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According to the World Economic Forum, millennials will make up 75% of our nation’s workforce by 2025. That statistic is important everywhere in the country, but in places like metro Atlanta, it becomes particularly important with our very low unemployment rate for technical and other highly skilled workers. Add to this the fact that businesses are moving here almost daily, and new ones are opening one after another. The talent base is in high demand.
If you are going to remain competitive for talented workers, especially those in virtually any field involving technology, you have to be prepared to give them the tools they deem necessary to do their jobs, including those that help your employees with working outside of the office. These are tools that a qualified managed IT services provider like DynaSis can provide you.
A recent article in Forbes showed that 87% of working millennials value the flexibility to work out of the office. If your talent isn’t allowed the flexibility to work off-premises at least some of the time, another company probably will offer them that opportunity. To accomplish this, they need to be able to access company data from their home computers, or even mobile devices, which is something that we here at DynaSis, a managed IT services provider, can accomplish for you in a cost-effective manner.
To keep millennials happy and keep them on the job, you need to prepare for them. Annecdotal reports tell us that they are far more likely to leave a job they don’t find truly satisfying than baby boomers who were taught that work wasn’t necessarily meant to be enjoyable…it was “work”. Typically, millennials have high expectations that many small to mid-sized companies may find hard meet, dangerously increasing the likelihood of turnover. If you can’t resolve this situation, you are apt to discover the best and brightest of your millennials seeking greener pastures.
So let’s take a look at how you can proactively deal with the type of situation, thus ensuring the stability of your workforce. If you are like most companies of this size, it is likely that you don’t have this expertise on staff so the engagement of a managed IT services company can be an excellent investment.
Step one to creating a workplace millennials will enjoy is establishing your current realistic technology position as a baseline, or, your starting point. A qualified, experienced managed IT services company can provide an IT and security assessment, usually on a complimentary basis, that will give you a clear picture of where your hardware and software are today, as well as a game plan to provide upgrades that will keep your people happy and efficient. The benefits of upgrading are numerous. You are allowing your people to be more effective and efficient, to provide better customer service, and enjoy their work days more, all of which lead to happier customers/clients, and strengthened bottom lines.
This type of assessment provides you with more than just a road-map to the future, you will also have inventories of all your equipment and software. You will see if you have equipment that is underutilized and you will see what equipment and software is out of support. You will discover vulnerabilities in your cyber security profile, and also discover newer and better ways to accomplish current tasks. You and your managed IT services provider can now begin to make intelligent decisions in developing realistic and dynamic plans for addressing the challenges of working with millennials. This assessment should also include reporting on the software you are using as well as the mobility and security of your entire IT network, as well as clearly benchmarking your network against current industry standards and trends.
By working with a reliable, experienced and reputable managed IT services company, you can use this information to plan for upgrades and improvements to allow you to meet the 24 x 7 x 365 access expectations of the younger members of your workforce, plus the collaboration tools that will make virtually every member of your team more productive. Your managed IT services company can also put together a cost effective plan for achieving these improvements over a timeframe that is financially acceptable to you.
And speaking of being cost effective, the right managed IT services provider will be able to include many, if not all, of these upgrades in a support contract that will provide your employees with 24 x 7 x 365 help desk support and field support, while usually keeping your IT costs the same as, or even lower than they are today.
One of the goals you should be looking at is embracing the use of mobile technology. For many companies, this advice may seem a bit outdated because who isn’t using mobile phones, laptops, and tablets? But true mobility includes the adoption of secure cloud based technology that allows the access we have been discussing, while also protecting your network, keeping your intellectual property, your financial records, your personnel files, and your customer data safe and secure. This is no small task and should involve expertise you will find with a quality managed IT services company like DynaSis.
Many forward looking companies that once frowned upon employees using their own devices for company work have accepted the fact that this is a growing trend and one that millennials embrace whole-heartedly. Simply put, they don’t want to carry two laptops and two smartphones. By offering partial reimbursement for the use of the employees’ devices, some companies have cut their own costs while providing a financial benefit to the worker. But a word of caution: these devices require the same high level of security as devices provided by the company. It’s vitally important that these devices are not only secured on a day-to-day basis, but can also be “wiped” clean remotely in the event of termination or resignation of employees. Again, this is something for the professionals at your managed IT services provider.
DynaSis is a managed IT services company, having provided these services for the small to mid-sized business community in the Atlanta Metro area since 1992. We provide complimentary IT and Network Security Assessments that will give you a clear picture into your current IT infrastructure and allow us to jointly create a plan to make sure you are fully protected while offering the latest mobile productivity to your employees. Contact us online or call us at 770-629-9615 for more information about how we can help your business attract top talent.
For the past few weeks, we have taken a look at disaster planning and recovery and this week, to wrap things up, we are presenting a “checklist” of best practices for your consideration.
The value of daily continuity, the ability to recover quickly from minor outages, must be taken into consideration when you quantify the cost of business continuity in general. Businesses that experience frequent downtime know that it can be expensive. If yours is a company that has seen repeated short-term downtimes, you are probably very well aware of this. If this is the case, you need to re-evaluate your RTO and RPO to ensure you are adequately recovering your business following events like this. Of course, you also need to look into why these events are repeating.
RTO: Recovery Time Objective – the amount of time it will take to restore lost or corrupted data.
RPO: Recovery Point Objective – the point in time to which you can afford to lose some data. In other words, can you afford to lose a week’s worth of data (not many companies can), a day’s worth, an hour, or none at all.
For companies whose goals are zero to very short recovery periods, they should be evaluating a move to managed IT service providers who will work under service-level agreements guaranteeing acceptable RPOs and RTOs for their critical applications. Under service-level agreements, you can even specify zero downtime for those critical applications.
It is probably not necessary for all your business applications to have the same RTO and RPO. Typically, you will want your email and business contacts to be recovered almost immediately, but some areas, such as accounting and inventory, can generally tolerate being down for several days. To recover quickly, this type of data can actually be stored in smartphones and other remote devices as alternate back-up solutions.
Included in recovery time must be the time required to upload data along with the application itself. Two examples:
1) a CPA firm may have to upload hundreds of complex accounting documents
2) an architect may have to upload a terabyte or two of blueprints and other drawings for his people to work with before they can be fully functional.
When all your research and calculations have been completed and plans for upgrading your disaster prevention and recovery strategy have been completed, make sure all your work is fully documented and stored. This information can be critical in resolving issues in the event of such a disaster, and for future upgrades, as well. No sense ever having to go back to “square one”.
Your backup and recovery process should be tested at least once a year. If this is beyond the technical capabilities of your in-house staff, a qualified managed IT support company should be hired to accomplish this.
A rule of thumb in the industry is this: the total cost of your disaster prevention and recovery program should not exceed the losses it is designed to prevent. You don’t spend $2 to save $1. But it does make sense to spend $.50 to save $1.
If disaster recovery and prevention is an area you would like to explore, give us a call. We have been providing managed IT support services to small to mid-sized businesses in the Atlanta metro area since 1992, and we would welcome the opportunity to answer your questions. Call us at 770-629-9615 or contact us online.
Zac Brown Collective, formerly known as Southern Ground, was experiencing a lack of attention and service to their complex IT environment from their previous Managed Service Provider. Harold Earls, President and COO of Zac Brown Collective, stated that they have a “super serve mentality”, and therefore they expect the same in return. They were not receiving this on a consistent basis.
Harold worked with DynaSis at his previous company before he was employed with Zac Brown Collective. Chas Arnold, VP of MIT Services, stayed in touch with Harold over the years after Harold switched companies and touched based often to see if he needed any help at his new roles.
When Chas heard that Harold was not happy with his current Managed Service Provider, he offered to have the DynaSis team run a Network & Cyber Security Assessment. The DynaSis team ran the Assessment and met with the Zac Brown Collective team to discuss all of their current IT pains and requirements.
The DynaSis team analyzed the results, reviewed the pain points and came up with a plan and recommendations for Zac Brown Collective. A detailed plan was put into place and solutions were designed to cover all of the specific requirements that Zac Brown Collective needed support for.
Harold said that he felt DynaSis was honest, transparent and detail oriented with their plan. With his past experience working with DynaSis and after reviewing the IT plan and recommendations they had in place, Harold knew that it was the right choice to move forward with selecting DynaSis as their Managed Service Provider.
“I had a great experience when I worked with the DynaSis team and Chas in the past at my previous company. After reviewing the plan that they put together for Zac Brown Collective, I had no doubt that their expertise and solutions were the right choice for us to move forward with,” said Harold.
DynaSis has been servicing Zac Brown Collective for multiple years and providing the level of “super serve mentality” that they were looking for. “Zac Brown Collective has a complex IT structure and DynaSis has done a great job at providing quality and consistent service to maintain their infrastructure,” said Harold Earls. “It is my experience that you get what you pay for and if you want the best you pay for the best and DynaSis fits that bill.”
Last week, in part 3 of this series, we took a look at creating a Business Impact Analysis to determine how much a serious data loss could cost your company, and how to determine how time – both in terms of how much data you could afford to lose and how quickly you would need to recover it – figures into your calculations. This week we are continuing our review of disaster prevention, recovery, and IT support with a look at just how much peace of mind is worth and next week we will finish this series with a check list of disaster recovery strategy best practices.
With all the information we have collected using the tools we have presented over the past three weeks, you can actively look at the cost of purchasing backup equipment, or at least know where you can locate it in an emergency, as well as the backup solutions and managed IT support company that you can call on when needed. You can evaluate cloud-based backups, some of which can be set for updates as often as every few minutes, and evaluate the recovery time. Recovery can vary from almost immediate, to hours, to days. You can install a system in which your most important files are recovered very quickly while others are restored over a number of days. The thing is, almost anything can be accomplished with today’s technology. The question you have to answer is: what do you really require and how much are you willing to pay for it?
What we suggest is taking a look at a worst-case scenario. Price out the equipment, tools, software and personnel you will require. Balance that against business losses that might be incurred if such an event takes place. Then look at options for less catastrophic events and analyze the downsides of drive crashes or local power outages. These are more easily resolved but only if you are prepared for them.
Vendors are important, but even more so will be an independent managed IT support company that will sort through the marketing hype that every company puts out and help you determine the equipment and software that is truly best for your company. Once you have worked through your options, you can make choices and move forward. A word of caution: all too often, companies go through the exercise of determining how they should prepare and react in the event of cyber intrusion, equipment failure, man-made or natural disaster, but fail to actually pull the trigger and spend the money necessary to implement that plan. Don’t be one of them.
Here at DynaSis, we have helped many companies create their disaster prevention and recovery plans. Most are surprised to learn that we are able to provide all the equipment they need with little to no money out of pocket by tying the cost of the equipment into a monthly IT managed support agreement that covers all the equipment, software, maintenance, help desk and field support they need for not only possible disasters, but for trouble-free, worry-free daily operations. They are also surprised to learn that this service usually costs no more than they are currently paying for IT, and often costs even less. Want to learn more? Give us a call today at 770-629-9615.
Over the past couple of weeks, we have looked at disaster recovery from the perspective of RPO, RTO, and MTO. Then we took a look at creating a Business Impact Analysis. This week, let’s evaluate how “time” figures into your calculations of potential losses, how to determine how much time you can afford to lose, and how managed IT services can help. This is an exercise that should involve all aspects of your business and you should be asking this question to at least one person from every department: “How long can we be down before the loss of critical systems starts to have a serious negative long-term impact on our business?”
The answers may vary by department and, depending on the department and depending on your business, the answer may be zero acceptable downtime. Solutions for zero downtime do exist. These solutions allow for immediate transition to a secondary yet fully functional and operational infrastructure from a remote location. Needless to say, back-up like this is expensive, but for some businesses, it is imperative to their survival. Most businesses will determine that their requirements are less draconian.
When considering acceptable downtime, you must also account for what we call “dependencies.” If your calculations tell you that you can be down for 36 hours, for example, you also need to deduct from the 36 hours the amount of time you will need for your servers, networks, and all your other critical functions to be up and running. And you must also consider time to acquire replacement equipment, availability of personnel, etc. Based on these “dependencies”, your effective downtime may be far less than 36 hours. These are factors that must be discussed with your managed IT services provider as they will figure heavily into your recovery.
In working through these time calculations, do not lose sight of your RPO – your Recovery Point Objective. In simple terms, this means: how much data can you afford to lose? This will be the data lost between your last backup and the point at which you are fully online again. This includes your ability to service your customers/clients. This will be impacted by how often you run back-ups. If you haven’t backed up often enough, will you be able to, or be comfortable in asking your customers/clients to provide documentation to help you fill in gaps in your data caused by downtime since your last data backup? At best, it is embarrassing. At worst, you create a lack of confidence in your business among your customers/clients, and possibly lose revenue to which you are entitled because you cannot produce invoices, or even the existence of customers to whom you may have provided goods or services.
If you would like to catch up and read our past two blogs on disaster recovery, or any of the other topics we cover regularly, check out our blog. Keep an eye out for our next blog in which we will discuss risk assessment and how to achieve peace of mind. Better yet, give us a call today. We are a managed IT services company that has been protecting Atlanta’s small to mid-sized businesses since 1992 and we would love to speak with you. Call us at 770.629.9615.
Last week we began our discussion on disaster recovery with a look at RPO (Recovery Point Objective), RTO (Recovery Time Objective), and MTO (Maximum Time Objective). This week we’re going to give you a little insight in how IT companies set these parameters. Of course, there is no magic bullet or yellow brick road to instantaneously give us answers, but if you start with some good information, you are probably going to get good solutions. A large part of your calculation will consider how much the cost will be if your business is effectively shut down for any length of time.
How much do most businesses lose because of IT problems? A study by Coleman Parks Research not too long ago estimated that small businesses lose an average of $55,000 a year due to downtime, data loss, and the cost of recovery. Mid-sized businesses are losing an average of $91,000. And these losses are before any major disaster. You may be asking, why aren’t I seeing this loss? How can it actually exist if I am not seeing it? IT companies know the answer is that it occurs in almost unnoticeable dribs and drabs. It’s the customer complaint that isn’t answered properly because accurate records couldn’t be found. Or business lost because the phone system was down for ten minutes. Or, even worse, angry customers because of a data breach. Yes, small companies suffer data breaches. You don’t hear about them because the media isn’t interested in the losses of a small company.
Your first step in understanding your potential loss should be the creation of a Business Impact Analysis. Many IT companies will have a version of this to help you implement. The primary steps include:
1: Create a list of your business’s core functions and the data required to keep these functions running. This includes processes critical to generating revenue: sales, accounting, etc. You should be including customer/client contacts, purchase orders and contract items, accounting and your other corporate records, as well as any other documents that will prove important to your business continuity.
2: Supporting infrastructure: what will you need if you have to replace damaged or destroyed equipment and/or software in the event of fire, flood, storm, or theft? It’s important to know what you will need to get your business up and running again. AND you need to know where and how you will obtain everything. Every day you are not operating, you are losing money.
3: Calculate your potential losses. Work with your accountant or in-house financial officer to figure out how much your company will suffer financially if unplanned business interruptions occur. Money that may be recovered from business interruption insurance is part of this. Calculate your losses from each part of your business to include loss from sales, loss of goodwill, aging and loss of value of inventory, etc. Now, here is the critical part: your potential loss will be a major factor in deciding how much you should spend on disaster prevention.
Next week we will continue this discussion by looking into the effect “time” will have on your disaster prevention decisions. In the meantime, we would love to start a conversation with you about disaster prevention and disaster recovery. If this is a concern of yours, and it is truly something every business executive should be thinking about, give us a call at 770.629.9615. We’ve been helping businesses just like yours as one of the top IT companies in metro Atlanta since 1992.
There are many kinds of disasters that can compromise your IT network. Fire, flood, and tornadoes are just a few. These can all bring your network down and your business to a standstill. But cybercrime, including data loss and theft, can also prove disastrous without proper IT support.
Recent surveys show that most small to mid-sized businesses have no disaster recovery plan in place. That’s a pretty scary scenario given that about 50% of all small businesses have reported some sort of data loss. In fact, according to the Association of Small Business Development Centers (SBDC), about a quarter of these businesses will experience a “crisis level” loss each year.
Think about all the electronic records in your business – customer contacts and purchase records, email, finance, etc. – now think about how devastating this kind of loss can be. You can lose some of your records or you can lose all your records. There have been many cases of total loss through ransomware attacks that lock up every file and that cannot be undone.
But even lesser losses can be problematic. Statistics show that the average data loss costs the victimized company more than $10,000. This includes lost business, lost future customers, the cost of reloading compromised files, etc. It builds very quickly. But these problems are unnecessary as worst case scenario prevention and recovery plans are affordable to the point where it is truly foolish to not explore your IT support options.
We are going to cover this area in some depth over the next few weeks and today we’re going to start with three of the key IT support metrics companies should be using in determining the level of risk they can tolerate, the level of data loss they can afford to suffer, and how quickly they must get back online.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO): This states the maximum time you are willing for your company to be down. “Not at all” is generally not an acceptable answer because, although such planning is possible, the cost of IT support doing so is generally prohibitive for most companies. The actual answer often depends on the type of company you are. If you are a manufacturer, it’s one thing. Quite another if you sell products online.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO): This is the point in time to which you need your data recovered, in other words, how much data can you afford to lose? Again, it’s a question of dollars spent in setting up your back-up / recovery process vs. dollars that will be lost.
Maximum Tolerable Outage (MTO): This is kind of a first cousin to RTO but looks more closely at loss of business relationships and the daily continuity of your business. Or, how long can you be down before the effect on your business relationships becomes a disaster?
Want to learn more? Check out our blog next week and the weeks after as we continue this discussion. Better yet, give DynaSis a call today at 770.629.9615 or contact us online. We have been providing IT support and IT security for small to mid-sized companies throughout metro Atlanta for more than 25 years.
If you are running a small to mid-sized business today, you are using technology, including desktop and laptop computers, communications devices, and software of all types. If you are like most businesses, your employees range from highly technologically proficient to barely comfortable. Security is also a major consideration as studies reveal that the number one cause of cyber intrusions that leads to ransomware attacks and data breaches is employee error. As your company grows you are faced with the reality that you need outsourced IT services for your people to call upon when they have questions, when problems arise, and when it is time for employee security training.
When it comes to managing IT services for your business, you have three main options.
You will often find that outsourced IT services are less expensive than employing your own IT department, even a department of one. With the right company, you will also receive support around the clock, 365 days a year. No worries about vacation time, IT people resigning unexpectedly, or supporting your team when they are on the road, working from home, or pitching a foreign client six times zones away.
If you are going to be paying a third party for outsourced IT services, there are many services you can and should expect, but just a few of the major ones are:
If the problem isn’t explained properly, it may not get fixed. If it isn’t sent to the right person, it may not get fixed. Escalation should also take place when appropriate. If you are limited to service from your in-house team, they probably don’t have anyone to escalate to.
IT today is a moving target and ongoing training is essential. The problem in most SMBs is that this ongoing training usually doesn’t take place. Employers don’t want their IT people away from the office and, frankly, aren’t willing to pay for the training. A qualified managed IT support company will have ongoing training and updating for all its technicians.
Password security these days is critical. If your in-house team isn’t consistently updating password strategies and employee training, they are not providing you with the level of service you need.
These are just a few to the considerations in determining how to handle your helpdesk needs. If you want a more complete presentation on how to make this decision, we suggest you read our recent white paper, Why Outsource Your IT Support, or even better, since we have been servicing the small to mid-sized business community since 1992, give us a call today at770.629.9615.
Before working with DynaSis, Communiqué was working with another IT partner and didn’t feel like they had a relationship where they could ask for recommendations and guidance regarding IT policies and best practices. They weren’t confident that their hardware/software was being properly backed up and protected with the latest security patches. There was no accurate reporting or IT planning in place. They did not feel like they were being consulted with IT advice from their IT partner so they decided to speak with DynaSis.
The DynaSis team has helped resolve the challenges that Communiqué was facing in the past. There is no longer any doubt about proper backups and IT planning. “DynaSis offers so much more than the typical IT support company. They offer dedicated account managers that are truly eager to help your business achieve success with any IT related need. They offer quarterly reports to provide insight into potential issues that could arise within your company’s infrastructure/network. They are proactive partners that help alleviate any fears you might have about the security of your company’s data/network/equipment,” said Christal Young, Director of Information at Communiqué.
Communiqué is highly satisfied with the results they have seen since signing on with DynaSis. They predict they will continue to see consistent results as their partnership continues. “The customer service far exceeds my expectations, and engineers are always confirming that the service has been performed to our expectations,” Young said.
Ever wonder what the “HTTP” or the “HTTPS” you see at the beginning of every website means? HTTP is the abbreviation for “hypertext transfer protocol” and describes the internet technology that enables the text you have been typing to be transferred to your recipient. When the letter “S” is added on the end to make HTTPS, the S stands for “secure”. The security feature is what IT companies call a “secure socket layer” (SSL), or “transport layer security” (TLS), and this is all enabled by the use of data encryption. This encryption provides security from hackers, whether it is for your personal email or sensitive banking information. In today’s world, making sure email and the files in them are secure is serious business.
The basic concept is simple. Your email, and the files within, are scrambled into unreadable text by an algorithm that must be unscrambled by a cryptographic key. So, how secure is this scrambling? Consider this: When the system was first introduced by IT companies in the 1970s, they were using a 56-bit key. In the ‘90s this was upgraded to a 128-bit key. That 128-bit key would take the most powerful computers of today 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to decipher. Today the keys are 256-bits and each bit doubles the time it would take to decode. We showed you the 128-key decode time because there simply isn’t enough space in this blog for all the zeroes in the 256-bit time frame. So, yes, the answer is that it is pretty darn secure.
There are essentially two types of data encryption. With symmetric encryption, a single key is used to code and decode. With asymmetric encryption, one key is used to encode and a different key is used to decode. Which type will be used depends on the level of security you are seeking as asymmetric is considered more secure.
While data encryption is critical to security, you may be asking yourself, “if the data is encrypted on one end, how does the recipient get the key for decoding on the other end?” Good question. SSL and TLS take care of that by providing the keys on both ends. The process is a bit convoluted and more complex than we want to deal with here, but it works…most of the time. Since “most of the time” isn’t good enough, code developers have taken encryption to a higher level using what we call “client-based encryption.” This is accomplished by using encryption tools such as Mimecast and Galaxkey. Mimecast is great when the main security issue is email, but when there is a broader security concern, Galaxkey is often the choice. If you would like to learn more about these tools, as well as more about data encryption in general, we suggest reading our recent article: The How & Why of Data Encryption.
Here at DynaSis, our security team is fully familiar with data encryption and the thought process that goes into the selection of the best tools for every client’s situation. We understand that every business is unique and the combination of security tools needed to protect each business can be different. Again, we recommend reading the article mentioned above as it presents much more information. Better yet, give us a call today at 678-373-0716.
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