Connecticut's IT Managed Services Blog

On February 5th, 2014 the Wall Street Journal Business section featured an article tackling the topic of paid sick leave for employees who work for small businesses. Several owners were interviewed, and NSI's President, Tom McDonald, was among them.

"NSI has been in business almost 30 years, and I've always thought of the company culture as that of a family.  Recently, we implemented an internal employee satisfaction and feedback system through a service called TINYPulse which allows any employee to participate in weekly surveys, anonymously.  The feedback I get is great, and has encouraged positive changes throughout our organization such as process changes, improved communications, new applications, a new employee lounge and some much needed remodeling.  However, the one thing that impresses me the most, is the amount of employees who use the word "family" when referring the NSI in their anonymous comments through the TINYPulse portal."

Thinking of getting a new or re-do for your company's web presence?  Here are seven ‘Must Haves’ for your small business website. 

Your website represents your business, so building and maintaining it need to be of primary concern as a business owner. We often find business owners struggling with their websites saying things like: "My website looks great, but I am not able to convert" or "I invested so much into creating my website, but I don't get many hits.” These things are very common pains faced by businesses, especially small business. If you aren’t sure where to start your site improvement project, this post will get you rolling in the right direction with seven key areas you need to pay attention to when it comes to your website.

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. 

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:

The Cloud.  It's the place to be.  Perhaps Sir Richard Branson will find a way for us to tour the cloud.  If anyone can find a way, it's him. 

We use the cloud when we put gas in our car.  We use the cloud to pay our bills (even if you are sending a paper check, funds are transferred through the cloud by the banks and corporations that process payments).