You’re in Business But Is Your Technology Ready?

It’s a fast business world. Brilliant business ideas can be conjured up at some 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 business icon 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, 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 then find themselves completely unprepared to meet the demands of growth, particularly when it comes to their IT infrastructure. There is no one-size fit all approach to how to manage technology for optimal efficiency, uptime, and profitability. Especially given the challenges of limited budgets and the need to keep overhead down.

So exactly how do SMBs make sound decisions regarding their technology infrastructure? Choices that are cost-effective enough to get their business off the ground and running without screwing them over once it truly takes off?

 

Combine On-Site and Off-Site Support for the Best of Both Worlds

Over 45% of SMBs have no dedicated in-house IT staff and no contracted IT consultant regularly monitoring and managing their technology. Roughly only 7 percent of SMBs have a full-time onsite IT technician on payroll. The rest rely on third-party on-call IT companies who appear only when technology goes haywire and disrupts business. These on-call companies can sometimes take a day or two to even show up, which means issues aren’t resolved in a timely and efficient manner. And did we mention they’re expensive?

Most SMBs say they simply can’t afford full-time in-house support. Even those who do budget for it face overwhelming challenges. They often experience a revolving door of on-site help who leave for a larger company and better salary once they’ve beefed up their resume. And those hires that do remain loyal often feel as if they have no reliable help and become overworked and frazzled as the business and their responsibilities grow. Discontent may even set in if wages aren’t raised proportionately to the added responsibilities, or if they grow bored of doing the same mundane repetitive work everyday.

But today’s SMB has access to technology that won’t drain resources. In particular, the evolution of cloud computing and managed services can either automate or re-assign a lot of the day-to-day caretaking of technology to remote employees, leaving onsite support available for more meaningful and potentially profitable projects.

Better yet, it saves money on equipment costs.

Whenever possible, a mix of on-premise and off-premise IT support is the best way to make your technology scalable and prepared for growth.

 

Learn more

If you want to find out how outsourcing your IT support can give you the competitive edge, contact us HERE. We’re happy to talk through options that you may not have considered and what opportunities might present themselves.

IT Service Providers save money, and you get stuff that matters

 Outsourcing has become a fairly common element in business processes today. What started off as a means to cut business costs and take advantage of cheaper resources based offshore has now become an essential part of running a business today. (Its definition doesn’t necessarily include offshore outsourcing anymore, of course)

Here we look at two additional areas where IT outsourcing can dramatically improve revenues. In particular, outsourcing can avoid high-fixed costs when you are trying to meet peak demand periods or have 24/7 coverage available.

 

Cost benefits

Having an MSP manage your IT infrastructure completely offers tremendous cost savings vis-a-vis having an in-house IT team. When you have FT IT professionals on your payroll, you incur many other HR and training-related costs that come with employing full-time staff. These may include 401(k) expenses, health insurance, paid time-off, etc., which can be avoided by outsourcing your IT process to an MSP. In-house staff needs ongoing management, something many business owners aren’t equipped to do.Another way outsourcing your IT helps is by keeping your IT budget within predetermined limits. When you have a service level agreement with a managed service provider, they take care of your IT requirements at a service charge you both have agreed upon. This saves you money, especially in case of unforeseen IT emergencies.

Like many SMBs, you may deploy the firefighting approach to technology, where you reach out to an IT specialist only in the event of an emergency that your in-house IT team can’t handle. This means incurring significant up-charges for emergency services. Working with an MSP under a service level agreement, you get the budgeting certainty of knowing what your IT expenses will likely be.

 

Scaling up or down

Relying on a managed service provider for your IT needs allows you the freedom to scale your IT infrastructure up or down depending on your business needs. For example, during the busy seasons you can ramp up your IT infrastructure and perhaps even scale down during the slower times–all without worrying about the need to hire new IT employees and consequently having to let them go during down times. This is particularly true for businesses that have busy and slow seasons.

Learn more

If you want to find out how outsourcing your IT support can save you money and make your business more profitable, contact us HERE. We’re happy to talk through options that you may not have considered and what financial breaks might present themselves.

New PCIe 6 Standard Brings Speeds Two Times Faster

For those that aren’t aware, PCI SIG is short for the PCI Special Interests Group.

They have just announced the release of the latest PCI Express (PCIe) specification which is called PCIe 6.0. It has the entire industry abuzz. Standards aren’t usually all that exciting but, in this case, it’s a very big deal.

That’s because it is the specification that matters in terms of connecting your computer’s CPU to graphics cards, SSDs, your Wi-Fi, and the like.

The old 5.0 standard offered transfer rates of up to 64 Giga Transfers per second (64 GT/s).  The new standard literally doubles this to a whopping 128 Gigabytes per second in a single direction on 16 lanes (or 8 GB/s per lane). That makes it the largest rate of increase in the entire 19-year history of the standard.

Even better is that the new standard is designed to be backwards compatible so older devices will continue to retain their value.

It’s important to note that as good and exciting as the new standard is, it’s probably too soon to hold off making a strategic purchase to take advantage of it.  New products that take advantage of the 6.0 standard won’t hit the market for a few years. So if you need something now, get it.  Just know that the day is coming when we’ll all be able to enjoy equipment with significantly improved transfer speeds.

If the past is any guide the first products to be released taking advantage of the new standards were equipment used by server farms and big, industrial concerns. These include research labs that are investing heavily in AI and with consumer products appearing sometime after that.

Even though we won’t be getting any instant gratification from the new standard it’s still fantastic news and points to great things on the horizon.

Live Captioned Language Translation Comes To Google Meet

Google is once again raising the bar where messaging and team meeting software is concerned.  The company just rolled out the first phase of its new live translation service for Meet users after months of beta testing the feature.

Naturally this is the first step in a long process, so there are some limitations and caveats to be aware of.

Right now, the translation service only works if you speak English and it can only translate your speech live into four different languages at present. These include French, German, Portuguese and Spanish.

Currently Google and Microsoft are in a bit of a Translation War with Microsoft recently upping their translation game and allowing for real time live captioning of content from English to 27 different languages.  The limitation here being that they are not translated from one language to another.

Google may be a bit behind the curve but their goal is to catch up quickly. If history is any guide at all that’s entirely within the realm of possibility.  We’ve seen Google move at a blistering pace when the company gets excited about something and they seem determined to catch up with and ultimately surpass Microsoft on the translations front.

All of this is superb news for anyone who has business dealings in various parts of the world where language differences can be a significant barrier to getting anything meaningful done. As Google puts it they see their efforts as equalizing information sharing, learning and collaboration.

It does all those things and more. We are thrilled to see two of the biggest tech firms on the planet pouring so much time and effort into this project.   Though world peace is too lofty a goal to consider, if we can at least understand each other, we’ll all be a whole lot better off.  Kudos to both Microsoft and Google.

New iOS Update Provides Fix For HomeKit Brick Issue

If you have an iPhone by now you’ve almost certainly heard of the security flaw in the HomeKit protocol which allows Apple users to discover and control a wide range of Smart Devices in their home from the HomeKit dashboard. The recently discovered security flaw dubbed “DoorLock” allows an attacker to essentially brick your phone by deploying a maliciously crafted HomeKit accessory name.  The issue is being tracked as CVE-2022022588.

Apple has now addressed the issue with the release of iOS 15.2.1 and iPadOS 15.2.1. Both updates improve input validation with the result that the devices are no longer susceptible.

That’s the good news.  Trevor Spiniolas is the researcher who first discovered the flaw and he gives us the bad news. The company has known about it since August of 2021, and it has taken months for them to issue a fix for it.  During that time Apple said very little about the issue while exposing their user base to unnecessary risk.

Spinolas had this to say about the matter:

“I believe this bug is being handled inappropriately as it poses a serious risk to users and many months have passed without a comprehensive fix.  The public should be aware of this vulnerability and how to prevent it from being exploited, rather than being kept in the dark.”

We agree.  It does appear that where the DoorLock issue is concerned, Apple dropped the ball.  The company is normally much better at handling and responding to issues like these.  Here’s hoping they take Spinolas’ criticism in the spirit in which it was intended and strive to do better when the next issue inevitably rears its head.

If you own an Apple device and if you use HomeKit be sure to check your iOS or iPadOS version.  If you’re running anything prior to 15.2.1 upgrade right away to mitigate your risk.