Training Employees for Disaster Recovery

it consulting in south florida training employees for disaster recovery

IT Consulting in South Florida Disaster recovery plays a major role in IT consulting. Most businesses understand that business downtime is costly, but not all of them know how to create and execute a disaster recovery strategy.

According to this article, good business continuity plans will keep your company up and running through interruptions of any kind: power failures, IT system crashes, natural disasters, supply chain problems and more

Technology is just one aspect of disaster recovery. It’s great if you back your data up in the cloud, but you also need to know how to recover it.

Even if you practice data backup, you can fail at disaster recovery if you didn’t train your employees. According to a recent Tech Republic article, you should establish a communication protocol to keep employees informed in the case of a disaster:

“Working directly with your IT staff on disaster communication protocol goes hand in hand with the rule set of the communication tree. In a disaster, staff has a tendency to be nervous, so it’s natural for a staffer in the accounting department to just call a junior staff member in IT networking he has lunch with to “get the latest.” This is where rumors start that can be damaging to the company, both internally and externally.”

Here are three things you can do to establish a communication protocol:

Create a strategy

It all starts with your recovery strategy. In your plan, you need to outline how exactly employees will communicate with management.

Train employees

Once your strategy is finished, you can start training employees. The important thing is that each individual knows what he or she is supposed to do.

Follow up

After you train employees, you should follow up with them from time to time. If you don’t, then employees will just forget what they learned during training.

By mentioning disaster recovery from time to time, you’ll make sure that employees remember their training. This way, they’ll know what to do when disaster strikes.

To talk more about IT consulting in South Florida, or anything else, please contact us. Thanks.

IT Consulting in South Florida: Why Migration is the Hardest Aspect of Office 365

it consulting in south florida why migration is the hardest aspect of office 365 2

IT Consulting in South Florida
An important aspect of IT consulting is incorporating new programs and applications in your operations. Office 365 has been great so far in terms of increasing business productivity. It seems like the biggest problem businesses have had so far is migrating to the cloud. Once that’s set up, they have no trouble at all as far as adjusting to the hosted applications goes.

According to this article, migrating to Office 365 is becoming increasingly popular among businesses both large and small. The upside of moving from an on-premises environment to one hosted online by Microsoft offers compelling benefits.

There’s a reason migrating is the hardest part. Most business owners don’t have experience with cloud applications. Although they function like Windows program for the most part, setting them up is a different story.

For that reason, many businesses seek professional help to set their hosted applications up. According to a recent Info World article, this is particularly common with Office 365’s cloud Exchange:

“Office 365 has been touted as Microsoft’s fastest growing business ever. Still, some organizations are stalling when it comes to moving mailboxes from on-premises Exchange to Office 365’s cloud Exchange. What’s the holdup? For some, the need to plan and execute the transition may be competing with other day-to-day issues, delaying the Office 365 Exchange migration.”

Exchange is perhaps Microsoft’s most important program for businesses. But because they rely on email so much, they’re hesitant to migrate to the new hosted Exchange.

Here’s the good news: after the migration is over, your business productivity will increase. Employees will have access to the hosted Exchange from remote locations. The standard benefits of cloud computing also apply to hosted Exchange in this context.

The important thing is that you get the migration right. If you mess with the settings and employees aren’t able to send outgoing emails, then your productivity will take a hit. You can avoid this problem altogether by working with a professional IT agency. In this case, you’ll know that you’re starting off on the right foot regarding Office 365.

To talk more about IT consulting in South Florida, or anything else, please contact us.

5 Important Factors To Consider Regarding Computer Support Companies in South Florida

5 important factors to consider regarding computer support companies in south florida

computer support companies in south florida Computer support comes in different shapes and sizes. Here are some factors to look for when considering computer support companies in South Florida. Computer support companies and services specialize in troubleshooting and fixing a wide variety of primarily software-related personal computer issues and network connectivity problems as well as some hardware issues.

Integrity

We’ll start off with integrity since we think it’s the most important. You don’t want to trust something as important as computer support to just anybody, so it’s important to know who you’re dealing with.

To research a company’s integrity, look for their ratings and reviews. If other clients have had good experiences with them, that’s usually a good sign.

IT Support

IT support is kind of a vague term, and you want to be completely sure of what services you’re receiving. Ask about thinks like network support, computer repair, and data backup. If nothing else, you can choose a computer support company just based on the specific services they offer.

Office 365

Office 365 integration is very important for small businesses. You want to be sure that your computer support company assists you with Office 365 so you can take advantage of the new programs.

Cloud Computing

One of the new features of Office 365 is cloud computing. Many businesses are now turning to cloud computing in an effort to back up their data, improve collaboration among employees, and increase business productivity.

VoIP

Microsoft Lync, a new Office 365 program, helps companies implement a VoIP solution. VoIP improves upon the landline phone system by offering better call quality for lower prices.

Disaster Recovery

And finally, businesses should only choose a computer support company that assists with disaster recovery. In order to ensure business continuity, you need to practice disaster recovery preparedness and be ready to restore your data in the case of data loss.

It’s important that your computer support company in South Florida offers all of the aforementioned services. Otherwise, their computer support package would be incomplete.

To talk more about computer support companies in South Florida, or anything else, please contact us. Thanks.

Network Technicians Expected on More Budgets

computer network technicians expected to be on more company budgets

The thought of hiring a computer network technician might sound like someone working in-house in your company where availability is only limited to work days. Unfortunately, network problems seem to always happen at the worst possible times when your IT crew isn’t available. What happens if a problem arises when you’re working overtime on a project on a weekend, or even a holiday?

It’s better to have a network technician working internally or available on call whenever you need them. A computer network technician is an IT professional employed by a business entity to help with the creation, maintenance, and troubleshooting of present and future computer network hardware and software products, in support of business operations. That’s something we provide for you here at 4 Corner IT. But have you thought about including network management in your budget for this year after neglecting it for far too long?

A new poll from Forrester recently showed that 40% of companies polled are placing network management into their budget through 2015. This shouldn’t surprise you when you see how vulnerable networks now are in wake of what we’ve seen happening around the country. The Sony Pictures hack alone shows how a network is easily brought down to a point of crippling the ability to access any data.

On the other end of the spectrum is hacking on network lines without companies even realizing it’s happening. With so much of this happening unknowingly around the world, the danger exists of company data or even trade secrets being stolen. With proper monitoring, however, and technical assistance available at all times, this doesn’t have to happen.

Using our service, you’ll feel confident knowing we’re preventing online thieves from invading your network while making your business run more efficiently. You don’t have to worry about network slowdowns either, in addition to gaining tips on how to improve things along the way. As IT consultants, we have real-world experience to what’s really going on in the IT world today.

Contact us here at 4 Corner IT to find out more about how our network technicians work and how they’ll help you avoid being a new business statistic in online theft or downtime.

5 Real World Advantages to Implementing Disaster Recovery in Fort Lauderdale

5 real world advantages to implementing disaster recovery in fort lauderdale

Nearly every business these days is heavily dependent on computers. So great is this reliance that protecting themselves from an equipment failure is crucial when it comes to a business’s long term survival. Companies – large and small – have succumbed to oblivion due to catastrophic data loss.

According to a recent article, an information technology disaster recovery plan (IT DRP) should be developed in conjunction with the business continuity plan. Taking a proactive approach now and implementing a plan formulated by a professional in disaster recovery in Fort Lauderdale support is vital.

1. Relying on the expertise of a Fort Lauderdale IT support team means that the business decreases its reliance on the CDs or floppy disks that were a mainstay in system recovery in the past. This makes it easier for a business to add additional peripheral equipment or to weather a serve configuration.

2. Manually recovering from data loss is a stressful event that invites errors, particularly when a business is not knowledgeable in the established procedures. An IT professional can provide a comprehensive professional recovery system that help reduce user errors significantly.

3. Using an IT support team means that downtime and its associated costs are minimized. The business will not need to spend valuable time searching for the information that is necessary to address the issue.

4. Two crucial IT processes seamlessly become one, streamlining the entire task with this type of approach. Both the back up of data and the preparations for disaster recovery become the same procedure when Fort Lauderdale IT support is utilized.

5. There is no need to wait for a recovery specialist to arrive on-site. Instead, the system can be completely restored virtually from a remote location anywhere in the world. Fort Lauderdale IT support can craft a data recovery solution that is designed to protect and retrieve data.

Implementing such a plan can save a great deal of time, energy and money in the long run – and maybe even the business itself. Do not hesitate to contact us  with any questions you may have, or to start being proactive about your IT support today.