Connecticut's IT Managed Services Blog

With a lot of small and medium-sized (SMB) businesses, this scenario is an everyday reality. They are typically strapped from a cost standpoint to expand their IT staff—if they have a staff at all. Having the right people to assist is a big differentiator for curbing mistakes. In fact, Gartner projects that through 2015 people will be responsible for 80% of all technology failures. This can be due to a variety of reasons, including not having a realistic workload plan in place or underestimating how much labor is needed to prevent these problems from taking place.

To reduce management complexity while keeping costs down, SMBs need the ability to do more using fewer resources, and that’s  where managed services has turned into a viable option. With a managed services provider, businesses can either gain timely assistance to augment an overworked staff or have a full-blown IT department at their disposal. Either way, managed services can help bridge the gaps.

The SMB market is definitely catching on. According to Techaisle, the SMB Managed Services market is projected to grow to $44 billion until 2016, at a rate of roughly 12% growth in that span. Of particular note is that remote management monitoring services will increase to $15 billion during the same timeframe.

Managed Services can help SMBs:

• Free up resources that are tied up in IT labor for more impactful business planning and decision-making
• Enlist the aid of managed service providers (MSPs) that have experience helping other like businesses
• Can provide access and scaling to the latest technology at a reduce cost
• Gain financing and leasing options to alleviate the need for large, upfront investments

Why You Should Get On The Cloud

A recent article by The Guardian (UK) states that the cloud industry is set to see a growth of around 30% soon. But many small and medium business owners are still struggling to make sense of the cloud and how it can benefit them. Here are some of the benefits when you migrate to the cloud:

When it comes to data backup and disaster recovery for small business - Think Quicker Recovery Time, Not Quicker Backup.  While incremental backups are much faster than executing a full-backup, they also prolong recovery time. In the event of data loss, a full restore will require loading the most recent full backup and then each incremental backup tape. Having too many incremental backup tapes not only adds time to this restoration process, but it also increases the probability of not recovering all of your data. A tape could be lost, unintentionally skipped over, or contain corrupted data. Be sure to focus on optimizing the restore time to ensure faster data recovery. A quicker recovery time should be the main objective, not the need for a quicker backup process, although it is a nice benefit of moving to an image-based solution. 

The end of XP Support and SP3 Office 2003 is April 8th, 2014. A few members of the NSI team recently attended a conference where a lot of discussion took place regarding XP and Windows 8 Pro.  You do not have to be a techie to be aware that moving to Windows 8 has received a lot of heated publicity, both for and against the operating system.  

Recently,  I spent a full day in Washington, D.C.  attending the sold out inaugural 2013 Datto Partner Conference.  The vibe was similar to the first VMware Partner conference I attend years ago. 

A keynote from CEO Austin McChord kicked off the event; he is completely unpolished, which is refreshing, as is the obvious fact that he is totally immersed in every detail of his business.  He rattles off facts, figures, and details.  Technical, business, and sales related data roll off his lips at a rapid-fire pace.  What did I learn? Here are some of the key things I took away from his talk:

• Datto is exploding – 200+ employees; 112 of which were hired last year
• Datto has 8000+ partners – wow!  Lots more Managed Service Providers (MSP) and IT Service Providers than I thought existed
• The company is totally focused on the channel, particularly the MSP market
• New MSP User Interface has been rolled out, making it easier for us to quickly setup and troubleshoot devices for our clients
• Direct-2-Tech was introduced, this means when you escalate an issue, we go directly to the tech that can solve the problem – this is a great things for NSI, and NSI clients.
• Tech support is 24/7/365, when clients need help, help is there.
• Brand new software allows us to show our clients the incremental changes that are happening
• HIPAA compliance  -  Datto is compliant and enables NSI to continue offering backup in regulated environments for clients needing this

The summary from Austin’s keynote for me was this – Datto gets it. They understand what we need to be the best possible ITsupport service provider to our clients.  Additionally, they enable us to offer enterprise class services to the smallest of businesses;  it is as simple as that.  Why that’s a big deal: 

According to the U.S. Census of 2010: