Want to save money on your IT expenses?

To most business owners technology is seen as some kind of dark magic that costs them money every month.  Hopefully most of the time things just work and you focus on your daily tasks at the office.  But when “IT” hits the fan there can be all kinds of chaos, fire drills, stress, downtime and the inevitable bill to get things working again.  In the industry this is called “break/fix”.  It breaks, we come out and fix it.  This is called reactive support.  We start our day hoping something breaks at your company.

Let me tell you why this is a flawed way to pay for your technology support.  If you run a report on your IT expenses over the last 24 months take a look and see if you could actually predict a monthly budget for IT support.  Odds are you will have wild ups and downs from month to month and in the end it is too unpredictable.

You have a car right?  You pay insurance on that car?  Sure you do.  Well why not have insurance on the life blood of your company?  With a managed services contract you pay a flat rate every month that you can fit into your budget.  Predictable costs every month.

Why should I pay when everything is working fine you might ask?  Simple, with a managed services contract you get Pro Active support instead of reactive support.  Everything is monitored from laptops, pc’s, servers, email and Internet connection.  If something breaks you don’t get charged.  It’s all part of the plan. We start our day planning that nothing breaks at your company or we lose money.

So let’s say that in the previous 12 month period your expenses were 12K for your entire office on a managed services plan but the 12 months before that it was only 10k.  What did that extra 2k get you?  Your employees being able to work more often throughout the year, less stress and greater productivity out of everyone in the company.

Most business owners have never calculated how much downtime really costs their company.  Take a simple inventory of how much it costs per hr per employee.  Now add up all the hrs and that is how much it costs per hr.  So lets say you have 15 people working for you that cost approx $500 an hr for the entire office.  So every hr your network is down it is costing you $500 in addition to lost business or delays in getting a project or deal done.

So when you look at it from a cost benefit does that extra $167 a month sound like you are spending more or saving more?

Windows 7 is coming!!

Windows 7 Windows 7 Windows 7. 

You will be hearing a lot about the newest OS from Microsoft this month.  Oct 22nd is the official release date.  However, partners such as RNC have had Win 7 since early August.  :-)  This allows us to play with it and figure out all the great new things that come with it.

In short, this is by far the best release of Windows ever!  All the things that you typically hear from Microsoft whenever they release a new product are true regarding Windows 7.

It is faster, easier to use, great eye candy and a pleasure to work with.  We moved all of our desktops over to Win 7 the first week in August and have not looked back.  Install times are very fast so the total migration costs for clients will be reduced.

Laptop users are seeing definite improvements in battery life, speed and stability. Wireless connections are much easier and laptop users now never need to shutdown their laptops.  They just close the lid and let it go into sleep mode.  When they want to start using their laptop they just open the lid and BAM!  In under 2 seconds you are ready to start working.

Total game changer on using a laptop, no more 3 minute start times, no more dread in waiting to start working again.

Lastly, one of my favorite under the hood features is the new security feature called Bit Locker.  This came with Vista but only in the high end version.  It is now available in the Pro version of Win 7 and up.  This feature allows us to encrypt your entire hard drive.  What does this mean to you?  Ever wondered what would happen if you had your laptop stolen?  All your confidential emails and files were usually wide open for the bad guys to get access to.

Sure you have a login password but that is just a speed bump for any bad guy that wants in.  Bit Locker is another game changer when it comes to laptop security.  Now, if your laptop is stolen you can have peace of mind in knowing that all data on your laptop is super secure from the bad guys.

Want more info?  Take a look here: Windows 7 website