways you can value data include:

• How much capital would it cost to replace lost data?
• How much revenue is dependent on that data?
• How much money could you make by selling or renting the data you have?
• How much capital will you have to spend to protect this data?

However, you look at your organization’s data, it is an asset, and as those assets are compromised on your network, or removed from your network, you need to have a solution in place to get that data back.

Data Backup
The first step in any data recovery strategy is data backup. At Coleman Technologies, we believe that the best data backup strategy is to promote redundancy. In order to do so we promote a strategy that backs up data locally AND offsite. This presents options to make data recovery more efficient.

Our BDR service initially backs up your entire network. Since backing up an entire network will take a long time, and any downtime is extraordinarily costly, setting up a backup solution that protects the data you need without taking down the network at all, is important. Our BDR keeps data redundant on multiple hard drives and provides an organization with the much-desired data security it is looking for from a comprehensive solution.

Disaster Recovery
The first thing that has to be said is that the best data recovery strategy is one that never has to be used. However, data loss disasters can (and do) happen, leaving your business to pick up the pieces. The best way to do this is to have a dedicated disaster recovery platform in place that takes two crucial factors into account:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - The interval of time that might pass during a disruption before the amount of data lost exceeds the maximum threshold that your business can weather.
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - The duration of time within which data or business process must be restored after a disruption before it can be considered a complete break in continuity.

By thoroughly managing your disaster recovery program, your organization is sure to be able to get its data back--and its business’ processes up and running--to ensure that your business is able to sustain operational integrity. For more information about how to get a data backup and disaster recovery working for your business, call Coleman Technologies today at (604) 513-9428.

What is Breadcrumb Navigation?
As per the aforementioned fairy tale, breadcrumb navigation consists of a path leading home. In this case, home is the homepage. With breadcrumb navigation, you can more easily keep track of how you got to the current web page you’re on, as well as the path back to the home page. This path can typically be viewed at the top of the page. Each step includes a link that navigates back to a specific page.

Let’s say that you’re looking at a service page on a website. If the path you took leads back to the home page, you’ll see all of the pages in between in the breadcrumbs menu. For the sake of this example, let’s say the pages in between are the second menu item and the fifth menu item. It would look something like this:

Home > [Menu 2] > [Menu Item 5]

Since these breadcrumbs are links, you can click on any one of them to be brought back to that page. This lets you continue browsing with minimal chance of getting lost on the site trying to backtrack.

More Than Just Websites
You might notice that this navigation style is similar to the ones used in toolbars in file folders or files saved on your desktop. The reason is the same--it makes finding certain files easier at a later date. The location can also be shared with others who need to know where it is.

Breadcrumbs are typically meant for helping users with browsing and organization. Are there any other features out there you can think of that do the same thing? Let us know in the comments.

The first thing that should be mentioned is that, with all the threats out there, every business needs dedicated IT management. Many small businesses have tried to keep their crucial IT working properly through what is known as break/fix. The basic strategy of this is: when a part of your company’s IT infrastructure breaks, you get it fixed. This strategy has some merits for companies that don’t necessarily use enterprise-level, or complicated, IT solutions; but, no matter what their position is, when they rely on the break/fix strategy, downtime is going to end up being an issue. The average small business owner may not even consider this costly as much of the technology management services that you would call when your IT breaks (or starts acting up) is done onsite and only takes a short time to fix. However, it typically costs a pretty penny, and there is no telling if the problem will cause others, or come back again frequently.

The problem with this is that every minute that your IT is down, your organizational profitability is hindered. Say you run a small retail store and your point of sale computer goes down. You make the call to the computer repair company and they come within an hour and your computer is up and running in two. That’s two whole hours where you are scrambling around trying to figure out how to service your customers’ needs without the use of your most important computing system. If you are lucky, you will be able to keep your business open during this time, but often you simply cannot as many businesses not only have their register through their POS system, they also have their inventory system through it. When dealing with IT downtime your service will inevitably be hindered, and you may actually lose repeat customers because of the outage as word of mouth carries further than ever before as a result of social media.

IT Services

With Managed IT services, you’ll never have to shut your business down or deal with long stretches of downtime. This is because it is handled much differently. With an MSP looking after your business’ computers and computing network, you will know in advance if one of your computers is going to fail. Coleman Technologies brand of IT services proactively monitors your computers and network; and, using state-of-the-art software, is able to leverage its built-in and extremely innovative automation options to your advantage, effectively reducing your IT costs by keeping your systems up and running efficiently. The fact is that most of the problems the modern PC has can be remedied with dedicated monitoring and management.

It’s easy to see how our proactive monitoring service can present value. Your return is properly functioning technology, boosting profitability, and effectively cutting your IT support costs; but that is just the beginning. An MSP provides several other services that are designed to deliver value. One such service is our Backup and Disaster Recovery service. You may be thinking, “how could backup produce a significant return?” Not only is it part of the value-based approach, it also protects your business from data loss, a major problem for any business that depends on its data.

Data loss doesn’t just happen when a disaster hits your business, it can happen any day in a multitude of different ways. In fact, most data loss is a result of employee negligence. Many businesses also have to deal with strategic hacking and social engineering attempts that put data at risk. A majority of small businesses that deal with an event where they lose large portions of their data are out of business within the next fiscal year. This scenario is especially problematic when the data that is lost belongs to vendors and customers, since, for a small business, reputation damage is hard to rebound from.

MSP-offered backup and recovery typically comes in the form of a network attached storage device that is expanded with the use of cloud computing. All the data you need will be backed up initially. After your data is redundantly stored in multiple places, snapshots of the changes made to your organization’s data will be taken periodically to ensure that, if you are forced to restore, that you aren’t losing much data. Data snapshots can be completed as little as every 15 minutes, preserving your data and immediately boosting the potential effectiveness of your business’ continuity strategy.   

The value doesn’t stop there. MSPs typically also offer thorough network security practices to ensure that your network is protected. Outside of the comprehensive management you get with network and endpoint monitoring, you also will be outfitted with security solutions designed to ensure that if they don’t have access to the network and infrastructure, that they don’t get in, period. This is where the years of experience managing and maintaining business networks comes in. By knowing what to look for, and knowing where to strengthen security measures, your organization will deal with less downtime, essentially presenting you further opportunities for profitability.

Most MSPs also offer a vendor management service that is designed to keep clients from wasting time trying to juggle all their vendors. By handling your vendor relationships we are able to be a single point of contact for anything that you could need, saving you a lot of time. You can then focus on your business and not your vendors, which are relationships that tend to take up a lot of time. Moreover, with vendor management, you will get the solutions, services, and products you need at a price that works for you.

Additionally, most MSPs will also offer 24/7/365 help desk, so that if your organization does have problems, that it can get in touch with a remotely-connected technician immediately. Moreover, many MSPs also provide training resources that deliver information about industry best practices designed to keep security top of mind. If your staff is repelling threats instead of accepting them, it will go a long way toward securing your organization’s IT infrastructure and network.

Calculating Value

There is a lot a value in rolling out managed IT services, but how valuable is it to you? Well, there is no simple algorithm for this particular service. You could produce ROI totals for every service that your MSP provides for you then add them up, but that algorithm would get pretty long. Between the monitoring and maintenance, the network security, the vendor management, the backup and recovery, the around the clock support, the consultation, and the onsite support, you’re looking at a pretty significant amount of value from your monthly service agreement.

While it is hard to put a ROI on managed IT service delivery, people do try. There are managed IT ROI calculators all over the web. One of the easiest ways to do this is to estimate the revenue you generate by uptime and successful IT outcomes and compare it by the cost you pay for managed services. That will give you a rough idea about the value of your managed IT service.

Typically, the variable that most companies focus on when partnering with a managed services provider is downtime. As stated above, downtime is a business killer. Our strategy to deploying managed services is pretty simple: stop downtime from costing our clients’ money and marginalizing their success… and this strategy works! It takes committed and knowledgeable technicians, today’s best technology solutions, and clients that aren’t afraid to trust that we can deliver a valuable resource.

If yours is one such company, contact the IT professionals at Coleman Technologies inc today at (604) 513-9428.

“VoIP is Too Expensive”
Businesses often think that VoIP is more expensive than your typical telephone bill, but this isn’t necessarily the case. The purpose of VoIP is to actually reduce the costs of your telephone bill by eliminating unnecessary services and the costs associated with them. VoIP does this because it uses your Internet connection rather than a phone connection, meaning that you don’t have to have phone lines all over your office just to give each of your employees phones on their desks. All you need to use a VoIP solution is a headset or handset and a desktop/mobile app hooked up to the Internet.

“VoIP Isn’t Reliable Enough”
In reality, VoIP is only as reliable as your Internet connection. If your Internet connection isn’t reliable, then you have a problem as is, so why not use it as an opportunity to both improve connectivity and communications all in one?

“VoIP is More Trouble Than It’s Worth”
Considering that VoIP would be replacing your current telephone setup, it’s reasonable to suspect that the amount of effort put into this implementation would be considerable. However, that’s simply not the case--VoIP requires minimal setup, as it uses your existing network infrastructure. All you’re doing is connecting your phones to the Internet, which takes no time at all.

“VoIP Doesn’t Sound Good Enough”
VoIP often doesn’t sound any different from your typical phone line connection, and if it doesn’t sound as great as you want it to, chances are it’s (once again) an issue with your Internet connection--not necessarily anything wrong with the VoIP service itself.

“VoIP Isn’t the Right Fit”
VoIP can be the perfect fit for your business precisely due to just how customizable it is to your business’ specific needs. You can mix and match the additional features you desire to save money in the long run. All of the features from any old phone company would be a considerably larger investment, and some VoIP features aren’t even offered by your standard phone company in the first place.

VoIP is simply too good a solution to not implement or at least consider. If you want to hear more about VoIP, our IT professionals would be happy to assist you. To learn more, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.