How to Verify the Effectiveness of Your IT Managed Services

Congratulations! You have finally found your IT partner. However, have you verified their services? Psst… Don’t say you haven’t! Obviously, you don’t wish to face a terrible IT crisis after paying huge sums of money to your Managed Service Provider (MSP). It’s important to verify the effectiveness of your IT managers as they are the ones who you rely upon for your network security.

So, how will you verify the efficiency of your IT Managed Network Security Service Provider? It is essential to understand a raw fact that for vendors, an extra margin (profit) rests in professional services, software licenses and maintenance – NOT the hardware. Therefore, vigilance on these parameters can be dangerous if ignored. You must analyze some critical points at your end before hiring a Managed IT Service Provider for your business:

• Does your service provider have positive customer references? Irrespective of the lucrative offers and services they boast of, you must ensure whether they are practically delivered.
• Is the team equipped with the latest competitive infrastructure to support your network needs? It is important to confirm this because it is they who are going to support your network requirements in case any emergencies occur.
• Have you got the terms & conditions verified by an expert? The undertakings must be clearly mentioned and communicated.
• Are there penalties for non-performance?
• Are the service level requirements clearly mentioned?

Next, here are some points to observe after you have hired the services of the MSP:

• Is your provider proactively taking necessary steps to avoid break-offs?
• Is your IT service provider able to resolve unexpectedly arisen issues?
• Is the MSP keeping your data secure & taking measures to prevent hacking episodes?
• Is the team you hired available for a 24×7 service?
• Do the network security providers show patience while solving your issues?
• Do they have the necessary knowledge and expertise to handle the complexities of your data and other related issues?
• Do they understand your network and data related problems well?
• Do you have any clause to escape the agreement if there is any mishandling or loss to the business?

Trust, but Verify – an excellent phrase that explains almost everything very simply. Net Activity, Inc. is a trusted team of professionals doing just what you were looking out for – Securing your data physically as well as on the cloud. We have helped many businesses survive through the major IT breakdowns and excel in monitoring data for smooth and secure operations. For further discussion on how we have been able to maintain authenticity from our clients, visit http://www.netactivity.us/it-managed-services.html or call Harry Bhatia at 2165035150 X 206.

Source: http://www.netactivity.us/blog/how-to-verify-the-effectiveness-of-your-it-managed-services/

Don’t Hire MSPs Just Because Others Are Hiring

Don’t just hire; Think first

If you are well versed with technology and the pace at which IT is moving, you must definitely know what an MSP means. The IT Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are an essential backing to the IT needs of small to medium businesses, especially to those who cannot afford to have a dedicated team of IT professionals. While there are innumerable numbers of MSPs existing today, you can’t just fall into the trap.

Being a business owner, you need to do your homework well before making the decision. Here are a few points to think upon, before you finalize your IT partner. You require to hire an MSP if:

1. You don’t have a dedicated team of IT professionals:
   If you are a small or medium sized establishment, you definitely don’t need an entire team of IT experts on your payroll. Here’s where you can opt to hire the services of IT Managed Service Providers – providing expert solutions at relatively low costs.
2. Your systems need constant assistance & repairs:
   Technology is prone to eventual breakdowns and even if they seem to be simple at the first glance, you will get to know the complexities on deeper analysis. The MSPs do this for you at a fraction of the costs that an in-house IT professional would cost. Moreover, by partnering with an experienced MSP, you can be rest assured of having expert minds & brains to look after your technology.
3. You are unable to predict your IT budget:
   With this ever-changing cost of technology, it has become simply impossible to predict a fixed amount needed for the upcoming year. You can solve this issue by hiring an MSP that charges a flat fee/month and ensure to take care of all the network or data related issues without demanding for anything more. Thereby, you will have a planned approach to securing your IT infrastructure while reducing on overwhelming costs.
4. Your IT strategy is non-existent/poorly developed:
   No system is static. The technological components of your IT infrastructure also need upgrades. However, you have no idea as to how and when to proceed. The IT Managed Service Provider guides you through the whole process and also gives timely suggestions to stay consistently functional.

Apart from the above, there are other issues you may face regarding IT network security that are complex for you to resolve. Hiring MSPs can prove to be a better solution if your business is being hampered by the above mentioned technological pitfalls.

Partnering with the right MSP is essential. Net Activity, Inc. has been in business since 2002 and we believe in providing exceptionally competent solutions to our customers. If you wish to secure your data at the most economical prices, please contact Harry Bhatia at 2165035150 X 206. You may visit our website for a virtual tour of services offered by us: http://www.netactivity.us/.

Thank You for visiting us!

Source: http://www.netactivity.us/blog/dont-hire-msps-just-because-others-are-hiring/

Moving to the Cloud? See How Hiring a MSP Can Help

Your transition to the cloud is a critical process and involves numerous activities that affect various aspects of your business. It’s definitely not something you deal with on daily basis. So, hiring the services of professionals is a better alternative. Hosting your business on the cloud is an opportunity to enjoy flexible, expandable data management sources while cutting down on expenses. But before migration, businesses must weigh the advantages and disadvantages of the cloud environments. These are better known by experts as they are well-versed with the technicalities of the cloud. A custom strategy is vital to get enterprises up and running faster in the cloud environment with reduced overall costs.

Here is why you need the services of managed service providers (MSPs):

To avoid investment in IT technicians – Organizations require a dedicated team of technicians to monitor the cloud migration process. However, once migration is complete, the investment will seem to be unworthy and unproductive. MSPs accept various modes of payment and you can select the one that suits your budget.

To save on the infrastructural expenses – It is wise to delegate the job to MSPs as organizations cannot afford to arrange for the computer systems that are configured to suffice the cloud migration process.

To avail the services of specially trained engineers – Many details are understood better by the specially trained engineers employed with MSPs. Your in-house IT technicians may not be able to solve issues as they occur.

Organizations may experience many other pitfalls while the process is on and at that emergency hour, it would be difficult to manage apt solutions for the problems. Manpower, bandwidth, or architecture are some of such areas where unpredictable needs may arises leading to a situation of crisis. Fortunately, collaborating with MSPs can pacify the process of your transition to the cloud with its high availability, resiliency, or disaster recovery – freeing up internal IT staff to focus on more strategic projects.

Net Activity, Inc. is one such managed service provider that is dominantly serving its customers for cloud migration and management. We are leading providers of public, private and hybrid cloud computing solutions including cloud assets, IPs and services that are customized to meet the diverse business requirements. We would like to help you through the cloud migration.

Call Harry Bhatia at 2165035150 X 206 to know about the details or visit our website http://www.netactivity.us/ to understand what we offer.

Is Aging Computer Equipment Costing You Money?

“Oh no… Not again!” exclaims every business owner whenever new technology enters the market. Small business owners are better reflectors of what happens in the background when any of its computer equipment reaches the retirement age. Most of them tend to continue using older equipment until it completely fails; not a smart move indeed. Although this has not been the case with pro-active businessmen who meticulously keep an eye on the movement of technology, there is a certain part of the business that is hampered.

Yes. The aging computer equipment is costing you money, in fact, a huge chunk of the investment. Let’s understand the hows:

Repairing costs > Replacement costs: The cost of repairing the sluggish PCs or other computer accessories equals or even exceeds the cost of purchasing a new one. According to a global survey by Techaisle, small businesses spend $427 on the repairs of a 4 year old PC on an average which is 1.3 times costlier than to repair a PC that is less than 4 years old or replace with a new one.

Underutilization of Employee Productivity: We often miss out the technological component while measuring and assessing employee productivity. The Techaisle study revealed that an average of 42 productive hours is lost while the older PCs are being repaired which is twice as the unproductive time due to PCs which are less than 4 years old.

Struggle with the New Technology: The aged computer equipment is weak to handle the newer versions of the software. Compatibility issues are huge as the drivers get out of date. Automatic software updates force the business owners’ hands by pushing computers to their fullest capabilities. This consumes a considerable amount of hidden costs that are accountable for less productivity and profits.

Downtime Issues: Bearing the burden of non-productive hours and loss of opportunities as well as profits during the most profitable months is not what any of the businesses operate for. However, if businesses tend to push their hardware until it blows up severely bad, this is really critical. It results into a dual-end loss: replacing the old hardware along with the unforeseeable losses due to downtime.

Business Looks Outdated: As you wouldn’t walk into a business meeting wearing a 1970’s suit, your clients, employees and customers wouldn’t be impressed to see clunky old desktops and laptop computers. It wouldn’t be a pleasant scene to watch your employees struggle to connect to a local printer – they and others connected to your business naturally tend to think that your entire business is behind the times.

If you are already calculating the costs of your aging computers, it is a good start. We can definitely help you with replacing your hardware, machines, and network components. Call Harry Bhatia at 2165035150 X 206 to discuss how much it will cost you. For initial details, please visit http://www.netactivity.us/ and find out how we can help your business requirements.

Net Activity, Inc. offers services to all sizes of businesses with skilled server handling, network management and, computer maintenance including  complete IT solutions like system installation, IT consulting, data security, storage solutions, helpdesk, maintenance & support and hardware repair.

Source: http://www.netactivity.us/blog/is-aging-computer-equipment-costing-you-money/

Urgent Solutions for VoIP Security Issues

Until now, voice over internet protocol (VoIP) security has been overshadowed by the attractiveness of this new technology. But the intelligent users of today proactively raised the question of security of the internet telephony as a result of increasing vulnerability of the internet environment.
Let’s understand the vulnerabilities:
Starting with the basics, we know that these audio streams are accessible to anyone with network access. Voice over IP can be decoded by Eavesdroppers as they tap the audio conversations in an unsecured VoIP Environment. How about an eavesdropper overhearing the news of layoffs that management is planning? It can be dangerous as leaking out extremely confidential information of the management is really not what is expected of a sophisticated IT network. Hackers are all set to attack servers with irrelevant queries or requests making it inaccessible for legitimate users. This may lead to ruining the complete data structure of an organization.
What are the alternatives?
The VoIP communications may use one or more channels (TCP/UDP) connections which need to be secured – authenticated and encrypted. The VoIP network can be secured by:

• Authorization
• Transport Layer Security (TLS)
• Authentication
• Media Encryption (SRTP)

Authorization: The devices must be configured in a manner to allow traffic from a selected group of IP addresses. This mechanism shields the device from denial-of-service attacks to some extent.
Transport Layer Security: The TLS Protocol provides privacy and data integrity between two communicating applications. It allows only SIP signaling with other devices and permits applications to communicate in a way that prevents message forgery, tampering, and eavesdropping. With this, it will be mandatory for clients to set up a TLS/SSL connection to the server and exchange encrypted SIP messages on the secure connection.
Authentication: It requires the participating VoIP devices to authenticate each other before starting conversations. Thereby, it becomes nearly impossible for hackers to mislead/fake identities.
Media Encryption: SRTP (secure real-time transport protocol) is a security profile that adds confidentiality to the protocol and is ideal for protecting the voice over IP traffic. It also provides replay protection and achieves low packet and high throughput expansion by using fast–stream ciphers for encryption an implicit index for synchronization, and universal hash functions for message authentication. SRTP ensures confidentiality of the RTP payload, the integrity protection of the entire RTP packet (including protection against replayed RTP packets), and implicit authentication of the header. SRTP serves as a suitable choice for the most general scenarios as well as the most demanding ones.
Most of the VoIP vendors have pledged in to provide VoIP network services that are competitive enough to provide you a secure communication platform. The VoIP security issue is not “as” critical as it is hyped up. It’s just that hackers are alluded to interfere with the voice flowing through data networks. If you avail the services of a reliable VoIP service provider, the purpose of having an uninterrupted secure network will be solved.
Net Activity, Inc. comes along with high quality, reliable cloud-based solutions that future-proofs your communication systems. With our expert services, you will experience limitless call routing features, and an effective, intuitive user interface. For more details, please visit http://www.netactivity.us/voip-business-phone-services.html or call Harry Bhatia at 216 503 5150.

Source: http://www.netactivity.us/blog/urgent-solutions-for-voip-security-issues/

How to be Safe While Moving to the Cloud Infrastructure

We all live in an era where the digital workspace is known by the name Cloud. Unlike the earlier times, cloud migration is no longer an option; it is an imperative part of businesses responsible for speeding up processes, reducing costs and establishing flexibility. Almost all the businesses, irrespective of whether technology-based or not, due to the convenience and cost-efficiency (of course, when done right), are moving to the cloud infrastructure.

Moving to the cloud environment affects no single but many components of the business including information, personnel, expenses, security, and performance. To extract the advantages of cloud computing to the maximum, business owners as well as IT managers must diligently avoid the following mistakes that have led to hefty losses to some businesses:

• Selection of wrong service package – Many companies end up paying for services they don’t need and lose agility and control.
• Neglecting connectivity in lieu of saving on costs – You cannot afford to lose even a single minute productivity of thousands of employees which can cost you a hefty loss of thousands of dollars per minute. Some cloud computing service providers may try to lure you with cost saving options but you need to be extra careful in such cases.
• Overlooking disaster recovery exercises – A proper disaster recovery plan (not just backup) allows businesses to be stable during unfavorable situations too.
• Visioning only for the short-term – While opting for a cloud computing solution, many organizations look at their short term goals and analyze what cloud can do for them at that instant. This can lead to unintentional design limitations that could have easily been avoided.
• Underestimating the time and bandwidth required for moving large data sets – Due to network speed limits, large chunks of data require longer duration to be moved. Organizations must rationally understand that speed largely affects the cloud’s performance.

Benefits of cloud computing are many, however, in the current scenario, what speaks dominantly is how a business extracts the maximum out of the cloud computing solutions. For a better insight over cloud computing mechanism and to help you decide on the service provider you must trust, you ought to get impartial suggestions & advice from experts.

Net Activity Inc. is a leading provider of proven cloud computing solutions. Completely dedicated to its services and customer satisfaction, the team popularly addresses its customers’ diverse cloud requirements along with offering a robust environment. For more details on how our cloud services are way ahead of others, please visit http://www.netactivity.us/cloud-computing-services.html or contact Harry Bhatia at 2165035150 X 206.

Source: http://www.netactivity.us/blog/how-to-be-safe-while-moving-to-the-cloud-infrastructure/

Know the Difference Between Cloud Scalability and Elasticity

Among the various notions about cloud computing, the most disputed one expert are discussing on is – “What matters in Cloud Computing: scalability or elasticity?” Often, both the terms are interchangeably used which leads to all that confusion. Interestingly, there is a thin but important line of difference in the two features.

To simply state, scalability defines the ability of software or hardware to continue functioning at a high level of performance with the increasing workflow volume. Scalable applications are also capable of taking the fullest advantage of the resources that its new environment offers.

On the other hand, elasticity is aimed at companies developing business or customer-facing software application that they plan to sell on a monthly/yearly subscription basis. So, there is room for unpredictable changes without having a massive impact on the pricing.

Having defined both, we now understand that scalability is a specific and gradual concept than elasticity and is controlled by you. Apart from all the differences between scalability and elasticity, there is one thing in common between them – adaptability. Ideally, a cloud solution that is both scalable and elastic is an adaptable situation. But this doesn’t mean that you don’t have the option to select either of the features. To be very specific here, cloud elasticity is a better alternative for e-commerce businesses, mobile & web development, other software companies and SaaS, while scalability is the solution for those who want to put some or their entire business infrastructure on the cloud like call centers, law firms, car dealers, etc..

When you talk about securing your data on the cloud, it calls for another battle between choosing a private cloud or a public cloud. The public cloud relates more to elasticity and scalability goes well with the private cloud. Determining whether a company needs to decide on a scalable or elastic cloud solution first requires an analysis of the company’s needs. However, unfortunately many customers’ views are muddied by some providers who market the more expensive (at times unnecessary) elastic cloud option irrespective of the size and kind of businesses.

The bottom line is that when it comes to making a better choice, business owners need to remember that it’s scalability that is more important for success with the private cloud. No doubt, elasticity is a rational concept but it works for giant businesses who claim to handle the entire planet (or at least half of it). If you are still unable to make your decision, you can talk to our experts at 216 503 5150 X 206 or email your query to info@netactivity.us. We’ll be happy to provide you the solution.

Source : http://www.netactivity.us/blog/know-the-difference-between-cloud-scalability-and-elasticity/