Rich Schierer is President & Founder of Make My Technology Simple, a full service Information Technology Solutions provider. He is a member of the local chapter of the Association of Contingency Planners.
If you have any questions or comments, please direct them to him at rich@makemytechnologysimple.com

A Large percentage of my business is from repeat customers, with re-occurring problems, that slow their businesses down.

Let’s take a look at two ‘Offices’. Which of the following two scenarios is your office?

Office A

10 PCs running Windows XP Pro, w/ ~2GB RAM, 2-3 servers running Windows 2003/2008 Oses, running managed services on all PCs and servers. All issues are resolved pro-actively. Microsoft Security Patching and Anti-virus updates and scans are run and monitored. Connected to the internet via cable. IT support costs are fixed, leaving your IT staff or consultant to work with you to improve processes.

Office B

10 PCs running Windows XP Pro or Vista, w/ less than 2GB RAM, 2-3 servers running NT/2000 Server. No managed services. No remote monitoring, no remote access. All issues are resolved after the fact (reactively) and at a premium rate, Microsoft Security Patching is off, PC/Server has not had updates since… ??? Status of your antivirus updates and scans is also unknown (who is responsible for this?) Internet access is wide open and not only do your employees have the ability to surf the web, but hackers have access to your private company files (they do???!!) IT Support costs are out of hand, you have to reboot PCs and servers more than once a day. ( You do know how to reboot a server, don’t you?) You have a high turnover rate of IT staff (if you even have someone at all, who is responsible for this??)

So? Which office is yours? Or which one has more of one than it should?

Enter managed services. Office A has managed services and there was no mention of rebooting PCs or servers. Nor a mention of hackers (but sadly hackers are still a problem).

So what are managed services you ask? We load a small program on your PC/Server and let it run. This ‘agent’ collects only information about the workings of the hardware and software. What you have, what you don’t have. When a problem occurs (and no you weren’t alerted to it because you don’t have this type of system or an IT staff to do it for you), an alert is sent to the monitoring station (in IT terms it is called a NOC Network Operations Center) which in turn creates a trouble ticket that is either resolved immediately or is sent on to a tech who will be on-site in the morning.

What kind of problems do managed services resolve? For one, problems are solved before ‘You’ the business owner or even end user know about it. Now that end user, your employee does not have to reboot their PC a few times a day.

And now back to my opening statement about ROI, how do we calculate that?

If one end user has to reboot twice a day (2) and it takes 10 minutes, that means that your employee was sitting idle for 20 minutes a day, times 5 days a week equals 100 minutes or almost 2 hours a week. Now how much do you pay that employee a week? Multiply that times how many employees you have. OK now you have lost time/money due to rebooting. Add the same amount of time/money to that to show how much ‘productivity’ you lost. And finally, add the number of minutes/hours lost due to employees not getting back to work right away.

Managed services are all the range now as they are a great solution to a lot of issues that plague companies. They are used by some of the bigger companies because they have to show productivity gains and that is done by getting more use out of every person and piece of equipment.

And now the bad part,,, (yeah you knew it was coming!) the price. Now that you have a ballpark number in your head about how much you are losing to non productive equipment, we can use it against what managed services will cost you.

$15/PC per month, $35/server per month. Take that number and subtract it from the one above, of course make sure that your lost is showing how much a month you are losing. If the resulting number is a positive that would be the price you would be saving each month. If the resulting number is a negative, well then your systems are running better than most and I congratulate you! So! Now we can talk about getting other processes running better! You do have a business continuity plan in place, don’t you???

Richard W. “Rich” Schierer aka MyIT GuyOnLI is President & owner of Make My Technology Simple

You can find him on Facebook, follow him on Twitter, at the company website www.makemytechnologysimple.com or call him at 631.375.4512 to discuss what managed services can do for your company’s performance or any other computer/network issue.

Antivirus software doesn’t do it all any more. Now you need a combination of that and antimalware. And you have to keep up on those too! Long gone are the days of turning on the computer and having an interesting surf thru cyber-space!

But the end is not in sight my friends! At least not for securing your computers and networks! If you do the numbers, it costs less to have an experienced, trained professional come in and secure your network and computers.

Let me ask you this… “How much do you think it costs you on a daily basis to have problematic computers and networks vs having a professional secure and configure your networks and computers properly?”.

Let’s say you have 5 computers running Microsoft Windows XP Pro and one server running Microsoft Windows Server 2003. If each person loses 15 minutes a day because their computers froze and they had to reboot to get back to work. Now multiply that by a weekly time loss of 5 computers x 15 minutes loss per day x 5 days = 375 minutes a week or 6 hours 15 minutes. Multiply that times their billable rate $100/hour (if you are a law, accounting or health care firm you are billing at a much higher rate) and you now find that you are loosing $625 per week (or $2500 per month) in billable time to computers freezing up or running slow.

Now bring in the computer professional who will clean up all your problems and create a proactive approach to your support consisting of a visit once a week, plus managed services, plus off-site backup and your monthly cost is way less to have a properly configured, secured and running computer network. Fees vary depending on your location but here on Long Island, NY you are looking at approximately $1000 per month.

And that includes supporting the server also! And we didn’t even get into your company data being protected. What if the server goes down????

08 February 2010
VIPRISK INTELL ITEM 08FEB10-01 TITLE: Anti-Virus Again Proven Largely Ineffective
BYLINE:
Even users running up-to-date anti-virus software still get infected with malware, according to stats from an online malware scanning service. Nearly a third (25,000 out of 78,800) of computers with up-to-date anti-virus software were discovered to be infected with malicious code when users scanned their PC using SurfRight’s HitmanPro 3 behavioral scan. SurfRight’s analysis is based on 107,435 users who put their PC through its scanner between 10 October and 4 December 2009. Around a quarter of these users (28,608) either had no scanner installed or were running security software that was out of date.

WHO IS AT RISK: ALL Windows PC-based users of commercial anti-virus software (90% of the computing world).

WHY YOU CARE:
The purpose of this intell item is not to highlight a particular product – Maverick is product agnostic. The purpose is to make users aware of the ineffectiveness of an industry that has consistently failed them since 1999. The exercise by the product does illustrate the problem that running the latest version of antivirus software is no guarantee against malware infection, contrary to what the marketing department of many security software firms have historically said.

WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT:
Keep your AV in place, and keep it up-to-date. But also, combine that with smart surfing (carefully examining links and sites before you click on them – and use legitimate providers), filtering at the Internet Access Points, only downloading attachments from known (good) providers, and using the strongest browsers (alternatives to Internet Explorer). Those at particular risk should consider the use of secured bootable media for high-risk transactions, such as online banking, data transfers, or shopping.
Posted by VIPRisk (www.viprisk.com) at 13:58

Well, welcome Windows 7 on the scene and the story is the same. I have been working on installing a new Gateway PC into a professionals home network and it wasn’t any surprise that their old Dell wireless external adapter didn’t work with the new system. I went out and bought a few different kinds of adapter from Linksys, a USB stick adapter, a range booster and an internal card.

First I tried to install the internal card, but discovered that because the PC was a space saving slim line model, the full height card would not fit. OK let’s try the USB stick. Installed the accompanying software and barely got a signal from the Linksys router. OK remove the USB stick and try to get the range expander to work. After all the router is in the basement and the PC is in the 1st floor living room. BTW, the old PC didn’t have any problems getting a signal with this setup.

Spent way too much time trying to get a good signal, called Cablevision to troubleshoot. We got a great signal to the modem. I even put a laptop and connected it to the router via network cable. Worked great. So the problem is either the wireless signal or the adapter.

After much research I came upon a FAQ on Microsoft’s website that said that not all hardware would work yet with Windows 7. You would think that a company as big as Linksys would be one of the first to get the new drivers out, right?

Well not so. I now have to find another brand of adapter that is Windows 7 compliant and test it out. So much for keeping everything Linksys.

Word to the wise, Make sure that the box says Windows 7 compliant! It will save a lot of frustration on your part. For me it is too late!

Who is yours? I have always been enamored by the people that do things under the radar. The ones that don’t get the spotlight. Who do what they do because they have the passion.

Do you know of anyone like this?

Click on the Start Button, then left click the program that you want to work with. From the new resulting drop down menu you will see the following choices amongst others:

Pin to Task Bar
Pin to Start Menu

I like to keep my desktop as free of icons as possible, so I like to put my most used programs on the Task Bar.

To ‘Pin’ anything to the Task Bar, you must first make sure that it is ‘unlocked’. To do this, right click the task bar and make sure that the task bar is ‘unlocked’. If it says ‘task bar locked’, then left click it once and it was become unlocked.

By clicking ‘Pin to Task Bar’ the application sends a copy of itself to the Task Bar. Now instead of clicking Start>All programs>Program folder>program you can just single click the icon on the task bar.

If you have any questions about Windows 7, or any technology questions, please feel free to post it here and I will do the best I can to answer it.

Another smiling face at the breakfast was my friend and salesperson for the NY Islanders, Hank Jaroslawski. He is my main contact for all things Islanders. Helped me to find just the right jerseys for me and my daughter.

After the breakfast, I headed over to Charlie Razenson’s Unique Impressions shop to talk with him about getting some monogrammed shirts for my business and then as always catching up on the Islanders with him. Charlie is very involved with the Islanders and does a lot of work for them, so he is constantly talking with them, attends a ton of events, some as a member of the Islanders Business Club, of which I became a member of a few months ago. He was very gracious in giving me an autographed photo of one of my Islander favorites, Tim Jackman #28. That man gets on the ice and things happened!

Then after that I was back at the office, adding the people I met at the breakfast to my database and getting ready to contact them to set up appointments for next week.

Friday the 13th was a good day for this ‘Guy’. Hope it was for you too!

There is something to be said about this kind of forum. It definitely fills a void during these economic times.

(I actually picked up two key leads for work and am talking with a 3rd about using his services to promote my business.

I think the key thing is that we get out there, meet new people and see if we can get each other more contacts and perhaps work.

“People Do Business With People They Know.” Get to know someone new today and maybe do some business with them tomorrow!