MSPNetworks Blog

For a moment, I want you to stop and consider something: Who do you turn to when your business’ toilets suddenly stop working? Who do you call for when the lights stop working? Most likely, an expert… so if you turn to the pros for these needs, why would you do anything different for your IT?

Here, we’ll present the value of turning to the IT experts that we have here at MSPNetworks for your business’ technology needs. These values can effectively be broken down into three essential qualities that our services - known as managed services - are built around.

Predictable Productivity

Regardless of a business’ size, this is a primary concern: are they able to sustain their operations at a rate that means that they can remain open? This is one of the reasons that productivity is such a big buzzword in IT - the influence a given solution can have on a business’ productivity can easily make or break it over time. Try asking your employees how much they can accomplish if their computers don’t work - they’ll probably tell you how important an operational solution is to your business in no uncertain terms.

With a managed service provider (or MSP) like MSPNetworks managing your solutions, you can be sure that your technology is maintained. This way, your employees won’t find themselves stymied by technical issues out of their control.

Protection

Let’s face facts for a moment - business owners today have a lot to worry about. Once upon a time, a business could be protected by storing their documents in a safe and keeping the combination a secret. However, in today’s increasingly collaborative world, the safe has been made impractical. This means that your data needs to be both accessible to those who need it to meet the productivity standards we discussed above, as well as secured against cyberthreats and other risk factors, like data loss.

An MSP like MSPNetworks can implement the various solutions needed to ensure that this balance is achieved, allowing you the security to focus on your business. With the confidence that our services and solutions--including integrated security measures and business continuity with backups--can provide, you can breathe easy, knowing that your data stores are secure.

Professionals Pulling For You

As you may have noticed by now, most of the qualities of an MSP’s services that we’ve discussed thus far revolve around you receiving the managed support that gives providers like MSPNetworks their self-explanatory title. However, that only scratches the service. When your MSP’s team is made up of experts like ours is, you not only have professionals providing your business with support… you have professionals supporting you.

Unlike many other IT service options, the more successful our clients are, the happier we are. After all, that means that our solutions worked for them, only reinforcing the proof that our options are the right ones to leverage. Furthermore, you can be sure that if you do experience a problem with your business technology we’ll come correct to fix it. Again, our success is determined by yours - so if something doesn’t work, that’s a problem for us… and frankly, our professional egos aren’t going to let us overlook a problem like that.

It only makes sense to turn to an expert for issues that you want taken care of correctly, for these reasons, and many more to boot. This is only more apparent when your information technology is involved. The “expert touch” is a real thing, and can make a real difference.

Interested in finding out the difference that an expert touch can make for your IT services? Reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

When we discuss our service offerings, we understand that it can all seem like a little much, especially to the small business that - up to this point - has never needed all these fancy solutions to operate effectively. However, there are a few considerations that the business this scenario applies to needs to account for. For instance, is it certain that these solutions are unnecessary?

As it happens, probably not. On top of that, these solutions will only make doing business easier for you.

Apart from size and scope, what’s all that different between your operation and that of a large business? Not all that much - which means that you both are going about business in similar ways. At least, you probably should be.

If you still aren’t convinced, we’ve assembled a few common IT-based tools and solutions and reviewed the benefits each can deliver.

Web-Based Payments
Balancing out all of your business-essential tasks, it’s probably safe to say that ‘collecting payments’ ranks pretty high on that list. Any organization that provides goods and/or services needs to be reimbursed for those goods and/or services in some way if they are going to last very long. Accepting payments online can help encourage this by eliminating the need for a patron to visit your place of business to hand over a check, potentially reducing the time that your invoices are left outstanding.

Of course, to implement this intelligently, you will need to make sure that this is implemented securely. Many security solutions integrate this requirement, so we can help advise you on the right platform to use and assist you in managing it.

Communication
Promising something to your business’ audience is one thing. Ensuring that you can pull it off behind-the-scenes is another. The right technology solutions will help your team keep clear communications with each other, whether it’s a project management system, company email account, or an internal chat interface.

You may be surprised to discover how many time-wasting issues can be avoided just through the mitigation of miscommunication, thanks to simpler and more informative referential information. Progress toward goals, potential and imminent complications, and other key milestones are all made much easier to keep track of.

Social Media
While many see social media as an activity that is inappropriate for businesses, it can actually be highly beneficial to your strategy to leverage it in some ways. Not only can it be a highly effective marketing tool, it can give you some improved insight into what your clients or customers are looking for, thereby helping you shape your strategy.

Then there’s its potential to be used as a line of communication with your audience. Someone seeking customer service would find it easy just to send a brief message to your business on social media, as long as someone is keeping an eye on the account and responding to these messages.

Being too quick to discredit social media can have an impact on a business’ success. Leveraging it to assist your operations can as well, but with a much more preferable outcome.

Cloud Computing
There are many applications for cloud computing that businesses of all sizes could benefit from considerably. The ability to securely access data enables a team to access their data and collaborate on it from effectively anywhere, a highly useful prospect for many businesses. Alternatively, the cloud can be used to host a comprehensive business backup as an ace in the hole in case of disaster.

If you’re reconsidering how you implement IT solutions in your business, give us a call at (516) 403-9001. We can help you shape your strategy to fit your precise needs.

The right technology can be a catalyst for change. While the right kind of change can be enough to drive innovation and push the limits of your business, the wrong kind of change--namely, employee turnover--can put a halt to productivity and force you to trace your steps back down the old, familiar path of onboarding and training. How can you use technology to retain top talent and reinforce the right message amongst your employees?

Today we’ll examine some of the biggest business technology innovations that can help your organization keep its talent happy and its culture healthy. These recommendations will take into account the physical workspace of your company and how technology will influence the user’s satisfaction.

Provide the Technology to Fit the Workspace
Depending on the business, you might have a space that is conducive to a more mobile type of working style. Give your employees the technology to take advantage of their workspace, whether it’s a desktop or laptop. While the traditional work desk is still quite common in the workplace, open offices are gaining traction, and open areas where employees can work when they need to get away from others to focus or hunker down on a task can be provided to ensure employees can work on their own terms while still maintaining productivity.

Make It Easy for Employees to Use their Devices
A Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy can be a great boon for your business. For one, it keeps your organization from investing in company devices when they aren’t needed. You can just have your employees use their own devices for work purposes as long as they adhere to your organization’s policy regarding data security. The ideal BYOD policy will respect your employees’ ability to work as needed while also maintaining the right to remotely wipe devices and apply permissions to whitelist or blacklist apps.

Properly Maintain Technology Systems
Nothing is more irritating for workers than technology that doesn’t work. Even a task like checking your email can be held up by a workstation that is too slow or not configured properly. To this end, preventative maintenance and management is critical, as you can make sure technology stays in proper working order before it becomes a major issue for your employees. If you can’t take proper care of your technology, employees will wonder why you can’t make their jobs a priority for your business, and it can reflect in their work performance.

MSPNetworks can help you both implement and maintain technology in a way that is effective for retaining employees. To learn more about our remote monitoring and management solutions, as well as Bring Your Own Device policies, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

All businesses are part of their respective markets, and depending on that market, the business will implement technology solutions designed to help them best cater to their business. However, you should only implement technology that can yield a satisfactory return on investment, or ROI. We’re here to help you get the most return on your investment as possible.

Return on investment is basically a way of saying that whatever you’re investing in is actually creating results for your organization. It’s the difference between spending a considerable amount of time on a task with an expensive technology or spending even longer without one. It’s working smarter, not harder. It all comes down to calculating whether the investment you’ve made on a technology solution generates enough revenue to justify making the investment it in the first place.

Here’s how you too can calculate the return on investment for just about any technology solution your business might consider down the line.

Basic Return on Investment
At its most basic level, return on investment boils down to the following equation:

ROI = ((Net Gain) / Cost) * 100

Net gain is determined by a couple of factors, including how much you spend and how much you wind up with afterward. Therefore, if you spend $20 and make $40, your net gain would be $20.

ROI = (20/20) * 100 = 100%

This places the ROI at a 100%, effectively doubling the amount of money you’ve invested.

Net Gain and Costs Aren’t Always Easy to Determine
Of course, net gain for businesses isn’t always going to be this easy to figure out. You have all kinds of operating costs, implementation costs, payroll, opportunity cost, and so on, all of which can directly influence how much return on investment you will get from a particular solution. If you are thinking about implementing a new piece of technology, you’ll have to think about how much time is spent on a task now, how much time could be saved, and what the initial cost of implementation will be.

This might be overwhelming to some, but it’s not impossible to figure out. After all, you have the technology experts at MSPNetworks to rely on. For help determining if your next IT implementation will yield a positive return on investment, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

Many industries depend on their IT working properly to function as intended, and healthcare is among them. Prior to 2009, information technology had failed to take root, but with the passing of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act), the health industry is much more involved and reliant on IT than it has ever been before.

Electronic medical record technology is partially responsible for this rapid adoption, as it has made record keeping much easier for the healthcare industry. Since healthcare is quite a private industry, a system that can store patient and insurance data in a central location that can easily be accessed is critical to its success. This is one of the most important reasons why the healthcare industry suffers from some of the largest and most expensive data breaches out there, exposing countless medical and financial records for millions of patients.

Hoping to find a better way to keep data safe and secure from external threats, healthcare professionals are looking to alternative ways to store data so that it’s located in an environment where it is both secure and easy to distribute. When you take into account all of the other problems associated with healthcare, such as standards of care and rising costs, it’s clear that finding a way to keep data secure and accessible, while also not stifling innovation, is critical.

The Blockchain Might Be the Answer
An emerging technology called blockchain could be one of the best ways to solve the healthcare technology issues the industry is currently presented with. Many people know of blockchain as the tech that makes cryptocurrency possible, but it’s being looked at to solve a lot of issues associated with healthcare technology. The distributed ledger and technology behind it make it ideal for sharing information to a certain extent. Developers know that doctors, insurance agencies, and patients need access to this information, and the blockchain can provide this while guaranteeing data integrity. While it isn’t all great for the blockchain’s use in healthcare, there are various benefits that the blockchain can provide:

• Medical records: Once a medical record is completed, it is placed as a node into the blockchain. This effectively guarantees the authenticity of the record. The distributed nature of the blockchain allows the patient control over their medical and insurance information rather than have it be hosted by the care provider.
• Consent: Blockchain-based applications for consent management can potentially create a standard for these practices. A doctor or insurer might need access to records, so a patient can provide their consent through the blockchain as it’s needed.
• Medical rewards: Patients might be able to reap rewards and enjoy incentives for using this blockchain technology for their health records. This would be able to promote the solution to the rest of the industry, allowing for reduced costs in the long run.

While the blockchain might still be a developing technology, it could save the healthcare industry lots of time and resources in the future. What are your thoughts on these developments? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to subscribe to our blog.

If you look around your company, there’s a good chance that it has a lot of technology that you completely take for granted. No matter if you run a small retail store, a factory, or a multi-location office, your business needs IT to function properly. Today, we will take a look into several ways your organization can use technology to improve your business.

Customer Service
The relationships you forge with your customers are some of the most rewarding you will build in business; and, unmistakably the most crucial. When businesses fail to support the products and services that they sell, they have a much harder time sustaining positive consumer relationships. There are plenty of technologies that can help a business improve customer service. One such technology is customer relationship management software. Not only does it provide a ticketing system to get customer complaints and concerns in front of decision makers, it also provides several options to help manage support work.

Today, companies are routinely utilizing social media, including social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter to engage with their customers. These platforms in particular give the business the chance to promote their knowledge base, their products, and also hold a public conversation about their products and services. While this may not always work out in the business’ favor, it has proven to be a great outlet for businesses looking to engage in substantive conversations with customers and prospects.

Productivity
In order to be a successful business, revenue needs to flow; and, in order for that to happen productivity has to commence. No matter what your businesses, some value has to be created for you to be doing what you are doing. As a result, companies are looking to make investments in technology that will help build their revenue streams. That’s why you see many of today’s businesses, regardless of their industry or size, using technology to facilitate a boost to their organizational productivity.

One solution that is very useful for any service business is time-tracking software. Typically, this comes as a part of a scheduling solution. Software like this allows managers to assign time for certain tasks, while being able to review how long projects and service delivery takes, providing a way to best monetize the time their employees spend and streamline work processes.

Moreover, many of today’s most useful technology-based solutions for productivity are filled with collaborative options and hosted in the cloud. In utilizing cloud-hosted software solutions, companies are giving their employees the flexibility to do more. Cloud-hosted apps typically are available on any device and are scalable to ensure that the company isn’t paying more than it needs to for the productivity solutions they need.

Finance
It would be an understatement to say that money is a major consideration when it comes to business. Decisions are made every day with the bottom line the major consideration. Technology solutions can help small business owners better manage their finances. They can utilize online invoicing services to help them collect payment and reduce expenses.

The use of software to manage payroll and accounts receivable not only makes those inherently frustrating tasks much easier, they allow them to be handled with care. These are, after all, crucial aspects of your organization’s ability to conduct business. By having software solutions that provide the ability to streamline your organization’s revenue streams and expenses, business simply runs better.

Security
Let’s face it, security is crucial to the sustainability of every single business. Whether it is network security or physical security, if people are free to do other people harm with impunity, there is total chaos. With solutions that include antivirus, firewall, content filtering, and spam blocking, technology can keep the business’ IT safe.

On the other end of things, IT-fueled physical security is a big hit with organizations of all types. With digital cameras, biometric security locks, and more solutions keeping a constant eye (or eyes) out, you can ensure that your workplace, your employees, and your assets are properly protected.

Nowadays, organizations also have to worry about their wireless networks and mobile access. Today there are plenty of solutions aimed at enhancing your business’ mobility, while keeping the increased amount of enemies out of your business’ network and infrastructure.

Growth in the use of technology has been leading the way for quite some time, and, with all the new solutions on the market, this trend doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. Call the technology professionals at MSPNetworks at (516) 403-9001 to talk about getting an assessment to see how you can improve your business through technology.

Election Day in the United States is coming up quick on November 6th. It doesn’t matter what your thoughts or opinions on U.S. politics are--the fact remains that millions of Americans will be using the technology available at polling places to cast their ballots, and if this technology isn’t secured properly, the integrity of the voting system will be at risk.

Technology Found at Most Polling Places
Most polling places in America are using technology that is quickly approaching 15 years old. To put that in perspective, let’s think about some technologies and products today that haven’t even reached ten years old yet.

• Google Chrome
• Airbnb
• Spotify
• Kickstarter
• 4G
• Mobile GPS
• Instagram
• The iPad

A co-founder of a nonprofit group called Open Source Election Technology, Greg Miller, has this to say about election technology: ”You have equipment that was introduced in 2005. In that time frame, how many times have you changed your mobile phone? And how many times have we replaced our laptops?” In essence, Miller describes election technology as “...obsolete hardware [and] software that relies on a diet of spare parts.”

The other co-founder of OSET, John Sebes, takes a different approach by showing just how vulnerable the systems are to manipulation. Most polling places have a portable media device, like a CD or USB drive, that must be used to transport the results to another location for the tally. The machines that count the votes are usually outdated in terms of both hardware and software. Sebes initiated a live demonstration for a national news network to show how he could influence the results of an election between two fictional candidates named Thorfer and Varda. Thorfer won with 3,000 votes while Varda received only 100, yet Sebes was able to use malware to switch the tallies around, creating a fraudulent winner. While some computers used for this purpose are secured, others are not so much.

Furthermore, there is some inconsistency in regard to whether or not polling places keep a paper backup of the vote in the event a recount is needed. This includes some of the “battleground” or “swing” states where small numbers of votes can sway the final outcome much more than in other states.

How to Minimize the Issue
The easiest way to resolve this problem is one that is just impossible to pull off. The United States Constitution specifies that each state is responsible for maintaining its own set of electoral procedures, meaning that any attempts at consistency will be made impossible. There are other ways to make progress regarding election system security, even if some of them are more low-tech than anything else.

Temporarily Cease Online Voting
Some states allow online voting for those who are abroad or are unable to make it to the polling place for whatever reason. Some even allow for email ballots. Unfortunately, security for these methods is subpar to say the least, and it should be suspended until it can be secured properly.

Use Physical Backups
Ordinarily, we would suggest that all backups be saved to the cloud. In this case, we’re dealing with something a bit different, as digital assets can be hacked. A physically-generated paper backup of the voting records is less susceptible to being tampered with, and it allows for cross-checking any results.

Invest in Improved Voting Equipment
Since the devices used in the voting process are over a decade old, it’s clear that updating this infrastructure is not a priority. Some have suggested that Congress get involved to expedite the process, creating funding opportunities to improve machines and replace older devices, but this hasn’t happened since 2002.

What are your thoughts on the current state of election technology? Let us know in the comments.