Tag Archives: Security

Network Protection – Are you being too cheap?

Think back to the last time your server went down and you were not able to conduct business – Do you remember how frustrating that was? Or, maybe you experienced a virus or data-erasing disaster – Do you remember how difficult and expensive that was to resolve?

In today’s business environment, there are very few business activities that do not rely heavily on your computer network, email and data programs. When any of these components work improperly, business grinds to a halt – and you lose valuable time and money!

With technology becoming ever more imperative to your business operations and hackers and viruses becoming more sophisticated about accessing your network, you simply cannot afford not to monitor the health and security of your network at all times. A network monitoring system is a great way for a trained professional to watch over your computer network system for slow or failing components, security breaches, and alarms that signify trouble is brewing. It can also detect signs that your backup solution is not working, that you are running out of space on the server, or that a firewall is not functioning properly.

The question is this – If network monitoring is so important, why aren’t more small businesses insisting that their IT service provider put a system in place?

Lack of knowledge – The reality is that many businesses do have their systems monitored and the bigger and more sophisticated the business is, the more critical this becomes. Unfortunately, many IT providers that service small businesses do not know of or have the tools to provide monitoring services. As a result, many small business owners are not being offered this critically important service.

Complacency – If it isn’t broken, why fix it? Please allow us to rephrase this in more realistic terms – If it isn’t broken, it eventually will be and it will cost valuable time and money! Remember, we do not wait to get robbed before we start locking our doors…we lock our doors to prevent a robbery. Network monitoring is an extremely important preventive measure that On-Site Tech Support utilizes to ensure that businesses do not get robbed of valuable time and money due to computer system failures.

The Four Steps to Succeed in Your IT Systems Management

Organizations that are large or small, public or private, local or international, facing unprecedented challenges to support critical business initiatives in the dynamic business environment. Users are now scattered in many places; they bring their own mobile devices to work and expect IT to deliver fast and efficient services as well as support for those systems.

It is now possible that organizations achieve IT effectiveness without cutting the service levels by the adoption of a System Management strategy. DedicatedSolutions provides you with the best-dedicated server hardware in our multiple data centers across the globe.

If you have not decided yet how to build your Infrastructure, the below four steps can help companies improve the efficiency of the different processes of production, sales and administration; reduce costs and increase their competitiveness through the use of our managed services, information and communication technologies.

Know Your Infrastructure

See your network from a whole new perspective of the strategy of IT systems management of an organization depends on the discovery process. Managers must know what components are on the network, how assets are performing, who is not in compliance with IT policies and what to do to comply again. Unfortunately, the inventory lists do not always agree with reality and systems often fall into oblivion.

DedicatedSolutions provides visibility to all IT environment assets to collect and update management data automatically in real time. Although new assets enter the environment through acquisitions, lifecycles of IT, mobile workers or policies and other can be managed by our custom solutions.

On the other hand, whether you remain connected or not, DedicatedSolutions predefined applied policies on the new system stores the information in a central repository that can be used to provide proactive maintenance, providing solution and produce reports and alerts on any changes for administrators.

Manage Your IT Environment More Efficiently

Today, most organizations require operations around the clock, seven days a week, but traditionally, the management of IT systems has become a decentralized manner with product manuals in multiple processor points that are far from providing general availability. Administrators can perform maintenance and typically keep the systems in operation, but the work is hardly consistent between systems and usually is not documented and is performed manually.

DedicatedSolutions provides a unique framework where you can perform administration tasks remotely from anywhere consistently. Administrators can handle groups of machines by type, operating system, platform, department, geographical location or virtually any other distinguishing characteristic.

Combined with visibility into all IT assets and behavior systems, this accessibility allows policies based management systems. Administrators can set, monitor and update policies from a central console and leave them to machines distributed in the environment. Systems can fit in multiple groups and meet with various policies. It creates a focus on system management, which enables organizations to maintain a consistently healthy IT environment and with minimal impact on users.

SoftwareMgmt

Automating the Maintenance and Troubleshooting

Many organizations already have some automation in their IT environments, usually in the form of monitoring and alerting. Usually, when there is an issue with any system components in the infrastructure, a flurry of emails sent to the IT team. However, you and an administrator cannot manually create a ticket and solve a problem. Regular maintenance is also done in much the same way – task by task, machine by machine.

The custom solutions and managed services of DedicatedSolutions can automate IT tasks that are recurrent such as patch management, the operation of software and implementing solutions and analysis of the cause. Our 24*7 Help Desk provides relevant performance information to managers as they are working on solving a problem and can even solve problems automatically without manual intervention.

The result is that management of IT is possible using a minimum amount of resources. Simultaneously, automation allows regular maintenance of organizations tasks to improve IT service levels, expand capacity and meet needs of new business initiatives while reducing costs.

Tangible Results Monitors

IT services that are providing management of IT tasks are one of the most important functions, but it is also inconsistent and consumes a significant quantity of time. Rather than being viewed as a cost center, IT needs to show the contributions they are making to business and the value of supporting business goals and initiatives.

DedicatedSolutions provides the platform to collect data relevant from distributed systems management, store the information in a central repository and report them to the concerned person. Because different audiences require various levels of technical detail, customizable reports of DedicatedSolutions ranging from executive summaries to snapshots system and detailed historical reports. And because data have already been collected in real time and have managed centrally, time to compiling reports is minimal.

An Integrated Platform

DedicatedSolutions gives IT organizations the visibility and control they need to manage effective and efficient distributed systems. Automation streamlines maintenance and troubleshooting to improve user productivity without increasing IT costs. Administrators can then leverage the visibility and control to validate the results, and the management can take advantage of the information to make accurate decisions. Our integrated platform consolidates all aspects of apparatus under a single administrative panel, standardizing maintenance, monitoring and troubleshooting across the organization.

Five Top Trends That Will Define IT Landscape in 2016

Of all the important issues that keep executives awake, probably none is more important than to think “Are we keeping up to the date?”. The rapid pace of change in IT and business, in general, means that CIOs and other senior technologists cannot afford to be decentralized.

Where should you focus your energies as you build your to-do list for 2016? Forecast 2016 Computerworld survey of IT professional outlines five key areas – cloud computing, security, Internet of things, analysis, and the development of IT as a change-agent that promise to define the IT landscape in 2016.

IT As An Agent of Change

Finally, IT can move fully towards the center of the company in 2016 as the digital processing becomes an important strategic priority. Thanks to the economic growth, CIOs, and their IT organizations are well positioned to drive this change, increases in staff and a pronounced trend toward strategic spending.

Almost half (46%) of the 182 survey respondents said they are preparing for increased spending on technology, with anticipated budget increases averaging 14.7%. (Those numbers are higher than last year when 43% of respondents said they expected to increase spending, and the expected average was 13.1%.)

At the same time, 37% of respondents this year said they are planning to increase IT staff, compared with 24% last year. In addition, 42% of those hiring plans are looking for people with expertise in technology and business, that will articulate the value of IT in meeting business objectives.

This mixed knowledge will be essential for IT to achieve its primary goals in 2016 – 19% of the respondents said their mission is to generate new revenue or increase the existing ones in the next 12 months. Also, on the list is the acceleration of business processes and agility (cited by 40% of respondents) and improved collaboration with business units (35%).

While IT has made great progress in moving towards the strategic center of the company, there is more work to be done – mostly focuses on building relationships with business stakeholders.

Cloud Computing

As organizations are building an IT infrastructure for the future, there is no doubt that the cloud will play a key role. The real test is to figure out which model of cloud computing is the best choice for a particular company.

Almost half (48%) of the Forecast 2016 survey respondents said that cloud computing is an area for increased spending in their organizations, and 14% cited cloud initiatives as the draft most important technology for the coming year. Some 29% confirmed that they had already moved some business applications to the cloud with more plans; while 7% said they are in the process of migrating mission critical systems in a cloud environment.

On the other hand, 22% of respondents said their organizations are conducting beta testing or pilot programs covering the complete list of cloud delivery methods including private, public and hybrid options.

Now that the cloud is a standard element of IT architectures, the question facing CIOs is whether to use cloud-based systems and which deployment model is best for their organizations. Some things will be given a private cloud model while others take advantage of external cloud services or new types of delivery models.

Security

Data breaches made high profile last year (2015), with attention grabbing headlines. Maintaining the security is again at the top of IT budgets for the third year.

Exactly half of respondents this year (versus 46% last year) said security spending will increase in 2016; making safety the first choice among technology initiatives related to higher spending. When they were asked to identify the most important project of technology currently underway in their organizations, security came in second place (chosen by 12% of respondents), behind cloud computing by only two percentile points. And 16% of these identified security as their biggest challenge regarding leadership for the coming year; surpassed only by budget and economic pressures.

it-trends

The Internet of Things

The so-called Internet of Things (IoT) is no longer the stuff of science fiction, but a reality shortly for IT organizations across many industries. IoT technologies can be implemented in all kinds of practical uses, such as optimizing the supply chain through RFID, and performance monitoring focused on energy saving system.

Forecast 2016 Computerworld survey states 29% of respondents identified initiatives and IoT projects such as machine-to-machine and telematics as new areas of spending for this year. By comparison, last year, only 12% of respondents said that the work of IoT would be a new IT spending in 2015. Similarly, the percentage of the respondent said they planned to launch IoT projects in the next 12 months, which is 15% higher as compared to last year.

Analysis

As businesses pivot towards the digital market, the significant expenditure in the analysis of data will continue. The business analysis was No. 5 on the list of major projects for IT respondents and No. 3 in the technologies that they will get an increase in expenses over the next 12 months.

Having organized all your data, companies are now finding out how to use them effectively. At the same time, the analytical capabilities are being integrated into more and more applications and workflows for daily use, rather than being only available in separate tools.

The analysis also is infiltrating rapidly throughout the area of ​​machine learning, artificial intelligence and pattern recognition. This analysis can help discern patterns that are not apparent to humans.

The Wearables

While products like Google Glass and Apple Watch were announced with great fanfare, the reality is that companies are not willing to make practical use of the wearable systems, at least in the future foreseeable.

The wearable technology was last in the list of Forecast 2016 Computerworld survey, currently being evaluated in beta and pilot projects, with only 4% of respondents saying they had projects involving current wearables.

Moreover, 78% said they might work on wearable applications or anticipating the need to support wearables in the near future. And only 8% of these people said that the wearables would play a role in their commercial and technological operations while only 12% said they were adjusting their management strategies to include wearables mobile devices.