Your IT infrastructure never sleeps, so it can fail in the middle of the night. You need a remote-ready IT environment to allow for quick support. Whether you have remote staff that need access to your applications while they are on the road or need to set up an environment where IT can support your infrastructure, you need the right technology plan. The Essential Pillars of a Remote-Ready IT Environment Today’s secure IT environment requires infrastructure that you likely don’t have already if you need to set up remote access. This means that you’ll need new equipment before your network is remote-ready. Each item in this list can be deployed by you or a managed service provider (MSP). When you look into MSPs, here is a list of items they will recommend: VPN, Zero-Trust, and Multifactor Authentication (MFA): A virtual private network (VPN) will secure data traveling over the internet, so your data is safe even if an employee works from a vulnerable location like public Wi-Fi. The Zero-Trust aspect of VPN is a methodology used to authenticate and verify users as they continue to request data from your internal servers. Finally, MFA reduces the chance of a data breach should an employee fall for phishing or social engineering where their network credentials could be disclosed. Managed endpoints: Every mobile device, laptop, and remote desktop is an endpoint. Endpoints must be secured and managed by IT staff. Your security policy details what users must have on their devices to connect remotely, but antimalware and remote data wiping are two must-haves. Antimalware applications stop attackers, and remote data wiping removes sensitive data should a user lose their device. Email security: Every organization is a target for cyber-criminals. Today’s largest data breaches start with a phishing email. Email security filters out suspicious links, spoofed email addresses, and messages with malicious attachments. Cloud application protection: Your cloud vendor has tools to protect data at the vendor’s location. Ensure that these applications are enabled to stop attackers from breaching cloud infrastructure. Backup and disaster recovery: Whether you keep backups on-premises or in the cloud, you need them in case of a disaster. For example, if ransomware affects your environment, the quickest way to avoid damage is to restore data from a backup. Backups are also useful for natural disasters like floods or fires. Business-grade Wi-Fi: Wi-Fi can be set up around the office to offer remote access for staff if they don’t have a desktop. You need a setup that offers speed for enterprise applications and security to protect from outsiders. What Breaks First When SMBs Go Remote Even with the best and finest hardware, things break. It could be from a misconfiguration or a bug in the hardware. In rare cases, hardware fails from a faulty component. Whatever the reason, you need to be prepared. Here are a few common failures: All of the above issues can be proactively addressed with the right IT controls and deployment. After some time, your VPN might need upgrades as your business grows and adds more users. Your MSP can monitor the VPN for any speed issues and handle upgrades before they impact productivity.  Patch management handles any issues with security upgrades in your environment. Shadow IT is also a security concern. Your MSP should monitor the environment for any devices that aren’t authorized, and they can handle patch management to ensure that your infrastructure is up to date.  Compliance controls necessary for your environment depend on your industry. A good MSP will help guide you on the right controls. For example, if you must be HIPAA compliant, then you need the right monitoring and audit controls. MSPs install these tools to ensure that you aren’t vulnerable to compliance violations. Step-by-Step Setup Checklist for Business Owners Before you engage an MSP, you might want to go over your current infrastructure to determine what you need. An MSP can help determine the right hardware and software for your business, but it doesn’t hurt to take a look at what you have and make a checklist of your own. With this checklist, you can then engage with an MSP that can deploy and configure each item. How Corporate Technologies Builds a Remote-Ready Workplace As a small business owner, you might be overwhelmed with all of the requirements for remote access to your environment. You can choose from several MSPs, but we offer local onsite IT help that competitors can’t offer. We have a remote help center, but our professionals are local to our clients as well.  Cybersecurity is a primary concern. Once you open your environment to remote users, the network becomes a target for remote threats. Corporate Technologies deployed email filtering, a security operations center (SOC) that monitors the environment, endpoint protection, and backup procedures to keep your data safe from attackers and permanent damage. After we deploy your remote-ready workplace, we then offer continued protection and monitoring with: Why SMBs Need Local IT Support for Remote Work For many SMBs, technology concerns grow beyond what a local person can do, especially if they aren’t trained in IT. Corporate Technologies caters to small businesses with offices across the US. You need this support for full coverage of your environment. For example, if you suffer from a network outage or ISP interruption, a remote MSP can’t help. Corporate Technologies can remediate these types of issues with local technicians near you. A few other ways local IT support can help you: If your business is ready to take the next step towards remote access, see what Corporate Technologies can do for you. Contact us today. FAQs

When your internet connectivity fails, so does your business productivity. Your employees can’t reach cloud-based applications, email, phones, and any other critical internet dependent service. Productivity failure hurts your revenue, and it can cost millions for extensive downtime. Every component of your infrastructure should have a failover safety net, and this includes your internet connection. It’s not uncommon for small businesses to rely on a single internet service provider (ISP), but it’s a mistake. Your internet service might be stable for a while, but ISPs will often perform maintenance or upgrades without warning. ISP activities sometimes cut your service for several hours a day, or your service suffers from temporary degradation while the ISP performs its maintenance. Slow performance also harms productivity. In both these scenarios, you can overcome productivity loss with internet failover infrastructure. Before you decide on a failover design, you need a failover internet plan. What is an Internet Failover Plan? An internet failover plan is a document that decides what hardware you need to ensure that employees always have access to the internet, and what happens when your internet connection goes down. For most businesses, having a separate ISP is the answer to internet failover. In addition to having a second connection, having a secondary service type adds additional risk management. If your main connection is cable, then using a telecom provider avoids downtime if cable lines fail. You still need a trigger to cutover to your alternative source. The best method is to have an automatic switch, but you could leave it to a manual switch if you have full-time operational staff available for the cutover. Your router, firewall, and other infrastructure must be able to handle the cutover. The best way to ensure that all infrastructure will stay operational is to test it during off hours. You can simulate an internet failure scenario by cutting connection to your current ISP. Failover hardware should take over and allow a smooth transition. As an example, suppose that you live in an area where hurricanes are common. You might have cable internet for your normal internet connection, but you have a telecom like AT&T for failover. Cable might be down for days, but AT&T brings their infrastructure to service more quickly. The opposite could also occur. You would have two ISPs to limit your downtime after a major storm, which reduces your risk factors and eliminates a single source of failure. Why It Matters to SMBs? Small business owners might not even realize the importance of the internet for productivity. Internet connectivity is often taken for granted because it’s so common now in any industry. Take, for example, a law firm. Now, documents hosted on government websites are no longer available. Email messages from clients would no longer be available. Phones would not be operational, cutting all contact with colleagues and clients. Document editing and sharing would no longer be available whether you use Microsoft Office 365 or Google Workspace. Productivity for a small law firm would crash, and this is just one example. There are plenty of other industries that rely heavily on the internet. A loss in productivity translates to revenue loss in any industry. Small businesses don’t usually have the resources to estimate hourly revenue loss, but they still feel the impact just the same. Not only is productivity loss an issue, but once internet connectivity is back up, businesses must catch up and hope to avoid losing customers over the incident. Key Components of a Strong Failover Setup It’s better to have a reliable IT professional design your infrastructure, but here are a few items you can expect to add to your current infrastructure.  After setup and configuration, you first need to test the infrastructure. Even after your first test, IT staff must annually test internet failover and any disaster recovery procedures. Disaster recovery testing often involves simulating an actual event like creating an environment where internet connectivity fails and then the alternative provider activates. IT staff must then test all critical resources to ensure that they are available. In addition to testing, IT staff should create a document that details every step necessary to deal with an internet outage. For example, the document highlights key stakeholders to contact, and who will manage any bugs if the cutover doesn’t happen smoothly. An email to users warning them of slower network performance might also be necessary. How Corporate Technologies Helps? You could upgrade network hardware yourself, but it requires a professional to configure infrastructure for optimum performance. Any mistakes could leave your internet failover design useless, which could in turn waste money and lose productivity when an outage occurs. For some small businesses with IT staff, the onsite staff might not have the experience to deploy failover and disaster recovery infrastructure. That’s where Corporate Technologies can help. We cater disaster recovery plans and designs to your business to ensure that productivity is always running at optimal levels even during outages. Professional IT providers deploy infrastructure, test it, and then monitor it 24/7 for any issues. Contact us to find out how Corporate Technologies can help you with disaster recovery and internet failover. FAQs

IT monitoring isn’t only for tech companies. Manufacturers might focus on their machinery, but their networking equipment is equally important for smooth productivity. Servers control user permissions and access controls. Network equipment gives technicians remote access to machinery, and infrastructure for software control manufacturing activities. All these systems must be monitored to detect any issues before they impact production, and the right managed service provider (MSP) can help. Why Cybersecurity Monitoring is Important In Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report, cyber-threat intelligence researchers saw a stark increase in manufacturing targets between 2023 and 2024. Ransomware was the primary payload with 44% of data breaches involving ransomware in 2024. The most significant attack vector was the human element, meaning most attackers delivered their ransomware payload using phishing or social engineering to trick employees into taking action. A good example of this recent cybersecurity trend is in the September 2024 ransomware attack on Kawasaki Motors Europe. The attack came from a well-known ransomware group named RansomHub. As with any other ransomware attack, Kawasaki files were encrypted and held ransom. Instead of paying the cyber-criminals, Kawasaki declined. In retaliation, RansomHub leaked 487GB of stolen data. Operations were temporarily halted for a little over a week, which means the data breach affected the manufacturer’s productivity and likely cost them millions in the process. Manufacturers spend millions in monitoring systems and IoT for their machinery, but monitoring IT equipment is just as important. Most cyber-criminal groups target businesses where cybersecurity is commonly lacking. Even when businesses set up cybersecurity infrastructure, they often forget to integrate monitoring to ensure that threats are caught quickly. Intrusion detection and intrusion prevention are necessary to stop interruptions in manufacturing, supply chain, and protection of your manufactured product. Monitoring Infrastructure Health Cybersecurity isn’t the only reason to monitor your environment. The health of your infrastructure is also important to ensure that the environment continues to be productive. For example, if a server’s CPU is overheating, it could crash unexpectedly bringing down all users and workstations relying on it for productivity. Let’s say that you have a server in an environment a bit too hot for the equipment. The heat could slowly cause issues with your infrastructure hardware. Monitoring the environment for any unexpected errors including the internal heat of the CPU tells you that the environment needs cooling. If you don’t have monitoring systems in place to detect errors from heat, you could have servers that will eventually crash. Unexpected crashes lead to extensive downtime between troubleshooting and replacing any damaged hardware. Monitoring the environment also detects any strange behavior or errors in an application. Errors in an application present several issues. First, users are frustrated when they can’t use business software as intended. Second, application errors also cause issues with data integrity. When data isn’t processed properly, it can cause data corruption, errors with orders, mistakes in shipping and customer service, and any number of service problems. Resource Usage Monitoring Resource usage must also be monitored to prevent users from exhausting available infrastructure. For example, data storage eventually runs out, but you won’t know if there is nothing monitoring storage capacity. Monitoring resources also covers CPU usage, memory issues, or any other number of exhausted resources that impacts performance. Small performance issues might seem negligible at first, but accumulated performance degradation eventually impacts users and productivity. Slow applications slow down data processing, which slows down productivity like orders, shipping, customer service, financial activity, and any other number of employee actions reliant on your infrastructure. Servers aren’t the only infrastructure that needs monitoring. Other networking equipment must be monitored. Switches, routers, workstations, application servers, and cloud resources should be monitored for any anomalies. Cloud infrastructure often has native tools to monitor it, but you still need a reliable service provider to watch for alerts and respond to any critical notifications. The Cost of Downtime Monitoring for all the possible issues that could affect infrastructure lets your managed service provider remediate any problems before they cause downtime. Manufacturers know the value of uptime, but they often focus on their machinery without integrating infrastructure monitoring. Without monitoring, a manufacturer could suffer from downtime. Downtime is costly whether you have a small manufacturing plant or a large global business that supports customers around the world. Infrastructure downtime affects multiple locations, not just the location where the downtime occurs. Even for small manufacturers, the cost of downtime can be thousands of dollars an hour. For large manufacturers, the cost can be seven figures.  Add more money to downtime costs when it involves a cybersecurity event. Cybersecurity events require mandatory downtime to contain the threat. After the threat is contained, a professional must investigate and save evidence for law enforcement. Then, eradication of the threat also requires professionals. Litigation, customer reparations, and brand damage also affect costs. For manufacturers, losing just one large customer impacts revenue long-term.  All costs from downtime add up, and it can put small manufacturers into bankruptcy. Costs can be mitigated with proper monitoring. You can’t eliminate repairs to equipment or changes to the environment when they are necessary, but making changes before issues cause downtime can greatly reduce costs. Where to Get Started You don’t need more local staff to manage monitoring your environment. A good managed service provider can help you avoid any productivity downtime from infrastructure errors. Your MSP will install monitoring across all locations and respond to any cybersecurity incidents, repair damaged infrastructure, and configure applications to avoid errors. Find out if your environment could be at risk with a three-minute IT health check. To find out what Corporate Technologies can do for your manufacturing business, contact us. FAQs

At some point, your law firm will have IT questions, whether it’s because of a workstation error or some kind of connectivity issue to the internet. One of the most beneficial ways you can save productivity time is by contracting with a managed help desk to help your users get quick access to answers to their IT problems. The dedicated help desk also saves time for your local onsite support, especially if you’re a small law firm relying on another staff member to answer questions. Why Downtime is So Costly for Law Firms Without access to critical systems, your law firm could lose thousands every hour. One attorney might charge $500 per hour and up to $1,000 per hour (realistically, attorneys charge anywhere from $150 to $1,000 per hour). Attorney rates vary, especially by state, but some technical downtime affects the entire office, putting multiple costly attorneys in a place where they can no longer work on their cases. Let’s say you have only 5 attorneys working at $500 per hour. The downtime would be $2,500 per hour, and a daily loss of $20,000 (assuming 8 hours of productivity). The cost of lost productivity is significant for small law firms and even more devastating to revenue for large law firms. Most case management and government applications work in the cloud, so you need internet connectivity and a working internal environment to stay productive. Having a help desk and managed service provider for any IT issue will lower the risks of downtime. When you only have a few attorneys on staff, it might seem insignificant, but as you grow to 10, 20, or 100 staff members, stable environments are a must. Large law firms could lose up to seven figures a day in downtime with enough staff left unable to manage their clients and cases. What a Managed Help Desk Provides Instead of relying on another attorney to answer IT questions and struggling to resume productivity, a managed help desk provides you with dedicated support professionals with experience in common IT issues. Even the simplest of issues can be overwhelming for someone inexperienced with infrastructure and help desk support alleviates this stress. For example, suppose that your entire office loses connectivity to the internet. Your ISP tells you that the downtime is not coming from their end. ISP support will only manage the router from your office to the ISP, so you need to figure out why the network is down. In many cases, this could be a Wi-Fi router issue or a damaged internal switch. A simple reboot could fix the problem, or you might need to reconfigure the router for better connectivity strength. Instead of relying on someone to take hours to figure out the problem, an experienced help desk person can more quickly identify the issue and walk you through configurations, saving time on recovery. A few benefits you get with managed IT services: How Managed IT Services Ensure Case Management Software Runs Smoothly Managed IT services are more than putting out fires. They also help you stay proactive with your hardware and software. For example, keeping your software updated and installing antivirus software on all staff devices is a proactive way to avoid data breaches and malware. Both these tasks take time from normal productivity and often require a dedicated IT staff for larger law firms. A managed service provider –including help desk services– performs these tasks in collaboration with your onsite staff to keep your case management software working smoothly. Your managed service provider also has service level agreements (SLAs) that they must adhere to. The number of hours –sometimes minutes– for a response depends on the severity of the issue. For example, if your whole office can’t access the internet and can’t work, this might be a tier 1 severity, meaning a response is necessary within 30 minutes (for example). The provider will then give you an estimated time of resolution, which would be a priority for them. A lower-level severity that does not interfere with productivity would have a longer timeframe for contact and recovery. SLAs are invaluable to any law firm that needs dedicated support for any critical downtime to limit monetary damage and revenue loss. Predictable Costs and Scalability of a Managed Help Desk As with most businesses, the idea of having a managed help desk might sound like an unnecessary expense. Good managed service providers will give you estimated costs so that IT support stays within your budget. Costs are often calculated per seat and the nature of your environment. This gives you a set flat-rate cost to include in your budget, and businesses can scale IT costs as the law firm grows. Corporate Technologies makes it easy for you to determine costs. You can use our managed IT services calculator to estimate your monthly IT budget. You aren’t limited to remote support either. You can add on-site IT support if you’re limited on staff and need someone to help scale infrastructure or prefer a hands-on approach to support. Knowing your future IT costs is essential for budgeting, and any good managed service provider will mold a contract to fit your budget, expectations, and scalability. Also Read: Cybersecurity Policies for Small Businesses To determine if having an outsourced IT help desk is worth it, ask yourself these questions: How Can You Get Started with a Reliable Managed Help Desk? If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you should be looking for IT support. Local staff is expensive, and each IT professional has their own set of skills and experience. With a managed service provider, you get several professionals with experience in several different fields to help support your law firm. To find out how Corporate Technologies can help you, contact us today. FAQs