Inquiring SMBs Want to Know... What's the Difference Between a Help Desk and NOC? It's no secret that any growing small-to-medium sized business must monitor and manage its business technology in the most cost-efficient way. The tricky part is figuring out how to do this without sacrificing the overall experience of the end-user. End-users can be clients and customers or employees. Both rely on the efficiency of a firm's network, servers, and applications, and the availability of the company's data center.

Understanding Managed Services and How They Benefit SMBs Small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) receive a lot of calls each day from slick sales people peddling the next technology trend that's going to save them money and revolutionize how they do business. They're all too quick to caution that if you don't listen to them, you'll fall behind the times, and eventually be swimming in a sea of debt and out of business.

Breaking News: Downtime Kills Small Businesses Downtime is bad news for any business whether big or small. A recent two-hour New York Times' downtime occurrence sent Twitter ablaze and their stock price plummeting. Google going down for one to five hours resulted in lost revenue up to $500,000 and decreased overall web traffic by 40%. We know what you're thinking. Holy crap, Google makes $100,000 an hour? Yeah... insane, huh? While the hourly cost of downtime for a small-to-medium sized business won't be nearly as large as that astronomical Google figure, downtime is often more detrimental to smaller companies. Smaller enterprises are more susceptible to downtime and are neither large nor profitable enough to sustain its short and long-term effects. Downtime Leads to Unhappy/Unproductive Employees Even the happiest of employees become dissatisfied when they can't perform basic day-to-day job functions or properly service customers or clients. While some employees may use downtime as an excuse to lean back, put their feet up, and comfortably collect their hourly pay, we're talking about those employees who come to work to actually work. And don't forget your IT guy or tech crew. They can't necessarily sit back and twiddle their thumbs when downtime occurs because they're typically taking the brunt of the storm. They will ultimately grow tired of the daily routine of having to put out fires and having neither the additional manpower nor resources to change things for the better. These things lead to high employee turnover and the expenses that come with training and re-training a revolving door of employees. Downtime Leads to Customer Dissatisfaction Customers and clients grow weary whenever critical components of your operations – or the services they either expect or pay for - cannot be accessed. Nearly 50% of customers will move on to a competitor if they encounter downtime of five minutes or more. These customers represent significant lost revenue. While some suggest this is a bigger problem in the retail sector, other types of businesses are impacted as well. Have you ever clicked a link from search engine results only to quickly bolt when the page didn't load, you couldn't complete an online transaction, or you were greeted with a "Technical Difficulties – Be Back Up Soon!" message? Did you give up on finding what you were looking for or did you wait it out? You did neither. You went back to Google and found someone else offering a similar service or product that satisfied your yearning for instant gratification. Downtime Ruins Your Reputation One of the most commonly overlooked consequences of downtime is the hit your company's reputation takes online. In this age of social media, one person's bad experience is broadcast to dozens or even hundreds of followers. Bad news spreads faster than ever and has lasting repercussions. "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently." -- Warren Buffet. Protect Your Bottom Line The challenge for small businesses has always been how to minimize single-point-of-failure downtime using their limited IT resources. This is why downtime kills so many small businesses. They can't prevent it and they can't react quickly enough. Thankfully, there are end-to-end business continuity solutions available today that integrate Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) software, 24/7 access to a Network Operations Center (NOC), and advanced backup and disaster recovery solutions to alleviate this issue. Not only do these methods minimize downtime and get businesses back up and running quickly, but they can reduce the cost of technology infrastructure maintenance by as much as 80 percent. It's time that small businesses stop being victims to the silent killer that is downtime.

What You Can Learn From U.S. Regulator's Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery Recommendations

Is That a Business Continuity Plan in Your Pocket or a Bunch of Jargon? Technology is full of difficult jargon. To further complicate things, certain terms are often used in a different context between one publication or service provider and the next. An example of this is the usage of backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity. These terms are commonly used interchangeably, often resulting in confusion. In an effort to alleviate some of this confusion, let's describe each physical process. You will see an overlay among all three, although they are each different processes.

8 Cold Hard Truths for SMBs Not Worried About Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity The foundation of any successful business continuity solution is the ability to retrieve data from any point in time from anywhere. When the topic of data recovery and business continuity comes up, you get the feeling that many decision makers at smaller businesses and organizations wish they could channel their inner six year old, simply cover their ears, and sing "La, la, la. I Can't Hear You. I'm Not Listening." Everybody things bad things only happen to other people. Just because we hear about a fatal car accident on the morning news, doesn't mean we fixate on that news when we ourselves get into a car and drive to work. So no matter how many times the owner or CIO of a small to midsize business (SMB) hears of other small businesses being crippled by hurricanes, tornados, fires, or flooding, they aren't necessarily overcome with fear to the point that they feel an urgency to take action. Sure, they may think about backup and data recovery solutions a little more that day, but not enough to initiate immediate change or reverse a lenient approach to their processes. If you fall into this category, here are eight cold hard truths to consider

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. If you are one of them, then here’s what’s in store for you when you migrate to the cloud:

Research has revealed that over half of all users end up opening fraudulent emails and often even fall for them. Phishing is done with the aim of gathering personal information about you, generally related to your finances. The most common reason for the large number of people falling for fraudulent emails is that the phishing attempts are often so well-disguised that they escape the eyes of a busy email reader. Here are a few tips that help you identify whether that email really came from your bank or is another attempt at defrauding you…

Did you know that by 2014 there will be more mobile web surfers than stationary ones? That means more prospects are accessing your business website more through their smart phones, tablets or other mobile devices than with a laptop or PC. If you thought you had time to make the switch closer to 2014, you may want to reconsider in light of new research.

1. Backup Files Every Day - As catastrophic as data loss is, the number of businesses that still are not backing up their network is unbelievable. According to the Symantec Small to Medium Size Businesses (SMB) data, only 23% of SMBs are backing up their data on a daily basis and fewer than 50% are backing up data weekly. Any number of events can result in data loss, so the importance of frequently backing up your network cannot be overstated.