Proactive Support And Why It’s Good For Business

proactive support and why it good for business

When is the best time to fix a problem? Before it’s a problem! That’s where proactive support comes in.

Once an IT problem becomes obvious, it’s a serious annoyance. It can mean downtime, calling people in during off hours, and lost productivity and revenue. It’s better to prevent trouble from happening in the first place. That’s what proactive IT support is all about.

Proactive Support Is Good For Business

Your network can go a long time with security weaknesses before someone stumbles on them and takes advantage. Sooner or later, though, someone will. If your support team finds the weakness first, then they can fix it before anyone can exploit it.

Other situations are less dramatic but likewise provide opportunities to prevent trouble. If a server is filling up rapidly, it might be headed for a situation where it won’t have enough capacity. It may be necessary to get more disk storage, or perhaps all that’s needed is to find out what’s wasting space and clean it up. Finding out before the disk is full is better.

Regular software updates are part of proactive service. Outdated software is more likely to have bugs and security risks, and new applications might not work with an old operating system. Proactive service keeps all system software up to date.

Another aspect of proactive support is listening to the users. If they say that they’re having intermittent problems, or that the network is slower than it used to be, there might be a problem which isn’t yet obvious. An investigation might turn up a problem and fix it before it becomes serious.

Purely reactive IT support fixes problems only after they’ve become obvious. They’re harder to fix that way, and they may have already done serious damage. A smoothly running IT operation requires proactive support, fixing issues before they get in the way.

We provide managed IT services and proactive support so that your business can stay productive without interruptions. Please contact us to find out what we can offer you.

What Is An MSSP And Why Does Your Business Need One?

what is an mssp and why does your business need one

In today’s world, threats to an organization’s data and IT infrastructure are growing at an alarming rate. Both large enterprises and smaller companies have been the targets of phishing schemes, ransomware attacks, and data penetration attempts. What’s more, the level of sophistication demonstrated in these cyber attacks is rising steadily. Many businesses are finding it very difficult to keep up.  That’s where MSSP’s come in. But, what is an MSSP?

Although almost all companies have taken steps to make their IT operations as secure as they can, rarely do smaller organizations have the expert staff required to keep up with the constantly evolving threat. That’s the reason many businesses have turned to managed security service providers (MSSPs) to help them build defenses that can keep their IT systems and their data secure.

What is An MSSP?

MSSPs are security experts that offer outsourced management and monitoring of a company’s security infrastructure. They provide their services either on-site or, most often, remotely through the cloud.

Services MSSPs Provide

A good MSSP will typically provide services like the following:

  • Analyze your present security system to identify potential vulnerabilities, and take required action to minimize such exposures
  • Install and manage a first class authentication regime to ensure that only authorized users gain access to your sensitive data, networks, and computer systems
  • Implement and monitor intrusion detection systems and firewalls on a 24/7 basis
  • Analyze collected event monitoring data to identify possible intrusion attempts
  • Monitor network traffic to detect anomalies that might reveal a new or evolved threat signature
  • Rapidly and effectively respond when threats are identified

For SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses), a first-class MSSP can function as a seamless extension of their own IT staff. This provides the company with a level of expertise in identifying, preventing, and responding to sophisticated security threats that it can rarely achieve on its own. Plus, it releases the company’s own IT workers to concentrate on initiatives that are more directly tied to producing revenue for the business.

If you would like to explore how the services we offer here at 4 Corner IT can help keep your computers, networks, and data secure, please contact us.

 

Proactive IT or Reactive IT: How Should You Manage Incoming Problems?

proactive it or reactive it how should you manage incoming problems

There are two ways to approach IT support: proactively or reactively. In this blog, we’ll describe each strategy and explain why we believe businesses should opt for proactive IT.

Proactive IT detects problems early on

Here’s a little hint about your company’s IT hardware — there are going to be hundreds of bumps along the way. There’s nothing you can do to prevent them from ever existing.

What you can do, however, is deal with them before they ever become a serious problem. That’s an example of proactive IT support. The idea is to take an aggressive approach as soon as you spot something wrong. If everything works out, you’ll squash the small problems before they ever turn into large issues.

Reactive IT waits for problems to take shape

Reactive IT support is just the opposite; it waits for the small problems to turn into large issues. Although you might think you’re saving time by not always worrying about IT support, you’ll wind up making an even bigger investment in the long-run. Think of it like changing your car’s oil — you can either spend $25 on a quick oil change or $1000 on a new engine.

Unfortunately, this is the approach that many businesses take. They don’t understand its faults until it’s already too late.

Monitoring is proactive IT

The question whether you’ll monitor your IT hardware is the same as asking whether you’ll take a proactive or reactive approach. Monitoring is how you spot problems and errors as soon as they’re visible.

It’s all about making regular check ups and maintenance to get an idea of the state of your hardware. If you do this, you’ll occasionally have to make some minor repairs. If you don’t and wait for the problem to escalate, you’ll eventually have to deal with a much larger issue.

To talk more about proactive and reactive IT support, or anything else, contact us today.

Learn Basic Excel Formulas And Streamline Your Business

learn basic excel formulas and streamline your business

Basic Excel Formulas follow a simple, yet powerful pattern and can be used to accomplish automatically a number of functions that would many hours of manual calculation.  The structure of a basic excel formulas takes the pattern of an equals sign followed by a command, then parenthesis.  Inside of the parenthesis, you specify the values or cell references that serve as variables to the command.

Basic Excel Formulas

Examples of basic excel formulas you can use right now!

For example, you can use =SUM(7,7) to add the numbers 7 and 7 together.  While this simple example may not seem highly useful – after all, it takes less time to just put in 14, rather than this formula – it’s power expands when used with cell references.  As a second example, you may have the value 9 in cell A1, and the value 16 in cell A2.  To add these together in cell A3, you may put =SUM(A1, A2) instead.  You’ll still come up with the correct sum (25), but if you need to later change one of those values, say from 9 to 45, the cell in A3 will automatically update to reflect the change and give you the correct value of 51 without any additional input on your part.

In addition, most basic math functions can take many arguments. To continue our example using SUM, you can specify up to 255 discrete values or ranges.  So your SUM function may look like this: =SUM(A1-A295, B7, B23, 3.1415, 16, 32, 64, 256, D495) or even longer.  Note that this may look like it’s taking more than 255 values because of the range described in the first variable, however, ranges count as one value.

Some other basic functions that can be used in this manner include AVG (or AVERAGE depending on your version of Excel), SUM, COUNT, COUNTA, SUMA, AVERAGEA, MAX, and MIN.

SUM gives the SUM total of all entered arguments.  COUNT gives the total COUNT of all arguments in the range, COUNTA gives the COUNTA of all non-empty values in the range, AVERAGE gives the mathematical average of all the arguments in the range, AVERAGEA gives the mathematical average of all non-blank cells in the range, MAX returns the maximum value from the arguments, and MIN returns the minimum value from the range.

For more awesome computer tips for office users, contact us today or check out our blog at https://www.4cornerit.com/blog.

Network Support After You Trash Your Used Devices

network support doesnt end when its time to trash or give away your used devices and equipment

network support If you’re like most companies today, there comes a time when the devices, desktops and laptops you’re using just don’t offer what the new models can.

It becomes important to upgrade so that your staff has access to all the resources and software they need to do their jobs, and so that your company can grow. However, getting rid of old equipment and devices is not something that any manager or business owner should take lightly.

A typical Google search for device cleaning, data wiping and hard drive erasure software programs will yield a plethora of consumer results. However, though many of these product manufacturers talk tough in their online marketing campaigns, their products often don’t do what they claim they do.

As a business owner, you must completely purge any device you are thinking of giving away.

Maybe you’re planning to donate used desktops to the local high school or church. Maybe you’re going to give some used laptops to staff family members. However, you must prepare for the rogue element in any equation.

  • There might be a 17-year-old high school student that runs with a rough crime-happy crowd of 18 to 30-year-olds that would love to have access to your company’s data. Did you know that many young people have computer skills that rival even the most skilled hackers? In fact, many hackers start hacking well before their 18th birthdays.
  • Your secretary’s sister in college might be dating the wrong guy, or might allow her roommates to have regular access to the used laptop your company donated to her. Any of these people might be able to quickly gain access to the data still on the laptop, and use it for criminal ends.

The good news is, when people actually use classified information to carry out crimes, they will eventually go to jail. Internet activity like this is easily traceable. However, when you run a business, there is more to consider. You’re risking

  • Bad press,
  • Accusations of improper data handling,
  • Customer lawsuits, and
  • The loss of company resources while the problem gets resolved

There’s no need to deal with headaches like these.

Most business owners and managers would be shocked to learn digital forensic experts and garden variety hackers alike routinely recover tons of PII, (personally identifiable information) such as:

  • Financial records,
  • Resumes,
  • Medical insurance information,
  • Customer data,
  • CRM records,
  • Social security numbers,
  • Company emails,
  • Spreadsheets, and
  • Much more

… from resold or gifted HDDs and SDDs, (hard disk drives and solid state drives).

When you delete a file and it goes to the recycling bin, it’s still on your computer somewhere. In addition, many encryption products offered on the general consumer market still don’t offer enough security, since your average criminal is now learning more about how to reverse, decode and piece back together data after encryption.

The only way to truly make sure your company data is completely gone before you resell or gift your used devices is to work with a network support specialist that offers secure data erasure.

No consumer product on the market to date can offer this level of protection. This type of data removal sanitizes all necessary IT assets including desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones, virtual drives, extra SSDs and HDDs and even your server. Contact us today to learn more.