Technology Pain Points – How Long Can You Endure Them?

Do you know how much a slow, under-performing PC costs you each day/week?

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.

Summertime Blues

For most of us this phrase would mean that they are down in the dumps. To others it might mean that a concert. The key here is that we should not assume anything when it comes to our computers and their protection.

Case in point… a client calls me up saying that one of his office PCs is acting ‘weird’. So anyone that has sat in front of a computer can tell you that ‘weird’ is not good. So I get on over to the client’s office and discover that this computer has has been infected with a few viruses. I discover immediately that the PC does not have their anti virus software up to date. When I ask him about this he says that a message came up a month or so ago and said that it wanted him to buy something to continue his protection. I told him that that was normal. That the program itself would continue to do scans, but that you had to pay for the up to date ’signatures’ that tell the program how to detect all the new viruses.

Well to make a long story short, we activated his anti virus account, downloaded the ’signatures’ and then did a full scan. The scan found 17 new viruses. One of which was noted to send information to someone else’s email account!

 We will never know if that virus did in fact send any information out to another email account [this is one of the ways identity theft occurs]. But we have agreed that I would return the next business day to ensure that all his computers had up to date accounts and that they were doing full scans every night.

So the moral of the story… never assume your computers are safe! You just might end up with the Summertime Blues…