XFER Blog

Your business depends on a budget to come out in the black at the end of the fiscal year, and the way you invest that budget will have a considerable impact. As you create this budget, your IT needs to be one of your top considerations… after all, it is what effectively powers the modern business. This month, we’ll discuss how diligently incorporating your IT into your budget can help your business be more successful down the line.

Working in IT for any length of time will make you understand that it isn’t just novice workers that have trouble with their computers. In truth, about seven out of ten people can’t diagnose and fix simple IT problems. With that truth, it’s evident that any business that relies on IT, or at least on the productivity of people who use workstations, needs to have some type of strategy to keep those endpoints up, running, and managed proficiently. 

Okay, time for some real talk: There is no denying that 2020 has held a few unique challenges for everyone who runs a business. Economic challenges, political tensions, and an honest-to-goodness pandemic have all thrown us all for a loop. As a result, it is important that businesses all adjust their technology priorities to survive. Let’s discuss these priorities, and how they will need to shift. 

With less than half of 2020 behind us, many of us would already like a re-do of this year. With a global emergency impacting the personal and professional lives of so many, businesses are struggling right now. For these organizations to survive, they will need to get the most out of every business investment. When it comes to their essential technology, we recommend investing in managed IT services.

While managed services have made more sense for businesses to utilize for some time now, current events have made it even more apparent that this model of IT support is the only feasible option for businesses going forward. However, it has also never been clearer that you need to be selective in who you choose to provide this support.

As the workers that power many businesses are remaining at home, remote solutions have proven to be a significant tool in keeping productivity moving. However, with nobody going into the office, monitoring your IT environment is necessary to make sure that the infrastructure you depend on is still in the right conditions. For this week’s tip, we’ll discuss some best practices to help you do so.

The modern business uses IT in so many ways that aim to make a business move faster, be more efficient, and ultimately, produce more than it would have without that technology. Each of these technologies are powerful in their own right, but they depend on two variables: electricity and a reliably fast Internet connection. When your Internet connection isn’t doing your business any favors, you need to look into why you aren’t getting the network speeds you are paying for. After all, your business depends on it. Today, we will take a look at a few ways you can go about troubleshooting a slow Internet connection.

There is quite possibly no more famous question in IT services than “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” While it may sound like a joke (and has quite often been used as one), could this advice actually work? The short answer: it does. For this week’s tip, we’ll explain why that is.

When you think of professional services, you may think about smart people doing important things that took them years to learn how to do. You may not, however, consider them the kind of people that lean on their technology to make their businesses work. This is because for the longest time, technology wasn’t a major part of the professional services landscape. 

If Windows 7 is still at work on some (or all) of your business’ workstations, you have about a month to upgrade or face dealing with major cybersecurity problems. This month we will look at the options a business would have if they need to upgrade from Windows 7 quickly.

Old-school business information technology support isn’t necessarily wrong, but it most definitely isn’t cheap nor efficient. IT support strategies are developing in ways that some time ago, would have thought to be unheard of. Your business no longer needs a full on-site staff designated to maintaining network security or updating software. In part two of our five-part series, we discuss how your business can have the support it needs through managed services. 

Working in an office can often be a grind. People that have never experienced it may not realize just how much coordination is needed to perform successful service delivery and support. One way the modern office functions is with the help of integrated technology. This month we will take a look at the modern office, the technology used by the office staff, and how the managed IT service provider can help build operational efficiency.

Many businesses struggle with the reality of everyday IT issues, one of which is receiving the right kind of support and maintenance to ensure everything goes according to plan. When considering your business’ IT maintenance and management, you need to consider the service provider, the distance they travel to and from your office, and ease of support. How can you make sure that your business finds the right solution or service?

Downtime is a killer for any business. When a business is forced into confronting its technology support deficits, it usually means that they’ve been dealing with too much broken technology and downtime, and the costs associated with it. One way your business can avoid losing huge chunks of time to broken technology is to add a professional help desk to support your IT administrator. 

Karma is a pretty powerful force. If you do enough good, good will become of you. At least, that’s the idea. The same idea applies to the people around you; if you cultivate a positive environment and offer everything your staff needs to do a good job, they will perform better than the alternative.

Whether they are expected or not, there will always be situations when your business incurs some damage or loss due to natural disasters, downtime, or other issues. You might find that a little preparation could have kept some of the disaster at bay, and it could honestly save you a ton in terms of lost time and resources. In fact, it could save your organization from the brink of disaster.

It doesn’t matter how intensively a business uses their technology, there will always be a need for maintenance of some sort, whether it’s something as simple as a point-of-sale system or a full-fledged desktop workstation. Some businesses might have a complete IT department, while others might not have the resources to allocate to this role. We’ll walk you through how, no matter what kind of organization you operate, your business can benefit from a help desk solution.

Do you know what can completely kill a business’ momentum? Downtime. Businesses of all types look for a myriad of ways to save themselves the headaches that come from significant downtime. One way that is sure to reduce an organization’s downtime is by having conscientious IT management and support at the ready. One problem with this is that it's typically costly to hire a team of IT professionals with the experience and knowledge to keep your technology up and running.

Business owners; ever sit down and run through all of your expenses and ask yourself (or your accountant) what you are actually paying for? We’ve been there. Technology expenses like hardware, software licensing, cloud hosting, management and maintenance, support, and service agreements all add up quickly and it makes it easy to question what you can trim to save money without sinking the ship, especially when you rarely need to call your current IT provider.

Let’s be real: the title “managed service provider” doesn’t cast much insight into what we do on a daily basis. Even when people understand what we do, there are a lot of parts that confuse them and lead them to false conclusions. As a result, we wanted to take a few minutes and go over what it is that we do for our clients.