[this article is from our Small and Medium Sized Enterprise website.]

If there is one thing most small businesses can agree on – it’s that time equals money. Small business owners are in a position where they have to be a jack-of-all-trades, often spending most of their day wearing different hats. This is the nature of the small business and while expected is not always the best way use of time.

In order for a small business to be successful and remain competitive in an industry, there must be designated time for the owner to focus on growing and building the business. In many cases small businesses fail as a result of being unable to handle emergencies or other situations that are simply beyond the control and expertise of the owner.

Any business that relies on technology, which covers almost every business operating today, can benefit from managed services. Managed services providers understand that not every business has the ability to pay for an internal IT department which can be very expensive yet necessary to ensure all aspects of technology are supported. Without this backup, many small businesses find themselves in a position where they have to foot a very expensive bill to recover from a disaster or emergency. In other situations, using out-of-date or ineffective technology is simply a waste of both time and money on the part of the small business.

Here are ways small businesses can make the most of their time and money by hiring a managed services provider, like Nerds On Site.

Focus on running the business – One of the major benefits of outsourcing your technology needs to a company like Nerds On Site is that you as a business owner and your employees can focus 100% on their individual duties to keep the business moving in the right direction. This is the most valuable use of time for all parties involved, instead of hours or even days lost when trying to deal with technological issues that in-house employees are not trained to handle.

We can offer expert advise – there are many small businesses that simply do not know what they need to improve the functionality of their business. The old adage, “what you don’t know can’t hurt you” does not apply in all cases. By consulting with a managed services provider, you may discover areas of your business which can be improved that you previously thought were working “just fine”. Expert advice may be able to help you improve the efficiency of your business while positioning you better within the industry.

Support when you need it – Managed Services providers are not only there in the event of an emergency or recovery but also provide monitoring, which can invaluable in preventing problems before they can impact your business.

It is important for every small business to carefully examine their technical needs in order to see what services will be most beneficial to the company. Nerds On Site can offer services that not only reduce technology costs over time, but also improves functionality, which in turn saves time. When this balance is achieved, a small business is in the perfect position to thrive and grow

According to a survey conducted by 8e6 Technologies (www.8e6.com), employees are using company computers and resources to conduct non-work related activities.  Some of these activities simply wasting time, but others are malicious, or threaten company security or data.

Here are some of the more extreme cases:

• One employee was caught running a gambling website and acting as a bookie for his co-workers.
• To bypass the company’s web filter, one employee was caught using his desktop computer as an FTP server for the other employees. He had downloaded and saved over 300G of material.
• One employee was busted for giving away confidential information such as price lists, contracts, and software code for application development.
• Another employee was busted for having a side business stealing and selling company inventory on eBay.
• One woman was caught running an online outcall service from her desk.
• One employee was caught renting the corporate IP address to hacker friends to generate DOS attacks.

Although these are extreme cases, many companies have fired employees for violating company policies. It’s much more common than people realize.

As an employer, if you have an Acceptable Use Policy, which is strongly recommended, it must be enforced. Simply having it may not deter employees from finding ways around it in hopes of not getting caught.

There are excellent solutions that ensure that your Acceptable Use Policy is not violated, intentionally or otherwise. these solutions offer web filtering (gaming sites, gambling, or downloading viruses), email filtering (keywords or inappropriate jokes, etc), and many other must-have features.

Give us a call and let’s talk about your network security and Acceptable Use Policy, and find ways to make sure your company’s resources aren’t being wasted by your employees.

Stop "putting out fires", and consider taking a more pro-active approach with NerdCare!

Sometimes we start doing work for a business because they contact us looking to resolve issues that they are having. As we are performing the work, we notice other problems, and offer to resolve those as well. At which point we introduce our 3 N’s business model in hopes of proving pro-active support and preventative maintenance (NerdCare), as opposed to only acting when problems occur, or “putting out fires”.

In some cases, we are simply on-site to perform routine maintenance, or to check on things, not because something needs fixing. However, many employees are so accustomed to that sort of service from other providers, or their in-house I.T., that they naturally assume there’s a problem, and panic a little bit.

When we say “Don’t worry, there isn’t a problem, we’re just here to do some routine work and check on things. Everything is fine.”, they are pleasantly surprised!

That can often lead to the question: “Oh, since you’re here, can you look at something for me?” We’re happy to! On that note, we even take the “little things” seriously, because we know that they can be nagging frustrations, and something people deal with on a daily basis!

image credit: www.levelplatforms.com. Examples of what monitoring can do.

Little things can easily turn into big things, so it’s important to address them early.

Taking this approach, along with our ability to monitor the health of your computers, allows our team to stay on top of things 24/7, and most importantly, *saves you money*. Let us worry about your technology so you can focus on your business!

Stop wasting time, money, and energy “putting out fires”, and consider NerdCare!

One of our Nerds noticed a conversation on Twitter the other day about a specific free anti-virus product in use at a small business. The Nerd felt inclined to mention that free isn’t always better. More accurately, depending on a business’s needs, a paid anti-virus designed for enterprises is actually a must!

We felt inspired by that conversation to further explain why we feel this way.

Nerds On Site is vendor agnostic. This means that although we feel certain products are more effective than others, we feel no obligation to recommend a product if they are not a fit for a company or organization. This does not mean a free product, like Microsoft Security Essentials, isn’t effective or worth using, but given how the network and computers are being used, a paid product, like NOD32, can protect a network more effectively, and save a business time and money over the long term.

For example, some enterprise anti-virus product have the option to deploy and manage antivirus installed on workstations from the server. This is important, especially for larger companies that have many computers. The less that we need to go around to each machine and do maintenance, the less we interrupt the work people are doing. Using software to automate or remotely maintain and resolve issues from the server, possibly after hours, can accomplish the same tasks.

Free antivirus solutions do not offer this ability. Though they offer scheduled scans, which can be handy, some can nag the user to scan the computer regularly, or not offer to scan the system at all, leaving users to remember to do it. In a smaller business, or if the user doesn’t mind routinely doing this, a free anti-virus may be a fine choice.

For smaller companies that do not have a server, the ability to manage all workstation antivirus isn’t possible. That said, enterprise solutions are designed to work unattended for the most part, limiting how much we need to interrupt those using the workstation, including scheduled scans, and do not require being maintained by the server. Regardless, if it finds an infection, it notifies the user, which is by design.

image source: www.levelplatforms.com

Nerds On Site goes a step further, if an infection is found on a computer, we can install software to monitor the “health” of the system and send us alerts when issues or “warning signs” are discovered. This can often mean we are alerted to issues before our clients are even aware of them, and resolve them faster as a result. They can take comfort that when issues occur, we’re already aware of them, and they don’t have to do anything.

Enterprise antivirus (such as NOD32) can also saves bandwidth. For example, 50 PCs updating via the internet several times a day is extra load on the network, and that bandwidth best be used elsewhere, rather than slowing down the network unnecessarily. Business versions can download the updates once at the server, and workstations can get that update from the server. The update is downloaded once – not fifty times. We have clients with that have reported faster internet speeds – and better network performance – because of this.

Another important distinction is that free antivirus products are not licensed for business use, though companies like Microsoft aren’t enforcing that – yet. What does this really mean? If you have an issue with the software, businesses can’t call the vendor for support, and we’ve seen other (non-antivirus) software vendors decline support for THEIR software, blaming the free antivirus for the issues. Unlicensed software can be a scary position to be in.

That doesn’t mean we can’t monitor or maintain workstations that use a free anti-virus, but taking the onus off the user to not have to worry about doing scans or maintenance, or changing settings is a priority for us, and enables them to have more peace of mind.

[thanks to Mike Duffy, a Nerd in Calgary, Alberta for this post]

Being proactive when it comes to your Technology and Information is becoming more and more important.  Reactivity to system issues results in Downtime, Loss Money, Productivity, and not to mention Undue Stress and Anxiety.

Nerds On Site is making it possible to be proactive with your Technology and Systems no matter what your budget is!! For a low monthly cost, Nerds On Site will monitor your computer, printers, servers and many other Network connected devices and inform you by email if there is an issues or concern you need to be aware of. We can even notify you that your printer is low on toner!

You NO longer need for a inhouse server for this type of Monitoring! All you need is one computer to start with Nerds On Site 24/7 Monitoring.

24 hours a day, 7 days a week, Nerds On Site Monitoring will watch over your Vital Information and Technology.  When the first sign something is detected, Nerds On Site contacts you to help you get it taken care of it before it becomes a larger problem.

Being proactive not only save money and prevents down time it just makes sense.  Reduce frustration, and give yourself peace of mind with Nerds On Site 24/7 System Monitoring!

For more information or to get set up please contact us!

[this post from Nerd Scott Ledyard]

source: levelplatforms.com

Last time I checked, when you are admitted into a hospital room, they don’t ask, “Do you want us to hook you up to monitoring or not?” If you’re their patient, you ARE on monitoring and they strap you in.

We feel the same way. Monitoring of our client’s computers and other network devices is vital. And it’s really not optional: Nerds On Site has made monitoring a mandatory requirement for all NerdCare clients.

But let’s take a moment and think back to that blinking, beeping monitor in the hospital room. What’s it really doing? We visitors tend to think of it as an alarm, alerting the nurse if the patient’s health takes a turn for the worse.

However, the monitor is not only for the nurse, but for the doctor. The doctor is less interested in the alerts and more interested in the reports showing the trends of a patients vital signs taken over many hours and even days.

At Nerds On Site, we are fortunate that our monitoring tool of choice, Level Platforms, also captures BOTH types of vital data. It alerts us if there are impending troubles with a server or router. And it collects key statistics over time that let us sit back and analyze what’s going on – or going to happen – with the crucial bits of our client’s infrastructure.

Finally, we need to ask ourselves, “Are we a nurse or a doctor.” Trick question. Of course, we are both. Our clients need both, and we can only be trusted business advisers by looking out for their short-term and long-term best interests.

We are holding training sessions in the coming weeks to help Nerds learn the best ways to get the most from Level Platforms, which in turn they can pass on to their cleints!

Regular maintenance is essential for your site.

One of the most disheartening experiences for me is to listen to a client who has just found out their website is broken, and they don’t understand how or why that happened. All the client knows is that their website worked when it was built (usually years ago) but now some aspects of it just don’t operate properly.

WHY does this happen? Websites are like everything else in life – they breakdown absent of regular maintenance. Your car needs a regular oil change, brake inspection, engine tuneup, etc in order to continue operating at the same level as when you purchased it. Your computer needs regular updates for the OS and software, especially as new vulnerabilities and bugs are found. In the world of the Internet, technology moves quickly – web languages evolve, vulnerabilities are discovered, old technologies are discontinued, unsecure practices are marginalized or blocked…

WHAT can you do to maintain your website? It’s easy – add Hosting NerdCare! Hosting NerdCare is designed to keep your website maintained and UP. Websites powered by Joomla or WordPress are currently supported, and our team regularily updates these sites to ensure that they are using the latest standards and technologies.

Contact our team today to learn how Hosting NerdCare can help keep YOUR website in tip top shape!

At 1:49am EDT yesterday, Amazon’s cloud server (known as AWS) suffered a major and ongoing outage that took down many small and large web services around the world. The NPR has a great, easily understood explanation of what happened:

Major websites including Foursquare and Reddit crashed or suffered slowdowns Thursday after technical problems rattled Amazon.com’s widely used Web servers, frustrating millions of people who couldn’t access their favorite sites.

Read the rest of their article here: http://n.pr/fAMEoG. At the time of this writing, thousands of sites are still affected, as Amazon still has not resolved their issues. Interested clients can visit the Amazon status page directly to see a current status report of the Amazon issues.

While the Amazon outage did not affect any of our hosted websites, nor any of our dedicated or cloud server clients, it did take down our shared mail systems. As we employ third-party monitoring on all of our systems, our team was immediately alerted to the Amazon issues, even before Amazon itself acknowledged there was a problem. We immediately began working with Amazon to find the issues, and quickly discovered that this was not an issue isolated to our mail servers, but instead to wide swaths of the Internet. At that point our team had no choice but to wait on Amazon to provide the expected resolution.

When it became apparent that the problems at Amazon were getting worse, and not better, our team began reviewing our options, and decided to rebuild our mail systems from our last backup. We keep regular nightly backups of our mail systems in a different physical location with Amazon, and thus our backups were unaffected by the Amazon outage. By yesterday afternoon, we had restored all mail services. Because we were forced to rebuild our mail systems from a day-old backup, a few clients may experience a few lost emails. This is unfortunate, and we do apologize for this inconvenience.

Some clients may wonder if there was anything that we could have done to prevent this Amazon outage from affecting our mail systems. While the exact cause and after-action report from Amazon is still not available (they are still trying to fix the problem), some facts are known, and in the balance, the general consensus among Internet experts is that this Amazon outage was unprecedented and was nearly impossible to plan for:

This morning, multiple availability zones failed in the us-east region. AWS broke their promises on the failure scenarios for Availability Zones. It means that AWS have a common single point of failure (assuming it wasn’t a winning-the-lottery-while-being-hit-by-a-meteor-odds coincidence). The sites that are down were correctly designing to the ‘contract’; the problem is that AWS didn’t follow their own specifications.

You can read the rest of this informative article here: http://bit.ly/hPOjkH. However, just because this event was unprecedented and a complete failure of Amazon doesn’t mean that our team didn’t learn valuable lessons. Frequently, it is the largest of failures that teach the best of lessons.

This epic event showed our team that our basic recovery plans were sound and did allow us to recover relatively quickly from this outage. In addition, we have used this event to make adjustments to our disaster recovery procedures to ensure that the next time such an event occurs we will have significantly less downtime.

1. Our team will begin taking more frequent backups of our systems. This will allow us to recover from a more recent backup should such a failure even occur again.
2. We have changed the way we build our mail systems to allow for a quicker recovery in future events. In this case, it took our team 5 hours to rebuild the mail systems; with these changes already implemented, we expect that future re-builds will take less than an hour.
3. We have updated our disaster recovery documentation to reflect the lessons learned during this outage to ensure that our team has the latest and best procedures to follow for future events.

While our team is very disappointed that our clients had to suffer through another outage, we are pleased that we were able to recover services relatively quickly. As we write this, over 16 hours since we recovered our services, major sites like reddit.com are still not fully recovered. As always clients can watch our Trust Site for details on current uptime, and subscribe to our Twitter feed for regular updates for all problems.

Like thousands of companies around the world, we host many of our cloud services with Amazon. Currently, Amazon is experiencing crippling issues in their US-East datacenters, which is affecting thousands of websites and services around the globe. While all of our client websites remain up and unaffected, our client email systems are down because of Amazon’s issues. Amazon is aware of the problem, and is working to resolve this.

Have you considered the advantages of moving your corporate website and online presence to a dedicated server? The vast majority of businesses currently host their websites on a shared hosting platform, as this solution offers the greatest cost efficiency, but there are great benefits to having a server dedicated to your business’ needs.

Some advantages of a dedicated server are:

• 100% guaranteed uptime
• The freedom to do anything (legal) with your server
• A custom solution for your business’ needs
• No sharing of resources – the entire server is dedicated to your needs

Contact our team today to learn how we can help you with a dedicated hosted server solution!