We see a similar model in other industries under different names. Some doctors are beginning to charge annual fees to utilize their services under a “concierge” plan, typically around $100 per month, and they provide more preventative care in an effort to keep their patients healthier.

Aligning Interests

The Managed Service model aligns the needs of the customer with the incentives for the IT service provider. Customers want maximum productivity, meaning minimal IT issues. Managed Service Providers (MSPs) want to minimize time spent fixing issues if they’re not being paid per-issue, and it’s far less time consuming to prevent an issue than it is to fix it. Under a flat-rate model, the risk shifts onto the IT service provider, and therefore the responsibility also shifts onto the IT service provider.

The opposite situation exists in a break-fix model, and is sometimes referred to as the “principal-agent problem”. The break-fix provider makes the most money when you have the most problems; they make the most money when they work slowly; and they make more money if they fix a problem more than once. This is inherently not in the best interest of the client.

IT Security

The benefits of Managed Services extend far past minimizing downtime and increasing efficiency. Security has arguably become more important than uptime, and a break-fix model inherently puts little emphasis on IT security. Sure, you could pay a firm to come in and implement security for your organization, but it’s going to cost a fortune; an initial IT security implementation may only take a few days but you’re paying for the knowledge of the firm rather than their time to implement the solution. MSPs develop and implement security frameworks that can be replicated across their entire client base, often in an automated or semi-automated fashion, and the cost of those tools and R&D gets distributed amongst those customers. By keeping a standardized security stack across all customers, modifications can be done incrementally without requiring a full re-evaluation of every customer’s IT infrastructure.

Deciding Between Managed Services & Break-Fix

Managed Services is not for everyone. For most companies, the benefits far outweigh the costs, but that doesn’t universally hold true. Here’s a guide to deciding what is best for your company:

• Cost of Downtime: One of the primary goals of Managed Services is to reduce downtime. If downtime doesn’t cost your company a lot of money, it may not be beneficial to spend the money on a Managed Services plan. Downtime calculation spreadsheets have been created to help with this analysis, but you can do a basic calculation to get a rough estimate:
  • How much revenue does your company have on a typical business day?
  • If you suddenly had no computers, how much less would that revenue be?
  • How many days it would take to rebuild your entire IT environment from scratch?
  • Multiply the difference in your revenue by the number of days to get your expected loss from a major IT incident
• Cost of Security Breach: Companies use their technology differently. Some store sensitive customer data and, in the event of a breach, could be responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) in damages. Simply having to notify your customers in the event of a breach can be extremely expensive. On the other hand, some companies do not store information on their computers, and only use basic tasks such as internet browsing.
  • Estimate your exposure to data leaks
  • Account for other security breaches that don’t involve data leaks, but will impact your operations. How damaging would it be if a crypto virus encrypts all of your data and you can no longer access it?
  • If you don’t store a lot of data and won’t be impacted if you lose your files, or even the ability to use your computer, Managed Services will benefit you less.

There tends to be a strong correlation between company size and benefits of Managed Services. As a company becomes larger, they tend to benefit more from a Managed Services plan. Most companies with more than 10 regular users of computers tend to have a high enough cost of downtime and risk of security breach that the benefits of Managed Services outweigh the costs, but the calculation still needs to be done on a company-by-company basis to accurately answer the Managed Services vs break-fix question.

The post Should You Choose Managed Services or Break-Fix for Your IT Provider? appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Disaster Backup and Recovery; Bad things happen.  Hard drives fail, employees click on crypto-malware and/or accidentally delete data, and more.  Without planning to persevere, you are planning to fail.  You MUST have a disaster strategy in place.  Not only do you have critical files that would be hard to reproduce (your QuickBooks file, perhaps?), but also consider all the time/effort/expense in setting up your network.  You need a snapshot of your server or key computer, for example- or even if you have your key files you will need to reinstall and setup all your data, mapped drives and program settings from scratch.  Not just time consuming but expensive!

Hard Drive– often confused with RAM or even the entire machine, hard drives are where your operating system and data are stored.  The larger the capacity of the hard drive, the more photos and documents on can store.  For many folks the best option is at least a 500GB hard drive.

Local Area Network– also called a LAN, these are computers/servers connected together and exchanging information locally; like at your home or office.

Malware; mostly a catch all term for virus’, spyware, etc.  Malware damages computers and/or networks.  Trojan horses, spyware, adware, viruses, ransomware, and worms are common types of malware.

On Premise Infrastructure; Think of this as the opposite of “The Cloud”.  Your files/applications are within your four walls.  This affords you greater control, and if your internet connection goes out- you can still access your “stuff”.  While the cloud can be a good solution in certain circumstances, you need a trusted local IT provider to sift through your real needs and all the marketing to determine what should be in house, the cloud, etc.

Phishing Attack; Email scam attacks are increasingly common… but worse, they are increasingly convincing.  These days, who isn’t expecting an important package of some sort?  A well written email explaining your UPS package has an issue and to “click here” to resolve is all it takes to hold your company’s entire data hostage.  A good managed antivirus is important, as is a good backup and data recovery solution.  But you should also pay attention to your employees.  Regular and careful training and reinforcement is key and there are solutions to address just that.

RAM- Random Access Memory is a part of your computer that allows for multi-tasking.  The more you have, the better your computer can handle multiple programs open simultaneously, like having Excel open while surfing the web through a browser.  Typically, 8GB or RAM is sufficient for most users.

Remote Monitoring and Management; By proactively monitoring your hardware and network, your IT provider is afforded an interesting and important opportunity – solving IT problems before they even start.  While nothing can foreshadow all issues, wouldn’t it be nice to avoid most IT problems in the first place?  Most providers for a small monthly fee can make that happen.

SSID– Standing for Service Set Identifier, SSID’s are simply the friendly name for a wireless network.  That’s how you can tell your neighbor’s WiFi connection from your own for example.  When you are picking a WiFi network from your phone, you are picking them by their SSID.  They are typically named for practicality like “Smith Guest”. 

The Cloud; Try as they might in the marketing universe, “The Cloud” is not some magical place where data and applications live without care and consequence.   “The Cloud” is someone else’s computer or server.  That’s it.  If not properly cared for by the cloud provider, your data and uptime are sitting ducks.

Wide Area Network– also known as a WAN, is a network that covers a larger geographical area, and often utilizes various internet server providers.  “The Internet” is a WAN.  Going to a website, for example- is utilizing a WAN to go from say your computer at home to a server in Toronto, Canada. 

While understanding IT terminology is fun and exciting (ok, maybe not!)- the most important thing is to have a trusted technology provider or advisor to help you sift through the ever-changing landscape that is IT. New threats that must be guarded against emerge ever day. And technological advances take place all the time. It’s imperative in your business to be well defended and as efficient as possible.

The post A Glossary of IT Terms an MSP Will Say appeared first on My TechDecisions.

When you make the decision to hire an MSP provider for your business, you’re taking a step towards improving your technology and your overall company. The right provider can take the stress off your in-house team’s shoulders, improve your customer experience, and ultimately enhance your bottom line.

Making sure you hire the right provider is incredibly important. You need to find a provider who communicates well with you and is always there when you need them. Your provider also needs to take a proactive approach to your systems and not wait to react to problems they should’ve prevented.

Are you considering hiring a technology partner for your business? Here are some things you should look for:

How Responsive They Are

Your MSP provider needs to be available whenever you need them.

If your system goes down at two in the morning or you have a security breach on a Sunday night, your technology partner should have the manpower to immediately respond.

When your provider isn’t responsive, your business can experience costly downtime that will harm client relations and ultimately affect your reputation.

How Honest and Accessible They Are

When you talk to potential technology partners, can you understand what they’re telling you? Do they lay everything out in an accessible way that makes sense? Do you feel they’re telling you the truth about your needs and the services they’ll provide?

If your answer to any of these questions is no, you may want to interview other options. Your provider should always provide information to you in a way you can process and make you feel comfortable that the right decisions are being made.

Their Processes and Tools

Does the provider have the right processes and tools to effectively handle their clients’ tech needs?

It’s important to have some working knowledge of recent technology so you can evaluate potential providers. For example, do they have a remote monitoring solution? Are they able to effectively access your system from a remote location? Do they have the proper security tools?

Ensuring they’re equipped with the most recent and effective processes and tools will give you peace of mind that you’ve chosen the right partner.

Their Experience

How long has the provider been in business? How many companies have they partnered with and how many do they count as current clients? Have they worked with a company similar to yours in the past?

Finding out the depth of experience of potential providers can help you make an informed decision and lead you to the one that will be able to best fulfill your needs.

What Others Say About Them

You can find out a lot about a potential partner by talking with the owners and their staff. However, you can find out even more by talking with those they have worked with in the past or are currently working with.

Ask the company for a few references and make it a priority to call at least a few of them. Ask questions like how they handled any conflicts and how they handled after hours requests or problems.

You may also want to put a call out to any other businesses that have worked with this particular provider. The more feedback you can get from their past customers, the better.

They can be a Trusted Advisor

Your provider isn’t only the remote arm of your business that handles infrastructure and technology help desk needs. They should also be a trusted advisor that you can go to regarding all your tech-related questions and concerns.

The hallmarks of a trusted advisor are that they’re receptive to your questions, they respond quickly when you reach out for help, and that they make you feel comfortable whenever you go to them with an issue.

In addition, a trusted advisor will help you make decisions that are ultimately in the best interest of your company.

Big Decision

Choosing the right MSP provider for your business is a big decision.

No matter what type of industry you’re in, your technology is your lifeline to customers and the backbone of your team.

When interviewing potential providers, make sure you keep an eye on their level of experience, how honest they are, the tools and processes they’ll be utilizing, and how responsive they are to your needs.

When you choose the correct provider, you’ll be welcoming a teammate and business partner that will help your business thrive, so choose wisely.

Mike Bloomfield is the President of Tekie Geek. He has been an ASCII Group Member since 2016.

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With millions of customers speaking dozens of languages, it’s important that Amazon’s customer service centers in 32 countries maintain high standards of customer service. This is a priority for the company.

“Our customers are our top priority, and the future of our company is built on customer satisfaction,” says Tom Weiland, VP of Worldwide Customer Service for Amazon at the Enterprise Connect 2017 keynote.

Amazon Web Services decided to bring their expertise to the masses, announcing the Amazon Connect contact center solution. Amazon Connect is an easy to use, intuitive system that allows customer service agents to focus on the customer instead of navigating the system.

The cloud-based contact center solution makes it easy for any business to deliver better customer service at a lower cost. There is no hardware infrastructure to maintain. The self-service configuration can be set up in just minutes, and allows for dynamic, personal, and natural contact flows.

The system is open platform and simple to integrate with other business services. The system also offers skills-based routing, call recording, real time and historical data analytics, and high-quality voice capabilities.

Agents can be quickly and easily trained on the system. As a cloud-based solution, calls can be taken from anywhere. The contact flows editor features a simple user interface that allows contact flows to be edited with absolutely no coding experience, creating self-serviced conversational interactions.

The voice capability that greets and directs callers is called Amazon Lex, and uses the same speech recognition that powers Amazon’s consumer device, Echo.

When someone calls in they are greeted by Lex. The messages Lex gives back are totally customizable – just type in the message you want the customer to hear and Lex will relay. Continue on to relay different messages based on what the customer is asking for. Finally, let Lex know what points you want the customer transferred to a human customer service agent.

The system is pay as you go – customers pay for the minutes that they are connected, which is unique to any other solution on the market. You only pay for when customers are calling into the system. Automatic scaling means the solution can grow as your company grows.

Brian Pearson, CTO of GE Appliances, has been implementing the system into his company’s workflow over the past several months.

“The one industry we’ve not seen a lot of change in is the telephony space,” says Pearson.

GE Appliances saw a huge opportunity to reinvent how it interacts with customers. It wanted its engineers focusing on improving processes instead of focusing on mechanics. Meanwhile, in the past, a change would potentially take the six months and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Instead, with AWS Amazon Connect, GE Appliances got a solution that was 100 percent cloud based, had no infrastructure ownership, had high reliability and redundancy, and enabled any agent to talk anywhere at any time.

The open platform allowed them to make simple innovations – building custom API solutions into the AWS service for its particular CRM in only two hours.

Amazon Kinesis allows GE Appliances to have big data analytics. Amazon Athena allows it to use statement to interrogate call center data in real time and generate reports to drive instantaneous change in the call center within the same hour or same day.

Over the past three months, GE Appliances have taken over 15,000 production and consumer calls through Amazon Connect beta. While there were some hiccups, they were easily worked through, and overall it enabled GE Appliances to create a more personalized experience.

Moving forward, the company plans to utilize Amazon Lex to use AI to drive interaction in way consumers want to interact with call centers. Amazon Machine Learning will allow the company to do sentiment analysis, look at the metadata, and ensure the next time customers call the company will know what has been wrong in the past to more quickly and effectively provide solutions.

The post GE Appliances Explains How Amazon Connect Improved Customer Relations at Enterprise Connect 2017 appeared first on My TechDecisions.

It’s happening now. Both enterprise-level and small businesses are increasingly integrating cloud technology into their companies.

Whether you are considering using public/private/hybrid cloud tech for your business, security needs to be your top priority. If you are interviewing a number of cloud service providers before signing a contract, potential candidates should be able to skillfully answer a series of cloud security questions.

Consider asking the following questions before making a final decision on a cloud provider for your company. With the global cloud computing and hosting market estimated to be worth in excess of 94 billion dollars by 2017, the move to the cloud is no longer a far off notion for most businesses.

The post Top 10 Security Questions Your Cloud Provider Should Be Able To Answer appeared first on My TechDecisions.

“The concept of having reliable and redundant access to the internet is not new,” says Benson Yeung, senior partner at Triware Networld Systems LLC, of Santa Clara, Calif. “We’ve been doing it for 15 years or more.” Yeung prefers to configure completely redundant ISP connections, with two physical routers, firewalls, service providers, and DNS (Domain Name System) servers. He avoids any common elements if possible, choosing two ISPs using different delivery media, such as one over fiber and a second over cable or wireless.

He is specifying wireless more often since multiple wireless providers are now servicing Silicon Valley. “We still have spotty internet in San Jose, believe it or not,” says Yeung. “Wireless providers offer 3MB to 6MB for under $500 now, good enough for email and websites, if not streaming.” Cellular data services from telcos push their availability for internet access backup, but Yeung has only used them for temporary connections such as a construction job site.

Rob Cima, president and founder of FeatherShark, a reseller in Chesterfield, Mo., also duplicates ISPs and physical media. “I always specify two delivery methods, such as fiber and cable, or cable and landline.” He uses dual-WAN routers, saying he’s had good luck with products from Hong Kong-based Peplink and Edgewater Networks Inc., in San Jose, Calif. For small installations of five to 10 users, he favors ASUS Dual-WAN routers. He has yet to use a cellular data network as an ISP. “We’ve experimented,” he admits, “but the wiring closets are often buried in the building deep, and surrounded by metal.”

Cima warns that some customers just say no to ISP redundancy. “All the products and services we sell are cloud-based. Some customers just decide they will go to a coffee shop or home and get access to their email and other data.”

DNS and MX Records

Yeung likes to leverage his experience as an “older guy” in the IT business to craft redundant access for DNS and email MX (Mail Exchange) records. “You can use multiple MX entries to different ISPs with a priority rating for redundancy,” he says. “If mail can’t get to the primary email server, it will try the next one. Not too many people know about that.” Sometimes he pays DYN.com to handle this function for certain customers. “Just give them the IP addresses and ISP.”

BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is another “old” trick Yeung uses. “You can move traffic from one ISP to another without changing the MX records.” In his customer list, there are still plenty of customers using in-house email servers. “Redundancy is good, but everyone uses Microsoft Exchange servers, so we use their built-in redundancy.”

Cima resells Office 365 and Google Apps, including their email solutions. “We let the utility computing guys at Google and Microsoft handle redundancy for email,” he says.

Although he trusts those companies, he also uses Backupify from Datto Inc., in Norwalk, Conn. “They make copies of all the mail and documents in Office 365 and Google. Email is downloaded, files are copied, and they’re all stored somewhere else,” says Cima. But some customers trust Google and Microsoft to back things up for them automatically, and reject Backupify. “We explain Google doesn’t make copies of deleted files, and the trash is emptied after 30 days.” User error or accident matters not because the file is gone. And some customers must archive email for regulatory purposes.

Data Protection

Arcserve (USA) LLC, of Eden Prairie, Minn., an early player in data backup that is once again independent after its split from CA Technologies, has embraced the cloud to support its clients, as have its competitors. The 100 percent channel-based company has a new product called Unified Data Protection (UDP) that includes a variety of redundancy and high-availability options.

Christophe Bertrand, vice president of product marketing, joined Arcserve in 2013 to oversee the transition from CA division to its own company after being carved out by a private equity firm. “We can now compete with CA, and have about 20,000 UDP customers after two years.”

Leveraging virtual machine (VM) software, Arcserve can spin up new servers in short order to continue production, or for other reasons. “You can spin up an offline copy of a server with our HA [high-availability] module for testing, for instance. Or we can spin up a production server VM with the latest backup loaded directly from your backup server.”

Todd O’Bert is president and CEO of Minneapolis-based Productive Corp. and an Arcserve partner. Since starting the company in 2001, he and his company have seen the cloud landscape change. “Five to 10 years ago we saw some VARs building their own cloud-type data centers,” says O’Bert. “People have now gotten away from that, because they didn’t have the [ability] and flexibility to dial capacity up and down.” He uses Arcserve for backups, trusting the solution’s redundancy. He also uses hosting services such as TDS Telecom, which has a big facility in his area. “It’s small relative to Amazon, but it is still a Level 1, fully secured data center, kind of like Rackspace.”

O’Bert’s philosophy of redundancy comes from the classical security perspective: Get the customer to establish the value of his or her data. That answer will lead to the right choice. “Do they need continuously available service? Or just battery backup power for a couple of hours? Their answers tell me what infrastructure I need to provide to meet those requirements,” he says.

For his mostly midmarket customers, O’Bert prefers gateway routers from such providers as Sophos Ltd., Fortinet Inc., and Check Point Software Technologies Inc. He hasn’t installed a cellular backup line, but has checked out the options just in case. By default, he uses two separate ISPs delivered over different media, such as business-level service from the local cable company and a telco for the second ISP. He laments that his options vary widely depending on location. “Downtown Minneapolis has at least 10 options. Some areas barely have two.”

As these channel pros assert, every cloud project needs some kind of redundancy strategy. Multiple ISPs, virtual servers, backup replication, and the suite of services offered by the likes of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft make redundancy affordable.

This article was originally posted on TD sister site Channel Pro.

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