Nex-Tech Blog | Technology Tips and Tricks | Industry News

If you are like me, one of the first items you do each day is check your e-mail. Picture this, it is Tuesday morning and you have just poured your favorite drink and sat down at your desk. You open Outlook to see what fun things email has in store for you today.

I recently attended an IT conference, and I am sad to say this was the first of its kind for me. With the reality that Nex-Tech has been in the “Technology” business, I realized I was not where I needed to be with understanding the vital needed of advanced IT support and cybersecurity in today’s business. To be fair, I have had the luxury of leaning on our talented staff and our Chief Operating Officer, Mike Pollock, to understand how this is important to our company as well as our customers. Once immersed in the world of IT, I learned that they speak a different language than I had learned in the traditional telecommunications world. I found myself taking a lot of notes and then following that up with a lot of questions to my team.

Not all Managed Services Providers (MSP) are created equally – sure, they may all provide IT services for a monthly fee, but beyond that, there are vast differences. Today we want to look at some of the myths surrounding what “good managed IT services” look like, debunk them and give you some ideas of what to really look for in a great MSP. The industry is moving fast and what may have been best practice or top-of-the-line 5 years ago could be ineffective by now.

IT is becoming so prevalent in our businesses that it is thankfully earning its place in many budgets with its dedicated resources. If you’re not budgeting for your IT, here’s your wake-up call; you’re definitely spending money on it, so you might as well include it in your business plan. For those who do budget, many still struggle with spending money ad hoc as they react to issues and failures as they come up. IT can be a monster that’s tough to tame. Today I would like to share a few tips that will help you budget for the long run and stabilize your IT spending. None of these are quick fixes, but they will pay off over time and allow you to scale, so that as you grow your business, your IT helps that growth by enhancing productivity instead of becoming a cost inhibitor to that growth.

I’ve come to a sobering conclusion. As an IT Professional focused on protecting the networks of my own employer, as well as our clients, I’ve seen endless demonstrations of how networks can be infiltrated and damaged. The truth is, there is no way to ensure your network is completely safe. No person, no software, no service, can guarantee that.

I recently had a prime opportunity to accompany Steve Riat, our Director of Sales, and Justin Dempsey, our IT Manager to a Heartland Technology Group meeting. For anyone in the IT space, that might ring a bell (“Oh cool”), but for most of you, that probably doesn’t mean anything.