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By the DynaSis Team

In his recent article, DynaSis President and Founder Dave Moorman detailed how modern, up-to-date technology minimizes risk. This was a “broad strokes” piece, so he focused on big picture items, such as how high availability reduces the risk of business loss from outages, and how robust security mitigates the risk of—and damage from—cyberattacks. The article, “Technology Outcomes Every C-Level Executive Should Expect,” is a great, quick read if you haven’t downloaded it yet.

To compliment Dave’s efforts, we wanted to drill a bit further into this issue. When you really examine how businesses operate today, it is amazing how much modern technology is minimizing risk. Consider, for example, a company whose operation is reliant on a functional, predictable supply chain.

A recent survey found that mitigating risk is the single biggest challenge—and one of the highest priorities for—supply chain executives. When a company relies on trading partners that may be located around the world, technology can play a crucial role in fostering better collaboration and information exchange to keep executives abreast of supply chain efficiency. Automation technologies, including not only manufacturing, packaging and handling automation, but also information automation, such as shipping delay notifications, are further improving the efficiency and visibility of the supply chain. None of these advantages were available a few decades ago.

Of course, not every company lives or dies by its supply chain (even though most require supply chain reliability at some level). For all firms, there are other specific examples of how modern technology helps to minimize risk. Following are some of our top picks:

• Number One is now the collective ecosystem of network and infrastructure security (including network hardware and device monitoring/management, virus blocking, spam filtering, intrusion detection, firewall monitoring and management, and remote access management). Through these modern systems, firms mitigate the risk from external threats.
• Number Two is systems optimization—keeping hardware and software updated, including monitoring/applying necessary system changes, modifications and upgrades. These processes reduce the downtime that destroys productivity and impacts sales, which are two of the greatest risks to company performance.
• Number Three is backup and recovery technology, which ensures a firm replicates its digital assets on a timetable that suits the company’s risk and then can access those assets readily in the event of a major outage. This technology is crucial to business continuity.
• Number Four is desktop and device optimization, which goes beyond securing and managing access (included in Number One) to ensuring workers have the tools to be productive and satisfied. Risk comes in a variety of forms, and the risk of losing star employees due to technological inadequacy is very real now with the younger, tech-centric generation who are taking the helm.

Technology also reduces risk in a million others ways, from ensuring employees and executives receive urgent messages (mobile messaging) to helping organizations hire more safely (Internet, social and news media searches). The list goes on and on.

When you think about it, there are very few aspects of today’s corporate environment that are not improved by, and even dependent upon, technology. The question then becomes, how effectively is your firm leveraging this gift? No matter where your firm stands, in terms of technology adoption, we promise there are more improvements awaiting you.

About DynaSis

DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and midsized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.

By the DynaSis Team

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In his most recent article, “Technology Outcomes Every C-Level Executive Should Expect,” DynaSis Founder and President Dave Moorman details the three fundamental benefits of technology: increased productivity, reduced expenses and minimized risk. Dave does a great job of illustrating how technology achieves these goals, so for this article, we will just reiterate one truly vital productivity enhancer, and then give you the "freebies" we promised in the title.

Information technology (IT) has been helping employees and business owners execute tasks in half the time—or less—than it typically took them before PCs, the Internet and other major productivity enablers. That’s a given, so the question then becomes, how do they make that result even better? As Dave mentioned in his article, one of these enablers is availability, which is crucial to productivity in today’s business environment. If your systems are down all the time, it's a no-brainer that your productivity is being reduced. But, even the difference between 99% uptime (which sounds impressive to the uninformed) and 99.999% uptime is significant. (We covered this issue in more detail in our Availability blog, which you can read here to explore the topic further.)

At a 99% uptime level, you can expect 3.65 days of downtime per year. At 99.999%, you can anticipate 5.26 minutes. Of course, all that downtime might not occur during business hours, but if your business sells products or provides information online, or your employees work during off-hours or other time zones, your exposure increases significantly. Consequently, the easiest way for any business to increase productivity is to contract for the highest possible uptime, period.

Now, it's time for the freebies. Here are a few simple ways your business can start increasing productivity through technology without spending a dime.

Automated Reminders:  Ensure all your employees know how to use their calendar appointment and reminder functions and encourage them to use them. These are helpful for more than business meetings. Every time an employee doesn’t stop what they are doing to accomplish a forgotten task on a rush basis, the result is increased productivity. Reminders are great for everything from prospect follow-ups to ordering supplies for the break room. They can also remind your personnel to leave the computer to move around, which might save their lives.

Once personnel start using reminders, they will see how valuable they can be. Encourage them to explore other systems and platforms that provide reminders—or allow advance scheduling of tasks—and make use of them, as well.

Get Smart:  Rather than falling back on “I Don’t Know” as the answer to a question, or emailing other personnel and waiting for a response, encourage employees to perform Internet research first. If a question involves confidential company information, this might not work, but in most other cases, it will. If a salesperson is preparing a quote, for example, and needs to know the company's employee count or annual sales volume, they can likely find that information in five minutes, online. Writing targeted search queries to exclude irrelevant results takes a little practice, but there might be a search guru in your office that can teach others.

Leverage Other People’s Work

One of the most valuable aspects of technology is its ability to make solutions available to others inexpensively. From better financial tracking and management to faster presentation development with pre-built components, there are a multitude of “software as a service” (SaaS) programs that make your business efforts more productive—and in some cases, more impressive as well.

Many of these are inexpensive or even free. For faster, better presentations, for example, try Prezi, which offers a lot of content at no charge. For more ideas, check out this list of business-boosting technology tools from Inc.com.

About DynaSis

DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and midsized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.

The Challenge

With his IT vendor unable to support his company’s needs or ensure the uptime his workers required, Courtesy Finance President William P. Anderson knew his firm needed a change. One of Anderson’s top concerns was the security of the sensitive financial and customer information that his firm stores—and for which it must meet strict regulatory compliance – so an important requirement was the restricting of access to corporate resources, making available to each employees only that information needed to perform their jobs.

Having previously spoken with DynaSis's Vice President of Managed It Services Chas Arnold, Anderson decided to give DynaSis a call.

The Solution

After evaluating the situation, the DynaSis team recommended a cloud-based model, and Anderson liked what he saw. To secure his corporate assets against accidental exposure, the team recommended the DynaSis Business Cloud, through which users access cloud-hosted apps and data through a secure online portal that works on any browser. The plan called for DynaSis technicians to migrate the resources to cloud servers hosted at DynaSis’s state-of-the-art, redundant data center. The technicians would also upgrade eight firewalls to increase network security from all office locations and transition the firm’s hosted Exchange email to the secure environment of Microsoft Office 365.

To ensure uptime and robust support for company personnel, DynaSis recommended deploying 24 new desktop PCs to replace older equipment at Courtesy Finance’s nine locations in Tennessee and Georgia. DynaSis would also provide 24/7/365 user support and network management, ensuring continuity and uptime in the offices. To showcase the new solution, DynaSis generated a mock version of the Business Cloud portal and invited company personnel to try and break through. When his employees were stumped—Anderson was ready to proceed.

The Implementation

DynaSis engineers created a parallel environment so Courtesy Finance users could experiment with the system before the actual migration. DynaSis then performed the live cutover at night, switching everyone to the virtual server and deploying the new portal on all the PCs in a single effort, resulting in virtually no production downtime at all.

The Result

Anderson says he’s glad he made the switch. “We are a customer-facing company, and when customers walk in the door, we cannot help them if the computers are down,” he says. “With the new solution, our prior issues with support and reliability have gone away. Atlanta has a lot of IT providers, but many of them are just not that great. I have had a great experience working with DynaSis.”

After the migration was complete, users worked through the learning curve quickly and now “everyone likes it. We have had no major problems and minor issues are fixed remotely by the DynaSis support team, or they quickly talk our people through it.”

With the new solution, company personnel have total working flexibility when they travel. “We don’t need laptops anymore when we travel to our different offices as everyone can sign on to any computer at any office in our company.”

A final benefit, Anderson notes, will be the savings he anticipates. “We already knew we had to replace the old PCs, but because we were migrating to DynaSis’s Business Cloud, the new PCs cost a lot less and are expected to last years longer. And with DynaSis’s fixed pricing, we are also saving money on a monthly basis.”

The Future

DynaSis is currently helping Courtesy Finance move to a virtual telephone system, Fonality, and Anderson says he is considering bigger projects for the future. “We are already talking about virtualizing our corporate office,” he says. “We could get it down to just a firewall and a switch!”

By the DynaSis Team

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DynaSis Founder and President Dave Moorman has released the second article in his IT for the C-Suite series, a collection of articles that details how business leaders and other C-level executives can use technology to improve business agility, security and productivity—and power the organization’s success. “Technology Outcomes Every C-Level Executive Should Expect” details the three fundamental benefits of technology from Moorman’s perspective, and explores in detail why these benefits are so important.

Increasing Productivity: Maximizing the use of technology to enhance the business effort and foster great customer service.

Reducing Expense: Hosting and maintaining a modern, properly managed IT infrastructure to reduce technology overhead and potentially shrink the organization’s ownership and management footprint for both technology and physical space.

Minimizing Risk: Implementing a cloud-based model to make it statistically impossible for corporate assets to be destroyed or displaced by a single event business.

Moorman illustrates his point by briefly discussing some of the world’s great business success stories—entrepreneurs who created an incredibly successful business model by relying almost exclusively on technology.

Backed by credible statistics and reports, Moorman offers solid advice on how technology helps business leaders achieve these three goals, and why it is so essential for them to place appropriate emphasis on technology. He also helps them envision how they can start leveraging technology to realize the advantages discussed in the article.

All of his advice, in this article and beyond, is designed to help even the most traditional operation become innovative and extraordinary—not only enjoying success today, but establishing the competitive advantage that is vital to ongoing business development and value.

By following the advice in Moorman’s article, C-level executives can help transform their operations into what Moorman calls “the Modern Business”—One whose leadership “embraces and leverages technology to deliver targeted, advantageous outcomes in the organization.” As he notes in this article, Moorman views technology not merely as an enabler, but literally as the fulcrum that provides leverage for success.

It’s a great read, and we hope you enjoy it! To download the PDF, use the link above, or click here.

About DynaSis

DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and midsized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visitwww.dynasis.com.

By the DynaSis Team

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In May 2014, a Bitglass survey noted that only eight percent of organizations had adopted Microsoft’s Office 365. All we can say is, “What a difference 18 months makes.” In January 2015, Office 365 became Microsoft's fastest growing commercial product ever, with the number of Office 365 commercial seats in use nearly doubling in the fourth quarter of 2014, compared to 2013.

In August, the media announced that Office 365 had overtaken Google’s productivity suite in adoption. Now, according to one recent survey, Office 365 is the most widely used business cloud application of any type, surpassing even cloud giants like Salesforce.com.

This is exciting, but the numbers are based on Microsoft licensing figures, which don’t always tell the whole story. At DynaSis, we have worked with numerous business leaders who license Office 365 with high expectations and then discover the challenges of migrating to the product completely. Email migrations, especially, are a big issue.

The good news is that with proper planning and execution, migrations to Office 365 can be not only complete but also nearly seamless. Over the course of a few hours, properly trained technicians can deploy Office 365 on dozens—or hundreds—of desktops. Email migrations can be clean and accurate enough to maintain compliance requirements. It’s all a matter of how the firm goes about the process.

To ask yourself if your firm has the expertise to tackle an Office 365 migration, consider these key tasks beyond selecting the most appropriate model for Office:

• Determine which versions of on-premise Office are running and who is using them. Decide if everyone is a migration candidate.
• Evaluate the need for and schedule/perform hardware upgrades to run the newer products.
• Document email accounts and confirm which ones should move to Office 365. Determine if web-based accounts should remain open and accessible individually (Office 365 will sync with rather than replace them) or if the users should migrate to Office 365’s email service completely. Back up the email stores and import them into Office 365. Notify all contacts of new email addresses, if appropriate.
• Install the on-premise versions of applications on user’s machines and devices (up to five per user) and ensure everyone can access them.

Not only is implementing Office 365 more involved than most organizations realize, but ongoing operation is also not hands-off. Companies must plan for post-migration Help Desk support, which includes not only answering questions but also resetting passwords, setting mailbox and/or folder permissions, and more.

With 48% of enterprises now using cloud-based productivity and email products, there is no doubt that the future of business productivity apps lies in the cloud. Companies shouldn’t hold off on adopting Office 365 due to fear of complexity and problems. Rather, they should prepare for it in advance and ensure all technical support resources, in-house or outsourced, are up to the challenge.

About DynaSis

DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and midsized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.

By the DynaSis Team

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In the current corporate landscape, business continuity requires ongoing access to important company files, no matter what. No longer are customers willing to wait a week to receive a quote for a job or to have their order confirmed. The world operates in real time, and customers expect the businesses with which they work to do the same.

This need is leading many business owners to rely on real time data storage solutions that could actually hamper their business continuity in certain situations. To illustrate this point, let’s consider Dropbox—one of the most popular file storage services on the planet. Dropbox is an inexpensive way for organizations to store and share files among employees, customers and other authorized individuals. However, Dropbox has serious limitations from a business continuity perspective.

Dropbox has an easy-to-use mechanism to help users recover deleted files—or restore older versions—for up to 30 days (up to a year with Dropbox for Business Accounts). It also has redundant servers protecting customer data in the event Dropbox itself experiences a server failure.

However, for company personnel to make the most effective use of Dropbox, they must sync some or all company files to their local computing devices. To do this, during setup they tell Dropbox what data they want to store and sync locally. Most users share and sync folders rather than individual files, and these can become enormous over time as other users add files to them.

If local devices lack enough storage to stay in sync, Dropbox will stop syncing and prompt the users to reevaluate their Dropbox allocations, a process that wastes time and drains productivity. When users don’t have time or knowledge to manage those allocations, many will save their files locally, planning to upload them to Dropbox later. When that doesn’t happen, the entire system falls apart, along with any pretense of having a complete backup.

Second, most file storage and sharing services such as Dropbox (and Google Drive) do not offer end-to end-security. Files stored with them are encrypted on those servers, but they're not locally encrypted on the computers where they originate before being synced to the cloud, which also means they are not encrypted during transit. If a hacker has access to a user’s account or has penetrated the corporate network, he or she could easily steal company data unless the firm is using local encryption, which is a rarity.

The advanced file backup solutions offered by companies such as DynaSis will eliminate both of these challenges, and they can incorporate on-demand file access and sharing, as well. Productivity is maximized, and concerns about local PC and backup continuity are resolved.

In today’s threat laden environment, data protection is king, and ensuring it is appropriately secured and replicated is essential. We’re not saying that companies should avoid online file storage and sharing. Rather, we’re suggesting that business owners should work with a competent IT advisor that can help them determine exactly which file storage, sharing and backup solutions are right for their environments.

About DynaSis

DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and midsized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.

By the DynaSis Team

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Although small and midsized businesses (SMBs) were a bit late to the cloud party compared to larger enterprises, several research reports indicate that SMB decision makers are now embracing the cloud enthusiastically. As we might expect from overworked, budget-limited business owners, they are expressing a preference for “bundled” cloud services, whereby an SMB can have its email, applications, data storage (servers) and security united under a single service with a single provider.

Such a solution makes complete sense from the SMB business perspective. Not only is it easier and faster to deploy the cloud with a unified solution, but company personnel enjoy access to business-critical applications and data without the bur­den of IT infrastructure support. Furthermore, the bottom line gets a boost from a fixed, pay-as-you-go model, including converting IT costs to an operating expense and eliminating infrastructure and software upgrade expenses.

So popular has this approach become among SMBs that a survey of 1,300 SMBs, conducted by Coleman Parkes Research, found that nearly 70 percent of SMB decision makers prefer to receive their cloud services as a bundle. SMBs expressed even greater support for having all communication-related services united. Among those surveyed, 80 percent supported the idea of receiving a single monthly bill from one provider for both cloud environment and telecommunications services.

So, what does a “bundled” cloud solution look like? Optimally, it would be a fully managed, cloud-based IT platform with the following features and functions:

• Corporate data, email and applications hosted at world-class, ultra-secure, compliant data centers, ensuring best-practices security for all corporate assets.
• Company personnel would be able to access corporate assets, 24/7/365, from a secure online portal that ensures security in transit from the cloud to the user. With no data stored on user desktops and devices, endpoint security will also be assured.
• The provider would guarantee system uptime of 99.999%.
• The provider would include 24/7/365 IT support for all users, in addition to monitoring and maintaining the cloud-based corporate assets.
• Space allocations would be dynamically managed to ensure users always had enough storage.
• All corporate data and applications would be mirrored to a separate, secure server for disaster recovery purposes.
• Migrations and subsequent updates and upgrades would be actively managed by the provider to eliminate unplanned downtime and inconvenience for company personnel.

Providers such as DynaSis offer solutions that meet all of these critieria, giving SMBs the freedom to walk away from IT burdens and headaches, forever. As SMBs realize the potential of these offerings, we expect a large percentage will move from supporting the concept of a unified cloud solution to actively using one. In essence, all-in-one cloud hosting is the best way to realize the core value proposition of the cloud, which is to deliver high-value applications and data securely, anytime, anywhere and on any device.

About DynaSis

DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and midsized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.

By the DynaSis Team

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The technology world is filled with inscrutable acronyms, but two that seem to really confuse our customers are RPO or RTO – Recovery Point Objective versus Recovery Time Objective. Both metrics are crucial to data and system backup and recovery – and by correlation, to business continuity. Unfortunately, and not surprisingly given the confusion, business owners often don’t realize the importance of these two KPIs (key performance indicators) until their company has lost business or been placed at risk after a system outage.

When firms contract for backup or disaster recovery/business continuity services, they may assume their provider’s recommendation will meet their levels of risk. They may not ask the right questions to ensure sufficient protection. In reality, the level of data loss tolerance after a technology outage varies from company to company, and even from department to department within a single firm. There are ways to address these differences, but the time to consider them is before an outage, not afterward.

To get started, let’s explore these acronyms and why they are absolutely crucial for business survival. To the list we will also add MTO (Maximum Tolerable Outage), a less-commonly used KPI that is perhaps the most important of all.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO): This number reflects your goal for how quickly you would like to restore access to corporate data, applications, email and other IT systems after an outage. Could you wait a week and not suffer business losses or damage to your corporate reputation? Alternately, would you prefer to give personnel instant access to applications, data and email, perhaps through a secure portal on a computer or mobile device? Perhaps your level of risk tolerance lies somewhere in between?

Recovery Point Objective (RPO): This figure reflects the most recent point to which company data and applications would be restored after a data or system disruption or failure. Backup and disaster recovery solutions create periodic “snapshots” – mirror images of the assets being monitored by the solution. The most advanced systems take snapshots every few seconds, while others take them every few minutes, every hour, daily or even weekly. In the event of an irrevocable server or system crash, that lapse after the last snapshot is the amount of data you would lose forever.

Maximum Tolerable Outage (MTO): This KPI indicates the longest amount of time your business could be disrupted by loss of access to your data, email and applications before it would constitute a “disaster” for your business operations. Calculating your MTO is the first step in determining your data loss tolerance. Many business owners are surprised when they honestly consider this issue and realize how short of an outage their business could tolerate.

Calculating these metrics — called a Business Impact Analysis — is beyond the scope of this article, but we will discuss that process in the future. Many firms discover there is no “magic number” that will suit the entire organization. A company might be able to survive without a week’s worth of payroll data but wish to retain as many email messages and customer purchase orders as possible.

Fortunately, there are solutions that can accommodate different RPOs and RTOs within the same organization. Technology providers such as DynaSis have the tools and expertise to help business decision makers calculate their data loss tolerance accurately and eliminate unpleasant surprises when an outage occurs.

About DynaSis
DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and midsized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.

By the DynaSis Team
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Due to the rising cost of breach remediation, including potential fines, penalties and lost customer goodwill from data theft, cybersecurity experts are now looking at “cyber risk” in a new light. Today, the riskiest threats aren’t necessarily those that do the most system damage. They are the ones that expose a company to the most liability. For example, an attack that reconfigures software or deletes data might be expensive to remediate, but its total damage footprint will be less than having thousands or even hundreds of confidential records stolen. And, because profit is now the central motive of the vast majority of threats, theft or fraud-based activities are a component of nearly every attack.

Exacerbating the situation, 2014 saw the continued development of Malware as a Service (MaaS). Like the cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) programs – from Salesforce to Dropbox – that are popular with consumers and businesses, MaaS is highly intuitive, sophisticated and able to serve many users at once.

Essentially, companies are producing and packaging these products and services and selling, leasing or subcontracting them to others, making it easier than ever for criminals to stage complex and highly evasive multi-stage attacks. Other are customizing malicious source code on a contract basis for their own and others’ benefit.

These companies and individuals are also sharing information to enhance each other’s capabilities. There is no “competition” among malware authors that prevents information sharing. All of them have the same goals and all can profit individually from their attacks.

Finally, the development of detection-evasion techniques is also accelerating. Given that a successful threat actor only needs to focus on one or two evasion techniques to deploy a threat capable of breaching many organizations’ defenses, firms that rely on outdated security solutions are operating with a false sense of complacency - and putting their firms at extreme risk.

In such a landscape, organizations must constantly enhance their security postures to counter this evolving threat environment. Furthermore, the IT teams that work on corporate security, whether they are in-house or outsourced, must have very high-level skill sets that are continually updated. Integration with an advanced threat detection resource that continually scans the globe for new threats - and a mechanism for automatically updating whatever solution is in place - is also vital.

Currently, the courts are taking a dim view of companies that fail to adequately protect confidential assets and thereby expose other, unwitting individuals to risk, as well. Taking steps now to implement a comprehensive, advanced, largely automated security solution is the surest way to protect your firm, your assets and your customers and to sharply reduce the potential for unsurmountable liability.

About DynaSis

DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and midsized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.

With 74 percent of organizations either using or planning to adopt BYOD*, (bring your own device), the days of companies issuing corporate devices are coming to an end. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2017, half of employers will actually require personnel to provide their own devices.

If enterprise mobility is no longer defined (and secured) by device selection, what does the future of mobility look like? Increasingly, progressive organizations are moving away from a model where employees access a handful of corporate assets (most commonly mobile email) on their smartphones. Rather, as we discussed in our recent article, “Moving Your Business to the Cloud: Three Top Reasons Why the Time Is Now,” true corporate mobility, today, affords secure employee access to a much broader array of corporate resources on any device, at any place and at any time.

To support full mobile productivity, companies now enable users to access and work with data, email and productivity applications. In other words, a district manager should be able not only to view an Excel spreadsheet but also to run analytics on it and generate a report. A salesperson should be able to pull up a contract on his or her tablet and allow a customer to sign it, onscreen, and then submit it to the finance department for processing with a single click.

These types of activities foster significant productivity gains, but they also require organizations to engage in effective application and content management, and to secure both email and productivity applications. In this environment, and especially with BYOD in the picture, the blanket approach to securing an entire device simply doesn’t work.

Rather, such an environment requires companies to take a much more granular approach to mobility management. To assist in this effort, specialized Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) tools have been developed. They allow organizations and/or their IT partners to manage and secure mobile and cloud-based (software as a service, or SaaS) apps and their data, and to encrypt and protect all data transfers between a device and the corporate network and servers. These tools also allow organizations to create and apply policies selectively based on type of user (e.g. employee or contractor), job description and requirement, level of authority and many other variables.

This maturation of enterprise mobility is enabling worker behaviors most of us wouldn’t have dreamed were possible only 10 years ago. In the most advanced mobility deployments, retail employees roam around stores, using tablets to provide inventory checks for customers and then taking payments for merchandise on the tablet, as well. Doctors consult and update medical records from the bedside of a patient. Technicians receive text alerts on their smartphones when company equipment experiences a problem and adjust their schedules to address the issue more quickly.

These are only a few examples of what mobility is doing for the workplace, today. The new era of mobility is incredibly exciting, and here at DynaSis, we are delighted to be part of it.

*Tech Pro Research, 2015