Managed Services Works to Support Your Business’ Technology
IT support is one of the most important parts of any modern business simply because it’s just not feasible to run a business without any form of technology at its core. For example, most businesses rely on email and other forms of communication, whereas stores might require access to a point-of-sale software to sell their wares. Either way, it’s critical to the success of most businesses, and where there’s technology, there is bound to be someone who needs to manage and maintain it.
Get the Best of Both Worlds with a Managed Private Cloud
The cloud is a great asset for any business, whether you’re a major enterprise or a small family-owned operation. However, there are different types of hosted solutions, and they all offer various benefits and hindrances for your business. What’s the best type of cloud for your organization, and how can you protect the security and integrity of the data stored in it?
There are generally three types of clouds: public, private, and hybrid. Each of these has their own distinct benefits, and depending on the type of business you run, you might be more inclined to select one over the other.
Public
There are many reasons for a small business to select a public cloud as its preferred solution. For one, it removes the responsibility of management and maintenance from your company’s shoulders, allowing you to focus on operations. It has gotten to the point where public cloud solutions are both affordable and quite secure (for the most part), which means that even small businesses with limited budgets can take advantage of the basic aspects of a public cloud-hosted solution.
The main issue that businesses have with public clouds is that they don’t have as much control over their data–or the management of it. Basically, the public cloud is secured and maintained by those hosting it, which limits the ability of companies to implement secondary or more advanced security features. Consider whether your organization wants and needs this additional customization and security before investing in a public cloud.
Private
A private cloud, however, is generally hosted in-house on your company’s hardware, which enhances the security of your cloud system. As long as you have the computing resources, you can customize and control your cloud solution as you see fit. This is the preferred method of cloud management for organizations that have in-house teams dedicated to maintaining advanced computing infrastructures.
Of course, for companies that don’t have internal IT departments, the lack of regular maintenance and management can lead to wasted resources and crippling disasters. If you don’t take care of your technology, it can come back to bite you when you need access to it most. Thankfully, there is a middle-ground solution that works for both small businesses and larger enterprises: a managed private cloud.
Our Managed Private Cloud Solution
Small businesses can take advantage of a private cloud solution without the need to maintain the server hardware or other technology required, and it’s all thanks to modern managed IT solutions. Catalyst Technology Group can help your company implement an on-premise private cloud solution that we can remotely monitor and maintain. This keeps you more focused on daily operations and less on what could potentially go wrong. Since you have talented technology professionals working on your systems, you can keep operations moving forward relatively worry-free. Of course, if any issues do crop up, we will tend to them as needed.
If you’d rather your office didn’t have to worry about an in-house infrastructure, we can help you with that as well. We can partition off a portion of our in-house infrastructure to host your managed private cloud solution. Or for organizations that want the security of a private cloud with the cost reduction that often comes with a public cloud, we can set up a hybrid cloud interface. This will enable you to both manage and maintain the core computing construct of your business, while taking advantage of offsite resources for less-important parts of your computing infrastructure. All you will need is access to the Internet, and we’ll take care of the rest.
To learn more about hosted private cloud solutions from Catalyst Technology Group, reach out to us at (317) 705-0333.
Managed IT Services Bring Substantial Value
How does your business handle IT maintenance? Chances are that your small business is in one of two situations: you either have a small internal IT department that can only accomplish a handful of tasks every month, or you have no IT department and rely on your employees to perform any maintenance. No matter how you look at it, this situation is not advantageous.
Thankfully, managed IT is something that can replace the age-old break-fix method to IT maintenance. Break-fix is the traditional model of technology maintenance in which businesses would seek out companies trained in how to resolve IT issues. Examples of such trouble could be a hardware failure, data loss, or even something as simple as an email flow problem.
Unfortunately, by the time the issue is resolved, downtime has cost your organization likely more than it did to fix the problem, hitting your business where it hurts twice. In fact, downtime is one of the major problems associated with any technology maintenance, and it’s a big enough pain point that any way an organization can reduce or eliminate downtime is important to consider. In order to optimize the use of a small business’ capital resources, downtime needs to be thwarted. A managed IT service provider accomplishes this by preventing issues through proactive maintenance.
This is something that, by nature, a break-fix IT company is incapable of fulfilling. After all, a break-fix provider profits from your technology breaking down often. Rather than just slap a temporary fix on your infrastructure, managed IT looks at the core reason why they have happened in the first place. Managed IT aims to understand and prevent issues to reduce downtime, and thus cost. When the business’ technology breaks, an MSP is actually losing money. This method ensures that when you have a managed service provider handling your IT services, it is fully committed to seeing your organization’s technology run effectively.
To this end, managed IT provides technicians who are more than capable of either helping your current IT department, or filling the gap that’s currently being manned by your employees. Doing so can open up a world of possibilities for your on-site technicians. They can finally get around to implementing new solutions designed to help your organization profit, rather than answering endless questions thrown at them on a daily basis. On the other hand, if they would prefer to play the support role, our technicians can help your organization implement new technology solutions to streamline operations.
In other words, managed IT can be whatever you want it to be–whether as a supplement to your in-house team; or as the primary service provider.
One of the main selling points of managed IT is that it’s much more affordable than break-fix IT. As previously stated, you’re not waiting for a big bill in the event of a technology issue. Instead, you’re making smaller, predictable payments once a month to keep issues from surfacing. This keeps these small issues from becoming major problems.
If you’ve had enough irritating technology troubles and want to learn more about how managed IT services can save you money and help your organization be more profitable, call the IT professionals at Catalyst Technology Group today at (317) 705-0333.
3 Ways Managed IT Can Prevent Technology Troubles
Is technology a major problem for your organization? If so you’re just like many small businesses out there that think they can’t afford proper IT maintenance and management. Thankfully, managed services threatens this misperception by bringing affordable preventative solutions to the table.
Outsourced IT, or managed services, can be a valuable investment for a business that wants to prevent problems from occurring rather than react to them as they happen. By effectively using managed IT, you can significantly reduce the risk of your technology failing before it’s meant to.
A Network Assessment
Before you can work toward resolving problems found on your network, you need to know that they exist. This is where a comprehensive network assessment comes into play. A network assessment shows you where your network has its flaws, whether they are traffic bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities, or even just failing hardware components. A third party like Catalyst Technology Group can provide this service for you so that you can get a clear, unbiased opinion on what you must do to improve your organization’s operations.
Remote Network Monitoring
Knowing what’s wrong is only half of the battle, though. Once you know where to look, you need to keep watch over your network to ensure that the weak points don’t develop into major problems. Yet, your in-house team likely doesn’t have time to monitor your entire infrastructure day-in and day-out. An outsourced IT provider like Catalyst Technology Group is far better suited to this role, as we can do so remotely without an on-site visit. We can then ensure that any maintenance that must be performed can be done before your network is put at risk.
Unified Threat Management
To keep your business from falling victim to a rogue virus or malware on your network, you need to take preventative measures. One of the best ways you can protect your business is with a Unified Threat Management solution, which provides the collective might of enterprise-level security solutions, including a firewall, antivirus, spam blocker, and content filter. By keeping threats like ransomware, Trojans, spyware, viruses, and so much more out of your infrastructure, you can prevent problems from happening in the first place.
Ultimately, managed IT that keeps issues from happening in the first place saves your business time and money. You can focus on making sure your business runs properly without interruptions. To learn more about managed IT, reach out to us at (317) 705-0333.
Would You Rather Trust Something That Repeatedly Breaks, Or Something That’s Managed?
When you are looking for help with your IT maintenance, would you rather experience downtime and frustration, or would you rather not? While the right answer to this question is clear, many organizations still rely on antiquated break-fix IT support that holds them back from achieving greatness. What are the differences between traditional break-fix IT support and a managed service provider?
Let’s take a focused look at a certain issue, as well as how both break-fix IT and managed IT services approach it.
Break-Fix IT
A break-fix IT strategy focused on being more reactive than proactive. Basically, you only maintain your systems when they are already experiencing problems. This generally includes a technician arriving on-site to resolve the issue. Unfortunately, this method of maintaining your business’s technology isn’t sustainable, and you’ll soon realize that the downtime suffered from such a practice could be crippling in the long run.
Technology helps your business move at incredibly high speeds. Without it, you’ll be forced to slog through the mud when even a single part of your hardware infrastructure breaks down. If the hardware is required by your employees to perform their duties, you could wind up with not just a single employee being incapable of working, but multiple workers, all of whom are wasting time and money.
You have to take into account numerous factors when determining the true cost of break-fix IT services. The travel time to the office, the time spent by the technician on-site, how many employees aren’t capable of working, and the expense of purchasing new hardware. Furthermore, if they aren’t able to make the repairs with the parts they have on-hand, you’ll have to wait until the parts are ordered and delivered, further increasing just about all aspects of break-fix IT. The end result is your organization being unable to perform as intended for at least some duration of time, which also decreased profit and cash flow. Simply put, the more economical choice is managed IT services.
Managed IT Services
Just like break-fix IT, there’s a certain history to managed IT services. This development came about as a result of the shortcomings of break-fix IT–rather than waiting for problems to occur so they could be resolved, someone out there thought it would be better to prevent the problems from happening in the first place, therefore eliminating the need for them to be resolved. At its most optimal, managed IT proactively monitors your network to resolve minor issues before they can cause operational problems.
This leads to a predictable monthly rate to cover any issues that crop up remotely, which keeps your business from suffering due to downtime. Since most problems can be resolved remotely, it’s likely that you won’t even notice the problems in the first place, since they can be detected and resolved so quickly. Compared to the sporadic and volatile price range for break-fix IT, a monthly payment that covers your service level agreement is a much more appealing (and manageable) investment.
To learn more about managed IT services, reach out to Catalyst Technology Group at (317) 705-0333.
Managed IT Protects Your Business And Your Budget
When it comes to maintaining and managing technology properly, larger businesses traditionally have the advantage over small-and-medium-sized ones, as they have greater financial resources. In fact, many small businesses will postpone these activities to help preserve the flexibility in their budget. What these businesses need is a way to leverage the benefits of proactive IT maintenance without breaking the bank.
Small businesses face considerable difficulties when trying to maintain their IT. First of all, since they generally have fewer employees, the workload is heavier for each resource. This leads to IT management being postponed in favor of other, seemingly more important concerns. However, this strategy accomplishes little more than putting the company in a more precarious position. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that hiring the personnel that could help you better manage your IT is often prohibitively expensive.
If neither option is practical, business in this position should turn to option three: managed IT services.
Managed services are a much different approach than what many would perceive as the typical IT service process, referred to as break/fix. Let’s say one of your pieces of hardware isn’t operating correctly. Once you report the issue to your IT provider, they dispatch someone to your location to resolve the problem, and you’re left on the hook paying a bill for that one specific call. You lose the capital, but also the potential revenue from the downtime you have experienced. This reactive approach therefore is quite a bit costlier than the increasingly more popular managed service model, which takes a proactive stance against technology issues.
At Catalyst Technology Group, we follow this proactive approach, monitoring your solutions remotely so that we can prevent issues from influencing your business, especially before they turn into bigger problems. For instance, under our managed service agreement, we will keep an eye on your infrastructure for any warning of hardware failure so you have an opportunity to replace that hardware before it can have a negative impact on your business.
If this option sounds more expensive than the break/fix approach, consider this: if you combine the loss in revenue that downtime from the broken equipment lead to and the cost of replacing or repairing the broken technology, you are out a significant amount of usable capital.
Compare that to managed services where there’s a chance that your problem could be resolved remotely–leading to a smaller service fee when compared to the cost of hardware replacement–it makes a lot of sense to see what kind of value Catalyst Technology Group’s certified technicians can bring you.
Depending on what is included in your service level agreement, the expenses associated with managed services will essentially always be less than the costs that of break/fix. Catalyst Technology Group can help you to make these changes in your own company, making operations both more reliable and less expensive in the process. To learn more about what managed IT services can do for you, give us a call at (317) 705-0333.