Bay Area Computer Support Blog

3 Things to Consider Before Jumping Into BYOD You’ve read it time and time again. “Bring Your Own Device” isn’t a trend, it’s the future. Workplaces where companies let workers use their own devices for work purposes are the new normal. BYOD attracts new hires and lifts employee morale and productivity. But this doesn’t mean a small business owner should recklessly jump right into BYOD just because everyone else is doing it.  Data and network security concerns have to be thought out, defined, and addressed in a comprehensive BYOD policy. Here are three things to consider. Cost of Support Most businesses salivate at the thought of the money saved by having employees participate in a BYOD program. With employees using their own devices for work, there is no need to shell out thousands of dollars for desktop PCs, smartphones, tablets, and laptops. While that’s undoubtedly a huge incentive, extra support costs must also be factored in. Chances are your employees aren’t necessaril...

A Smarter Approach to Mobile Device Management More people today use personal mobile devices like smartphones and tablets for business purposes. Such devices, coupled with greater Wi-Fi accessibility and cloud services, have empowered us with the ability to access data and do business from practically anywhere at anytime. Needless to say, many small-to-medium sized business owners have embraced the BYOD (Bring-Your-Own-Device) revolution. The benefits are obvious; increased employee productivity, enhanced services to customers/clients, and better overall customer and employee satisfaction. But what about the potential consequences associated with this mobility revolution? Are small business owners doing enough preemptive planning to address potential risks that could arise with the use of BYOD devices? Mobile Device Management - Questions Every SMB Should Ask First, it is important that small business owners honestly assess whether their systems, networks, data, and overall i...

4 Essential Pieces of Any Small Business BYOD Strategy Believe it or not, once upon a time, kids at the bus stop didn’t have cell phones and the mobile device strategy of many businesses was typically "you’ll take what you’re given, refrain from using it for any personal use, and the data may be scrubbed clean whenever we please." We’ve come a long way.  Today, businesses really have no choice but to let employees use personal devices for work purposes.  Blurred lines now make it difficult to differentiate between what is professional and what is personal.  A company or organization may partially pay for an employee’s tablet computer or smartphone, but that same device is used to upload photos to Facebook or download torrents of this season of Game of Thrones. Naturally, security and privacy issues are a concern since these devices sync to the company network.  Larger corporations may be able to hire IT support or produce sophisticated BYOD guidelines fo...

Keep Your IT Guy and Outsource IT Services, Too Everyone in the office loves Eric. Sporting a different ironic t-shirt everyday, Eric is the one we call when technology spits in our face. Whether it's a slow system, a bug that needs to be squashed, a website issue, or a crash that results in unexpected downtime and data loss, Eric is right there. Not only does he get to the bottom of any issue but he also rights the ship like he's some sort of miracle-working captain who just happens to have a pretty wickedly funny Peter Griffinfrom Family Guy impersonation. But business is growing and Eric is overworked. Eric has certain skills that you'd love to use to develop innovative applications and revenue-generating projects-- but he's too busy running around fixing things that break. Or he's performing the most mundane and routine tasks day-in-and-day-out just to keep things secure and running smoothly. You get a sense that Eric's overburdened and he's sa...

How to Trim the Fat From Data Center Costs When smaller businesses look to cut costs, they commonly take shortcuts that are risky to their bottom line. They may go out of their way to avoid upgrading dated hardware, buying software licenses, or increasing bandwidth. In some instances, they layoff in-house IT support, or avoid hiring new help, even as the business grows. This often leads to a very cranky and disgruntled "IT guy" with a bad attitude as he or she runs around the office putting out one fire after another – feeling overburdened and underpaid. Operating even the most basic data center today means recurring operating expenses that aren't affordable for most small-to-midsize businesses. Unfortunately, SMBs just have to accept that keeping their data center alive and kicking means significant overhead and expenses. That's just the way it is. Or is it? There are actually several ways to reduce data center infrastructure costs without sacrificing the e...

Click, BOOM – You're in Business But Is Your Technology Ready? It's a fast business world. Brilliant business ideas can be conjured up at some hipster-filled vegan coffeehouse, a website is thrown together, and poof... in no time at all there is a living, breathing, small business venture accessible from anywhere in the world. But as your head hits the pillow at night, with visions of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg dancing in your head, understand that many obstacles will greet you on your road to entrepreneurial success. A fresh innovative idea is merely a start. For every successful startup like Groupon, there are even more that have faltered. Some great, even revolutionary, business concepts that just faded into obscurity; leaving behind nothing but tales of what could've been and insurmountable debt. Failed business technology is often a big reason for this. Many startups think big but tend to operate small-minded to keep overhead and costs down. They th...

Three Steps To Fix IT Management for SMBs Small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) tend to have a more difficult time managing IT than larger enterprises. Despite being as technology dependent as larger enterprises, SMBs have tighter budgets and fewer resources to devote to IT management. This leads to a more reactive "break-fix" approach to their technology that never does any smaller company or organization any good. Here's what break fix most often leads to. If the burden rests on the shoulders of hourly or salaried in-house IT support, and they're too busy putting out fires all day, then their skills and talents are essentially wasted. If there is no in-house tech support, and many smaller companies and organizations don't have even one onsite "IT guy", SMBs are commonly taken for a ride by some of the more unscrupulous on-call IT consultants. Although "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a popular saying, it should never b...

Inquiring SMBs Want to Know... What's the Difference Between a Help Desk and NOC? It's no secret that any growing small-to-medium sized business must monitor and manage its business technology in the most cost-efficient way. The tricky part is figuring out how to do this without sacrificing the overall experience of the end-user. End-users can be clients and customers or employees. Both rely on the efficiency of a firm's network, servers, and applications, and the availability of the company's data center. Thanks to the evolution of managed services, it's actually possible these days to reduce costs, which strengthens IT support and infrastructure. It's just a matter optimally integrating all available resources. It's a Staffing Conundrum for Most SMBs Most SMBs tend to be short staffed. This isn't just another reference to the many SMBs with little to no onsite tech support. While that's true, and problematic, it's actually all oper...

Understanding Managed Services and How They Benefit SMBs Small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) receive a lot of calls each day from slick sales people peddling the next technology trend that's going to save them money and revolutionize how they do business. They're all too quick to caution that if you don't listen to them, you'll fall behind the times, and eventually be swimming in a sea of debt and out of business. No doubt you've heard, or you've at least read about, the benefits of managed services. Managed services refer to clearly defined outsourced IT services delivered to you at predictable costs. You know the exact IT services you'll be getting and what you'll pay for them. There is no surprise sky-high bill for services rendered. So are solicitation calls that pertain to managed services worth listening to? We think so. Then again, we're in the managed services industry. There may be a bit of a bias here. How Managed Service Prov...

Are Managed IT Services Right For You? A Few Things to Consider How do you get a small business to recognize the value of manages IT services? In the start-up environment, we encounter an eclectic bunch of personality types. There is a reason people become entrepreneurs or C-level execs. When we meet the owners or decision makers at smaller companies and organizations, we can tell right away why they're where they are. They're visionaries. They're risk takers. They're competitive. They want to be in charge. Therefore, they aren't always quick to place the fate of their business technology in the hands of a third party. They've come as far as they have by being in control and they're hesitant to give up that control. But we've learned a few things along the way. For example, the Type A personality is highly independent but also very competitive. So we tap into the competitive advantage that managed IT services gives them. The Type B personality ...

Breaking News: Downtime Kills Small Businesses Downtime is bad news for any business whether big or small. A recent two-hour New York Times' downtime occurrence sent Twitter ablaze and their stock price plummeting. Google going down for one to five hours resulted in lost revenue up to $500,000 and decreased overall web traffic by 40%. We know what you're thinking. Holy crap, Google makes $100,000 an hour? Yeah... insane, huh? While the hourly cost of downtime for a small-to-medium sized business won't be nearly as large as that astronomical Google figure, downtime is often more detrimental to smaller companies. Smaller enterprises are more susceptible to downtime and are neither large nor profitable enough to sustain its short and long-term effects. Downtime Leads to Unhappy/Unproductive Employees Even the happiest of employees become dissatisfied when they can't perform basic day-to-day job functions or properly service customers or clients. While some employ...

Is That a Business Continuity Plan in Your Pocket or a Bunch of Jargon? Technology is full of difficult jargon. To further complicate things, certain terms are often used in a different context between one publication or service provider and the next. An example of this is the usage of backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity. These terms are commonly used interchangeably, often resulting in confusion. In an effort to alleviate some of this confusion, let's describe each physical process. You will see an overlay among all three, although they are each different processes. Backup – In IT lingo, the most basic description of backup is the act of copying data, as in files or programs, from its original location to another. The purpose of this is to ensure that the original files or programs are retrievable in the event of any accidental deletion, hardware or software failure, or any other type of tampering, corruption and theft. It's important to remember that ...