EZ MSP Blog

It’s important to think about how your organization manages its technology, especially in a world where businesses depend heavily on critical software and hardware solutions to stay functioning. Granted, getting the technology assistance you need can be difficult with a limited budget and workforce. Managed services can be a great alternative to your organization hiring and managing its own IT department, and they can even be used to augment your current IT administrators.

How does your business manage its technology solutions? If you have an in-house IT department, you might think that you have a better shot at keeping your business safe from a hard drive failure, but this is only if your IT department isn’t already overwhelmed with work. You might find that implementing new solutions is tricky, which wastes time and resources on your part. What’s the small business to do?

For the majority of small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), finding the right technology solution is the key to growth. According to a recent study, businesses with 250 employees or less whose primary goal for 2018 is growth cited IT systems and technology applications as their top strategy for facilitating growth. However, in order for technology to provide the most ample amount of growth for your business, they must be the right selection for your individual needs. By working with an MSP, you’ll have a team of business technology solutions experts as your disposal, at a fraction of the cost of hiring an internal IT department to find and implement the IT required to accomplish your desired growth.

You might have only recently heard about outsourced IT services, but you might be surprised to hear that they have been around for far longer than you previously thought. Even before managed IT, however, business owners and individuals alike were using the outsourced services of others to simplify operations and day-to-day tasks related to their technology management.

Managing a business is a tedious endeavor where time is a precious commodity. Therefore, it’s the goal of every business owner to dedicate as much of their time as possible to leading profit-making initiatives, which, let’s face it, can’t happen if you’re busy troubleshooting computer and network problems.

As a modern business, your success depends on your technology functioning properly. As many businesses have discovered when their solutions did not function as intended, the effects can have considerable impact to their success rates. To help keep your business running, you need to be sure that your solutions are maintained.

As more and more businesses rely on technology solutions to accomplish their everyday tasks, there is a natural expectation for there to be a bit of a learning curve as these advanced solutions are prioritized and accounted for. However, a few industry research firms have compiled their expectations for how this learning curve tendency will influence the needs and challenges businesses will face during the rest of the year.

Two major concerns of every business owner are the protection of their company and making sure their technology does what it’s supposed to do. It can be overwhelming to manage these two aspects on your own, which makes outsourcing the security and maintenance of your IT such an attractive option.

Let’s say you get a bill in the mail for technology support, but you don’t necessarily know why you got it. Pretty troubling, right? Clearly someone in your organization isn’t privy about the proper method of getting help for their technology, but if you regularly work with a break-fix IT provider, this kind of correspondence (and cost) is unavoidable. Thankfully, there’s a simple solution to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again.

The traditional break-fix IT model has given way to a more comprehensive and hands-off approach called managed IT. Managing technology solutions can be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. With the right combination of outsourced IT services, your business can take advantage of enterprise-level solutions without dealing with the expensive costs and extensive resources required to do so. Here are four of the many ideal ways that you can leverage managed IT services for your business.

The break-fix IT model can be exhausting and unpredictable. When your technology unexpectedly breaks down, you shouldn’t have to grasp at straws just to keep operations running. Thanks to the proactive approach of managed IT services, the break-fix model is on borrowed time. Will your business move on from this antiquated method of managing technology, or will it remain stuck in the past, unable to move forward?

Technology is an imperative part of your business’s operations, but sometimes things don’t go quite as planned. It can fail when you least expect it to, and you’d really hate to pay your IT provider for an on-site visit. What can you do when you’re in a technology bind and need to keep operations moving forward?

It’s well known in the business world that outsourcing your IT will yield significant savings for your IT budget. However, did you know that the benefits of outsourcing IT go beyond monetary savings? For example, gaining access to a new skillset is just one valuable benefit to outsourced IT that doesn’t have a column in your budget.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that cat memes infest the Internet to the point where it’s difficult to not see one. But, have you considered that it might not be that people are obsessed with cats, and that maybe the cats are simply overwhelmed by their ego as a superior race? Perhaps cats understand technology far better than even humans do, and they are the masterminds behind why the Internet has gone cat-crazy.

We often discuss why it’s important that a business takes proactive measures to resolve IT issues before they become problems, but these definitions might be lost on some of our followers. In order to understand the true value of our IT services, it’s imperative that you’re able to distinguish the difference between these two disruptive sources to your technology.

IT support is heavily reliant upon communication between both parties involved. Without both sides being on the same page, IT support miscommunications are far more likely to happen. Sometimes you just can’t help but laugh at poor communication skills, as seen in the 2001 movie Zoolander. But thankfully, these situations don’t arise too often in the non-fictional universe… right?

"Quick, to the emergency room!" These are dreaded words that nobody wants to hear. An emergency like this implies a life or death scenario, and it gets everybody worked up into a frenzy. After arriving to the ER and getting a doctor's diagnosis, how quickly do people's attitudes change when the emergency turns out to be false?

Data is the lifeblood of business. Therefore, IT workers who maintain business critical systems that "keep the blood pumping" are at the heart of every data-driven organization. Can your business live if an in-house IT worker took a vacation? Many employers think not. Statistics show IT workers have a difficult time "getting away from IT all."

The art of war is of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.
- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The ancient Chinese military general Sun Tzu might have been around long before the Internet was a thing, but he sure knew how to make an impression on the world. In his extremely influential book on ancient Chinese warfare, The Art of War, he says that "every battle is won before it's ever fought." This applies to protecting your IT network, too.

A change is happening in the White House. Mikey Dickerson, a Google site reliability engineer, has just been appointed by the United States government as the deputy federal CIO, proving that even the big wigs need consulting from time-to-time.