You likely have someone in your organization who is doing their best to provide this kind of support. They may or may not have the time, training or tools to get the job done on the best day, but even if they do, there are likely times when they are tied up on important projects and challenged to provide timely responses to these kinds of requests. Think of this service as a cloud-based IT assistance service that you can procure on a monthly basis.
Studies indicate that depending upon the training, skillset and aptitude of your users, your number of “tickets” per month can range up to as high as 3.23 tickets per user per month. Based on these statistics, if you were to take an inhouse staffing approach to meeting this need, you might require as many as 9 Agents/Technicians to support a 100 person high-tech company or 7 to support a financial services firm.
Our Help Desk services can help you take control of that paradigm and work it the way that best suits your business, financial goals, and personnel. It is common for firms to offload level one help desk services and staff for projects requiring a much more specialized knowledge of the business’s goals, values and applications.
Are you an executive trying to determine what kind of staffing profiles you should need? Take a look at some of the metrics at metricnet. https://www.metricnet.com/desktop-support-staffing/
Remote Maintenance & Management
Remote Maintenance and Management move your organizations IT approach from reactive to proactive mode. A small but potent piece of software on all your PC’s will keep an eye on the health of each PC and how that machine is doing overall. From ensuring all the Microsoft patches have been applied to monitoring of system resources for overutilization and basic virus/malware intrusions, it is most likely that we will identify your problems before your users do. All this is accomplished remotely through use of next generation software that is regularly updated and included in the price you pay for RMM services.
It is like having a NASCAR pit crew come into your business every night to check out all your machines and make sure they are good-to-go for the following day. If there is a problem, they will take care of it if possible, or provide notification if onsite services are required.
Advanced Security
Security is an interesting challenge.
First, you should understand that your security implementation is like trying to secure your home from burglary. Every thing you do makes your home more secure- Build a fence, add a heavier door, put bars on the windows, add an alarm, buy a junk yard dog—each of these improves your security, but none of them ensure that you are beyond breach.
Second, your security design needs to be commensurate with your security needs. If you are a cash only salvage yard, who does not keep any customer records, the data you have to protect is far less attractive to hackers than someone who keeps customer financial records or personal information. Your security decisions need to be sensible and reasonable for the kind of information you are protecting.
Also, think of it this way- does the gazelle (your business) have to be faster than the cheetah (the hacker) to avoid being eaten? No. The Cheetah is the worlds fastest land animal and no gazelle is faster—Just as a determined, capable hacker set on compromising your system is likely unstoppable. The gazelle just needs to be fast enough (well enough protected) to become one of the more difficult targets available to the cheetah.
All this in mind, beyond our basic RMM service that provides basic virus and malware protection, we can help you get one, two or more steps past that with:
- Proper Backups – Since we know that nothing can be done to perfectly protect you from attack, we want to make sure that you have backups that are air gapped and inaccessible to hackers. This won’t deprive a hacker of the data they stole from you, but at least we will be able to restore your system to the point it was before the breach and not lose additional downtime.
- user security testing and training– Almost nothing will protect you if a user is “fooled” into clicking on something that will open the front door to intrusion. We will randomly over time send probes to your users to see who falls for it. When users fail and potentially do something that would have resulted in a breach, they will be trained for how to recognize and react to threats.
- endpoint detection and monitoring – This always on service monitors every machine for “unusual” activity relative to what it has seen in the past, and if it sees anything fishy going on, it quarantines the affected files and gets a security specialist involved to sort through the activity. This is one of the highest levels of protection because even the newest, most novel type of intrusion is likely to be detected.
