Help Desk & On-site Support

While many IT services can be provided behind the scenes to avoid disrupting your staff’s workday, there are times when you need an IT professional on hand. This becomes particularly evident when employees need assistance and systems need repairs.

Solving Employees’ IT Problems

When your employees have IT problems or questions, who do they contact? Employees often turn to their managers, especially in small and midsize businesses. The managers then need to track down someone who can help, which takes them away from their responsibilities. Meanwhile, the employees become frustrated, as they wait for assistance to arrive.

Worse yet, an employee might turn to a coworker for help. If that person gives the wrong advice, a minor issue could escalate into a major problem. When an employee is suspicious of an email attachment but a coworker says he thinks it is legitimate, the employee could end up opening the attachment and have his computer infected with malware, which can potentially infect your entire network.

Having a reliable help desk can eliminate frustration and lost productivity. Our experienced technicians can assist your team with technical problems so they can get back on track quickly.

Help desk requests and the technicians that handle them are categorized into support levels. The higher the support level, the more difficult the problem is to solve—and the greater the IT expertise needed to resolve them. Help desks can have up to four support levels:

Level 1

This level of support is typically available 24×7. When employees contact the help desk, the level 1 technicians gather and analyze information about the employees’ problems to determine the best way to solve them. Common issues that fall into this level of support include resetting passwords, resolving basic network connectivity issues, and troubleshooting email problems. If the technicians cannot solve a problem, they reclassify it as a level 2 issue.

Level 2

Level 2 technicians handle more challenging problems, such as troubleshooting software and computer meltdowns. After an investigation, the technicians will determine whether it is a known or new issue. When it is a known issue, they look for solutions in the help desk database. If it is a new issue, they might try to resolve the problem on their own or they might reclassify it as a level 3 issue.

Level 3

Problems escalated to level 3 are complicated and thus difficult to solve. The problems often lie within the IT infrastructure. Sometimes, level 3 support is handled by networking specialists.

Level 4

Not all help desks provide level 4 support. This level of support is reserved for extremely complex problems involving multiple vendors, products, or tools outside of the organization.

There is no doubt that having a help desk is advantageous. However, maintaining one in-house is expensive and out of reach for most small to midsize businesses. When that is the case, a cost-effective solution is to use a managed help desk.

We can provide you with a professionally staffed IT help desk that will provide quick and courteous assistance to your employees when they need it.

Providing Onsite Support

Some computer and network management tasks need to be performed in person. For example, replacing a failing hard drive and setting up a wireless router requires the human touch.

Having an IT expert onsite is also helpful when conducting vulnerability assessments, educating employees about security threats, and solving complex IT problems. Our support services can include on-site help with a friendly, personal touch.

More Than Just a Matter of Convenience

Having IT professionals readily available is important in ways that go beyond just being convenient. Waiting for someone to resolve problems, answer questions, or provide onsite support leads to lost productivity, which hurts profitability. It can also lead to frustrated employees, who might try to fix a glitch themselves and inadvertently turn a minor issue into a major problem.

With our help desk and onsite support services, you do not have to wait. We will be there when you need us.

Data Backup & Disaster Recovery

Have you ever thought about what would happen to your business if…

• A company laptop was stolen from an employee’s car or at an airport?
• Your customer data or accounting files got corrupted and were not recoverable?
• An employee checked their personal email at work and innocently clicked on a link that encrypted your entire network and demanded a ransom?

Minor misfortunes happen every day in businesses. Files become corrupt. Hard drives fail. Employees accidentally delete folders and may be fooled into clicking on vicious emails.

Major disasters also occur. Fires wipe out computers and all the data on them. Ransomware attacks turn crucial business files into undecipherable gibberish.

Your business needs to be prepared for minor misfortunes as well as major disasters. This means creating an appropriate data backup strategy and an IT disaster recovery plan.

Developing a Data Backup Strategy

Your data backup strategy should fit your unique situation, including the type of data you store, your industry, and your security requirements. There are many factors that are involved:

Identify What Data Needs to Be Backed Up and When

Ideally, you should back up all your data every day, but sometimes that is impractical due to time or financial constraints. If that is the case, identify the data that is critical to your business so that it can be backed up daily. Any other data can then be backed up on a less rigorous, or incremental, schedule.

Select the Backup Techniques to Use

Long gone are the days when the only choice you had was whether to use differential or incremental backups with your full backups. There are many other options today, including system image backups and continuous data backups. To make things even more complicated, sometimes it is better to combine several backup techniques into a hybrid solution that is a more suitable fit for your company. There are also many security considerations to take into account to protect your valuable information.

Select Where to Store the Backup Files

Keeping multiple copies of your backups is very important. One copy should be kept onsite so you can access it easily when there are minor mishaps, such as an employee accidentally deleting a file. Another copy should be kept offsite in case a disaster destroys the onsite copy. Depending on your industry, you may be subject to government regulations regarding the storage of your data, which will affect the type of solution that makes sense for your business.

Determine How to Test the Backup Files

You do not want to find out that your backup files are corrupt and therefore useless when you are trying to recover from a ransomware attack. Backup files need to be tested to make sure they are available when you need them. Testing incremental and full restoration of your files will let you will know for certain that your backups will work. There are other validation methods, too.

Our team will review your business carefully, ask you pertinent questions, and then guide you on the data backup solutions that make the most sense for you. We can also perform validation testing to make sure your data can be restored as planned.

Devising an IT Disaster Recovery Plan

When some people see the term IT disaster recovery, they think backups. However, having backups is only one part of IT disaster recovery.

Essential Components

An effective IT disaster recovery plan will provide you with a roadmap to get essential systems running again quickly after a disaster. Your plan should incorporate recovery strategies for hardware, software, data, and connectivity. For each component, we can help you determine what has to be done to prepare for a disaster as well as what actions must take place if a calamity occurs.

For example, consider the software your company uses. A reliable plan will make sure that you can easily access copies of your operating system software and business-critical applications so that they can be quickly reinstalled after a disaster. Standardizing the operating system software and applications can make software recovery easier. To ensure that the software restoration goes smoothly after a disaster, part of the plan will specify who is responsible for carrying out this task and the order in which the software should be restored (most critical software first).

Business Continuity

If you have a business continuity plan, we will help you make sure the IT disaster recovery plan can meet the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) defined in the continuity plan.

We can also help you test the IT disaster recovery plan periodically, just like a fire drill, to make sure it works as designed. Our technical team has the business experience to evaluate each component of the plan so that your company is prepared and minimizes downtime.

You Do Not Have to Do It Alone

Developing a data backup strategy and IT disaster recovery plan can seem overwhelming, especially if you have never done it before. However, you do not have to do it alone. Our experienced technology experts can help you create and carry out these crucial processes so that you can rest easy.

We will ask you critical questions that you may not know to ask.

We are well versed in the pros and cons of the various options available to you. Our recommendations will take into account your data, systems, processes, industry and constraints.

Don’t let another day go by with your company exposed to risk that can cripple you or put you out of business.

Remote Monitoring & Management

Computer systems play a crucial role in your company’s daily operations. Problems with those systems can disrupt your operations—and those disruptions can lead to lost productivity, lost customers, and lost business opportunities, all of which hurts your bottom line. Consequently, keeping your computer systems secure and operating at peak efficiency needs to be a top priority.

How to Keep Your IT Running Smoothly

To help ensure safe, efficient computer systems, you need to monitor and manage all facets of your IT environment regularly. This means you need to:

Apply Software Updates

Applying software updates is a task that sometimes gets postponed or ignored, but it is crucial that you apply updates promptly. Proper patch management helps to fix any bugs discovered in your applications as well as provide enhancements. Most important, though, updates close known security vulnerabilities, which helps protect your computer systems from cyberattacks.

Keep Track of IT Assets

Another important but often ignored task is regularly inventorying IT assets, recording such information as serial numbers, licensing details, and location. For computing devices, it is also important to keep track of information about the installed applications, including their version numbers. Tracking IT assets lets you know much more than simply how many devices you have and where they are located. You will know other pertinent information, such as how old your equipment is, when a license is nearing its expiration date, and whether applications are receiving the necessary patches and updates.

Make Sure That Your Computers Are Secure

Monitoring your servers, desktop computers, and other devices for known security issues is one of the most important parts of your overall computer security strategy. While monitoring your computers for missing software updates is a good first step, more needs to be done. For instance, you should monitor a computer’s event logs to see if there have been numerous unsuccessful attempts to remotely access it. This provides insight into attack is taking place rather than finding out days or weeks later when a hacker manages to gain entry and steal data or implant malware.

Make Sure That Your Computer Systems Are Performing as Expected

The time to think about the performance of your computer systems is not when they grind to a halt. You need to continually monitor the performance of your servers, desktop computers, and other devices. For example, you should regularly track memory and processor utilization as well as check the amount of free disk space available. Collecting performance data about your computer systems over time lets you identify detrimental long-term trends, even before issues reach levels that would trigger an alert.

Monitor and Manage Mobile Devices

Employees are increasingly using laptops, tablets, and smartphones for work when they are both in and out of the office. When you provide employees with mobile devices, you need to monitor and manage them just like desktop computers. If employees are allowed to use their own mobile devices for work, you should provide secure mechanisms (e.g., virtual private networks) for the devices to connect to your computer systems and then manage those mechanisms.

This list is by no means exhaustive. There are many other tasks on a monitoring and management “To Do” list.

Have Peace of Mind without All the Work

With all the tasks that need to be done, monitoring and managing your computer systems can be a tall order. We can take care of them for you so that you can concentrate on running your business.

Our team will remotely monitor and manage your computer systems, uncovering security and performance issues so that they can be addressed before they turn into larger problems that can cause downtime. You will have peace of mind knowing that we will be watching your computer systems 24×7, keeping them safe and operating at peak efficiency.

Call us to learn more about our remote monitoring and management services.