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.

Security, are your systems protected?

Everyday you hear on the radio or TV, or read it in the papers or internet, that the security of your desktop computer or laptop running Windows XP or Vista or Microsoft network is getting harder and harder to keep up with. Hackers and viruses and spam and trojans and worms and downtime OH MY! Sometimes you might think that the Wizard of Oz is protecting (or not!) your systems!

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????