Info Advantage Blog

How often does your technology experience trouble? If your business is constantly dealing with technical hiccups, your assets that are meant to be a boon to your organization, can quickly become a nuisance that holds you back. How can you take better care of your technology, and use it to usher in a new era of productivity?

First, we might need to explain the nature of break-fix IT services. This is what you normally get when you take your technology to traditional tech support. They’ll take a look at your technology, tell you what’s wrong, and provide their services for a hefty cost. They won’t take measures to help you mitigate your technology problems down the road. After all, their livelihood depends on your technology breaking down, so why should they have your budget’s best interests in mind?

The other type of IT service seeks to do exactly that; managed IT wants to prevent issues from becoming major problems that cause downtime. This enables your business to save money and time by not having to deal with near-constant technology troubles. The idea is to use preventative maintenance in order to detect minor issues, and resolve the overarching cause, before they can escalate into costly problems that could derail your budget.

Some examples of effective managed service offerings include:

• Server hosting: Your server units are used for the storage and transportation of critical data, so it makes sense to take proper care of them. However, the average small or medium-sized business might not have the staff or skillset necessary to care for or accommodate the physical server component. Businesses will often outsource this responsibility to guarantee the consistent uptime of crucial systems.
• Network security: Do you know the difference between viruses, malware, trojans, phishing scams, and other online threats? This is one of the many reasons why organizations would rather outsource their network security to cyber security professionals. Managing and maintaining a security solution that includes a firewall, antivirus, spam blocker, and content filter, can be tiring and knowledge-intensive.
• Remote maintenance and management: Often times, business professionals might be able to effectively use technology, but don’t notice telltale signs of degradation. Many of these signs can be spotted remotely, and the patches can swiftly be administered without a costly on-site appointment.
• Backup and disaster recovery: Small businesses need to preserve their data at all costs. It’s been proven that businesses that fail to restore their data following a loss incident are likely to go out of business within one year. This is why so many organizations turn to outsourced managed IT services to handle data backup. With Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR), backups can be taken as often as every fifteen minutes, and data can be rapidly deployed in the event of a data loss incident.

Does your business have trouble managing and maintaining its critical technology assets? With Info Advantage, we try to make it as easy for you as possible. To learn more about any of the above services, and more, reach out to us at (585) 254-8710.

With today’s great technology solutions, working remotely is no longer just a dream. Many businesses have either a partial or a complete remote staff, and it’s all held together by modern technology solutions. However, even with the latest tech, the remote worker still has to invest in their own success. If you work remotely, here are four ways that you can maximize your productivity and keep yourself from getting in the way of your best work.

Have a Dedicated Office
You might have your own cubicle or office space at your workplace, but when you work remotely, you often have to get creative. You could turn a booth at a restaurant into a workspace, or your living room sofa into your office. However, this is often counterproductive and distracting. Instead of hoping to get work done away from your desk, you should arrange to have a dedicated home office with lots of space and privacy. This should be the place where you go to get good, solid work done; where all of your files and technology solutions are located. Also, it helps to avoid working in busy public places whenever possible, like coffee shops and restaurants.

Set Specific Rules for Your Family and Visitors
If you’re going to work remotely, this will often mean setting up a home office where you can go to get your best work done. If you have a family that’s always at home, it can be distracting. You need to set clear boundaries so that they know when it’s a good time to drop by your office. Furthermore, it’s a good idea to limit what you should be doing during the workday. It’s one thing to take a short break to handle some minor chores, but another entirely to get distracted by multiple large tasks. Working remotely is a privilege, and as such, you need to stay productive in order to retain this flexibility.

Keep Working Until the End of Your Shift
When you work remotely, you might have the impression that taking an early-out might not be a big issue. However, this can be a slippery slope; one day you’ll start taking more and more time off of the end of the day, and before you know it, your work performance will suffer and you won’t have anyone to blame but yourself. Plus, if you continuously abuse this privilege, you might ruin the opportunity to work remotely for the rest of your coworkers.

Use the Right Technology Solutions
Remote workers are only as effective as the tools that they use to get work done. This is why businesses often have to implement proper technology solutions, like virtual private networks and Voice over Internet Protocol communications, to ensure maximum protection for their investments and productivity for their employees. If your organization could use a tech revamp to accommodate remote workers, Info Advantage can help.

For more information about how to keep your remote workers productive, contact us at (585) 254-8710.

Sometimes when your workstation feels bogged down, a relatively cheap and simple hardware update can make all the difference in performance. Adding more memory can be a game changer for your computer.

There are several factors that contribute to the speed of a PC:

CPU/Processor

The CPU handles all of calculations a computer performs. These days, consumer-class CPUs handle billions and even trillions of instructions per second. Dated processors can greatly influence the actual speed of a computer, but if your PC is fairly new (as in 1 or 2 years old, and possibly older for higher end builds) it's likely not bottlenecking your performance. Today, CPUs are equipped with two, four, or even more cores, which means the CPU can handle more calculations exponentially and consume less electricity.

RAM/Memory

Random Access Memory (RAM) is basically the short-term memory of your computer. When your computer is loading and running applications, they get stored in the RAM. The RAM is much faster than the hard drive, so your computer doesn't need to spin it's wheels looking for specific files and parts of applications. The more RAM you have, the more "stuff" that can be stored in it. The faster your RAM, the faster your computer can sift through the data that gets temporarily pushed into it. Once your RAM is full, your computer will depend on the hard drive to retrieve information, and that's where things get sluggish. Once you stop running a program, it will remove itself from the RAM to free up some space for everything else running.

Hard Drive

The hard drive is the storage device of a computer. For extremely high-end PCs, the hard drive is often the bottleneck. Hard drives, when compared to RAM, are very slow to access and write information. Once your computer needs to rely on your hard drive heavily for RAM, things are going to start getting slowed down. While it's great that your PC can rely on your hard drive in this way for those times it needs some extra memory, it is likely this is the cause of the slowdown. Unfortunately, because hard drives are mechanical and have moving parts, there's limitations to how fast science can make them perform. There are costly solid-state drives, but as a performance-improving factor on a standard workstation, typically solid state drives aren't the cost-effective answer.

There are software factors as well that can affect your PC speed. Malware and Spyware can bog down your system, and after a lot of use, temporary files can bog things down. Before upgrading hardware, you'll want to have a technician run a quick evaluation on your PC - it's possible a little cleanup can make all the difference in the world.

Otherwise, the next step is upgrading the RAM. RAM is usually relatively cheap, even to double or triple your existing RAM with faster, higher performance memory. Often the cost of the new RAM itself will be between $50 and $100, and more than likely less than that, and that's for a substantial increase, but it depends on your PC.

Is your computer running slow? Does it get bogged down by the time you have all of your day-to-day applications open? Contact us at (585) 254-8710 for a quick evaluation to see if a simple, cost-effective upgrade will help you perform your job more effectively.

Face it, your laptop isn’t indestructible. There are only so many times you can throw your laptop in a cramped bag or have it drop from your hands before you see some damage. While many laptops can be saved with something as simple as a sturdy case, many modern professionals work in conditions that make it very difficult to protect the technological equipment needed for businesses to run smoothly. That is why many manufacturers are creating lines of ‘rugged laptops,’ which can withstand even the harshest of work conditions.

What Are Rugged Laptops?

A “rugged’’ laptop is a PC that has been designed to withstand very harsh environments and conditions, such as heavy traveling or factory work. These laptops are built to withstand just about anything, including drops, spills, extreme temperatures, and much more. There are a variety of different types of rugged laptops, each built for a specific purpose. Many rugged laptop vendors offer an assortment of rugged laptops that are classified into three ‘levels’ of ruggedness; semi-rugged, fully-rugged, and ultra-rugged. Semi-rugged laptops are typically enhanced versions of commercialized laptops with more protection, where an ultra-rugged laptop is built from the inside-out to resist even the harshest environments.

What Classifies a Laptop as Rugged?

Most rugged PC manufacturers use the MIL-STD-810 environmental durability standards to test how rugged their laptops are. The MIL-STD-810 was originally created in the 1960s by the US Department of Defense as a guideline for designing military-grade technology that can be used in high combat areas. The standard provides a variety of different test methods which can be used to ensure equipment is suitable enough to be used on the field of combat. This includes tests for temperature, vibration, impact, water resistance, altitude, sand or dust, and more. Manufacturers are also known to reference the Ingress Protection Code, which classifies the degrees of sealing protection of electrical equipment, and the NEMA classification, which describes different electrical enclosures and how they hold up in different environments.

Who Should Be Using Rugged Laptops?

While rugged laptops are typically designed for people who work in extreme conditions, just about any business professional can find value in a rugged laptop. While you may not be using your laptop underground or at sea, your personal computer may be taking on more damage than you think. Laptops are often shoved in bags or airplane compartments, or left in places they could potentially get damage, such as a bathroom or kitchen. Therefore, just about anyone who takes their business on-the-go can find benefits from ruggedized laptops.

If you’re interested in a more rugged laptop but don’t know what level of protection you need? Contact the technology experts at Info Advantage today at (585) 254-8710 to talk about what technology solutions will best fit your business.

[Photo: DoD]