Important aspect of your network every business owner should know.

As an IT professional who is freely roaming around in my clients' businesses, visiting everybody from the least significant employee all the way to business owners, I cannot help it notice how poorly most business regarding three critical aspect of their computer networks. Particularly, I refer to:

• Data Safety - How easy is it to gain unauthorized access to your date files?
• Crash Recovery - How long will it take you to be back at work after a crash?
• Computer usage Efficiency - How much time workers spending doing mining their own business while on your workstations at your expanse?

Unfortunately, I always witness the cost of this neglect, when I am called to repair a situation when it is already to late.

It always, sooner or later, comes, and the cost is always dear and painful, paid with money, time, stress and frustration.

Do you really need this?

Cause just as an earthquake is certain to come (we just cannot really tell when,) you are destine to loose business data at some point, to have a computer crash, and your employees will uncontrollably surf the internet at your expanse.

It is not a question of whether it will happened , but of a question of when, and please - this is not a threat - it is a promise...

So what tools would we put in your business arsenal to address those three aspects?

First defense line to avoid a problem would be to remove the cause before it become a problem.

The second defense line would be to bring to minimum the downtime should a major ever problem strike.

Here are the steps we proposing and will perform upon request:

1. Avoiding hardware malfunction: We inspect your system's hardware on a regular basis and inform your if any hardware signaling stress or is due to replacement.
2. Make your business "workstation independent." Should a station crash, you simply plug another one and continue. The Desktop, My Documents, Email accounts, Email, Calendar, Contacts - everything instantly appears on the new box as it was never replaced. This would give you another major benefit we call "Follow Me" - Your Desktop, My Documents, Emails, Favorites will pop on any computer in your network that you will log into.
3. Have Desktop, My Document, Emails data files and Email account settings physically placed on a server. All Desktop and My Documents of all workstations are mandatory saved on the server. This done seamlessly, no one notice, the workstation looks and feel the same as any other PC. You can now inspect data of all your employees, even if their workstations are off. You can keep documents under control, and most important insure a backed up of your entire business data.
4. Make email, contact and calendars of your employees visible to you, so you can follow on corresponding in your business and your secretary can manage your schedule for you. You can monitor every email in your business at will.
5. We limit workstations ability to exactly match your business tasks and work requirements. No one access C drive, no one play or burn CDs from the CD player, access USB drives and memory sticks in your workstations is disabled, and videos, animation or music will no longer play in your employees browsers. (Figure how faster your Internet will work then...) Installing different toolbars and nice little plug-ins is disabled as well, so play time is down, and work time is up.
6. Keep a daily copy of your entire business data for 5 - 10 days back, so the next time your QuickBooks data file get corrupted, you simply open yesterday version, paste yesterday's file in and continue...
7. Regularly cloning your entire hard drive. In case you need to know, when a server disk crash, even if you had all data backed up, you'll still have to install operating system, setup users and security, install updates, software and what not. This can take days' if not weeks. To avoid it, we are cloning your entire disk onto another drive that is installed in your computer. If the main hard drive crashes, all you do is unplug it and turn your server back on. The cloned hard drive with last night data kicks in, with all users setting, data, server setting - just as nothing happened. Your downtime is limited to the speed that you can shutdown, open a panel, disconnect the main disk, and turn on...
8. Regularly cloning your entire hard drive to an external drive, which we recommend that you'll exchange once a week and keep outside your business. When your server's hardware fail, or a thief, earthquake or fire hit you, your entire business is at another location, ready to be install and run in minimum downtime.

When we are done, here is what you get:

• Employees can only do on their workstations what very they are authorized to do.
• Should a workstation crash - you plug another workstation box, turn it on, log in and keep work. Your Desktop, Emails, Documents ETC will show as of nothing happened.
• If a file got corrupted - You simply open yesterday's version of it using Windows Explorer, copy and then paste it over, and keep work in minutes.
• If your server's hard drive crash - You unplug it and turn on again.
• If your business compromised, or earthquake or fire strike and access your data become impossible - you'll still have your entire business data, email setting on a hard drive out of the business location, ready to be installed on a new server in short time.

That is a good place to be, a wise business decision, should a disaster strike...

To sum it all up - The most important aspects of operating a computers network: Data Safety, Crash Recover and Efficiency are poorly addressed in most business, and likely yours among them.

Neglecting those issues will significantly increase your cost and pain when a disaster will strike.

Give us a call and lets see how to give your computer system the attention it deserved.