Let’s take a look at a common scenario: you’re a small business, your current IT infrastructure isn’t keeping up with company growth, so your current environment is holding you back. It’s time to consider cloud migration for businesses, but where do you start? This article will give you some basic guidelines to figure out when it’s time to migrate to the cloud. Here is a list of items we’ll cover: Running Out of IT Resources This item is a common one. Whether it’s storage space, slow servers, or a lack of applications, running out of IT resources slows business growth. Employees need to delete files to make room for more. Servers crash and cause data loss. Sometimes businesses can’t compete because competitors have better applications. All these issues inhibit business growth. As you run out of resources, you can frustrate customers and cause issues. In extreme cases, data loss can turn into liabilities and potential legal issues. You need enough resources for employees to do their job or your business growth will always be inhibited, but cloud migration for businesses can help eliminate this issue. Here are a few IT resources that can be migrated to the cloud: You Need Remote Employee Support The fastest way to support remote employees is to migrate to the cloud. Instead of building infrastructure like VPN and cybersecurity on-premises, you can offload it all to a cloud provider. You still need to manage the account and make sure that you configure cloud resources properly, but all the compute power and uptime is on the cloud provider. Cloud migration for businesses is a slow process, because you need to ensure that you have no downtime. You can migrate to the cloud and have remote employees test infrastructure casually. Another option is to slowly roll out new services to the cloud to allow employees time to get used to their new environment.  Here are a few reasons why cloud migration for businesses can help with remote employees: Can’t Keep Up with Software Updates and Security Patches Depending on your infrastructure, updates can be a full-time job. An IT person must constantly patch software, and some updates might cause downtime. Downtime is more stress for the IT person and loss in productivity. A loss in productivity means a loss in revenue. The issues snowball when IT infrastructure fails. When you migrate businesses to the cloud, the infrastructure is updated automatically by the cloud provider. Firmware and software is updated without intervention from administrators. You still need to configure business infrastructure properly, but you don’t need to worry about updates. This benefit takes a lot of the overhead off your IT employees and frees their time to do something else. Cloud providers automatically update: Cloud Migration for Businesses: Not Enough Space (Real Estate) for Hardware Adding infrastructure requires real estate. You need a room built for IT hardware too. The room must have low humidity, cool temperatures, and no traffic. Not every business has a room like this available. An IT closet doesn’t need to be big, but it must be the right environment for equipment. You don’t need to worry about space at all when you migrate your business to the cloud. Businesses can choose to keep some internal infrastructure, but you can also migrate everything but mobile devices to the cloud. The advantage of having cloud structure is that you can expand and reduce resources as needed. Signs that you need to migrate to the cloud: High IT Costs Computer hardware is expensive, especially since memory costs are up. Paying for new hardware is expensive. After cloud migration for businesses, you can expand your current resources at a fraction of the cost.  With cloud providers, you pay for the resources that you use. You can pay three or four figures a month, depending on the number of resources that you roll out. The benefit of cloud resources is that you can scale up during busy seasons and scale down during slow seasons to save money. One aspect of saving money with cloud computing is that you also no longer pay the utility expenses. Electricity costs also drop when you migrate your infrastructure to the cloud. You no longer need the extra cooling and 24/7 uptime for your hardware. It’s one extra cost savings most businesses forget when moving their IT to the cloud. Savings in the cloud include: Poor Performance Old hardware eventually stops working or has poor performance. You need to replace it, but it’s expensive. Instead of coming up with the funds to replace old hardware, moving to the cloud is much more cost efficient. Slow hardware performance has hidden costs also. It slows down productivity and affects revenue. You always get the latest hardware in the cloud. Poor performance affects: How Corporate Technologies Can Help Cloud Migration for Businesses Most business owners don’t know what to do to migrate to the cloud. You need to preserve uptime while being thorough in your procedures. Corporate Technologies can help.  Contact Corporate Technologies to see how we can help your cloud migration for businesses. FAQs Q: How much does cloud migration cost? A: Costs for migration to the cloud depends on the resources that you deploy and the amount of users you have onsite. Q: What happens if I run out of resources in the cloud? A: Every cloud provider has a dashboard where you can deploy more resources when you need them. Q: Can I use onsite hardware with cloud hardware? A: Yes, you can integrate cloud hardware with your onsite hardware. Q: Do I need to update cloud computing resources? A: No, resources are automatically updated by the cloud provider. Q: How do I manage cloud resources? A: You can have an IT employee manage them or outsource your cloud management to Corporate Technologies.

Every school needs IT equipment to help students learn, so an IT budget for charter schools is the necessary first step. Your charter school needs a budget before you know what you can afford. Budgeting also helps with allocating resources and prioritizing equipment. This article covers: Shift from Reactive to Proactive It might not seem like it at first, but reactive IT can be much more expensive than proactive IT. Reactive IT is when your charter school fixes issues as they come without adding infrastructure to stop the issue in the future. Proactive IT is infrastructure that stops issues before they happen. Examples of proactive IT include: Planning an IT Budget for Charter Schools at Scale If you only plan IT infrastructure for today, what happens when you have dozens more students, teachers, and administrators tomorrow? The answer is to create a budget that scales for several years in the future. It’s likely that you will need to add infrastructure in the future, so this is where your business and financial planning advisors can help. Some charter schools focus on certain industries, for example STEM or computer science. In this scenario, you need the infrastructure to support it. Science subjects (especially computer science) change frequently, so you need to allocate future budget resources to supporting these changes. A few items to consider: Consider Outsourcing to Lower Costs You can hire onsite employees, but having several dedicated onsite staff can be expensive. Outsourcing at least some of your IT management has a positive impact on your budget and can help with planning an IT budget for charter schools. Usually, this step also involves deploying some resources in the cloud to help manage them better. The cost of outsourcing ranges per person, but check with the provider. The cost also depends on the services that you need. Use a managed IT services calculator to determine your own charter school costs. Outsourcing your IT infrastructure management can help with: Student Costs Included in Planning an IT Budget for Charter Schools Budgeting for charter schools has the unique challenge of student costs. Most businesses only worry about local and remote infrastructure for employees, but charter schools often offer tablets and laptops for students. This infrastructure increases your costs, especially with the high risk of theft and damage. Insurance, maintenance, replacement, and repairs should all be included in your IT budgeting plan. Your financial plan will likely include a per-student cost, but it could also increase in the future. Make sure that you include potential future costs as you add more students to your roster. Student items that could increase your IT budget: Cybersecurity and Data Protection Schools are a good target for cyber-criminals. Most schools don’t have the resources or infrastructure to protect from sophisticated threats. Your charter school doesn’t need the most expensive infrastructure, but it should have effective cybersecurity. Monitoring and detection are essential. This item is also great for outsourcing. A dedicated managed service provider can set up monitoring and respond to incidents. Completely containing and eradicating a threat is essential for the security of your students and staff. An MSP that has the right cybersecurity professionals can preserve your data, charter school integrity and reputation, and help you avoid costly compliance fines. Cybersecurity monitoring helps with: What Does a Basic Budget Plan for Charter Schools Look Like? To create a plan, you need a plan for the plan! Here are a few tips that should guide you when you decide to make an IT budget: How Corporate Technologies Can Help Planning an IT Budget for Charter Schools Whether you’re a small charter school or you are a large charter school drowning in IT costs, a managed service provider like Corporate Technologies can help. We manage small to large businesses that need help with their IT budgets, including those with constant reactive repair spending.  Corporate Technologies services a large number of industries and covers every IT support service that you need. We can take you from start to finish with your charter school IT budget. To see what Corporate Technologies can do for you, contact us today. FAQs Q: How much does it cost per student for a charter school? A: The cost depends on what you need for each student, the number of students, and the internal infrastructure to support them. Q: What can an MSP do for a charter school? A: An MSP can help with planning, auditing, deploying, managing, and monitoring IT infrastructure for charter schools. Q: Where do I start with an IT budget for charter schools? A: The first step is to audit your current infrastructure, and then you set goals and priorities to determine what you need to purchase. Q: What IT infrastructure do I need for students at a charter school? A: Charter schools usually need tablets, laptops, endpoint security, and monitoring infrastructure to support cybersecurity. Q: Can an MSP help with reactive IT changes? A: Yes, an MSP can switch a charter school from reactive to proactive IT, which saves money on constant fixes.

Even in a small office, you need productivity software. You have several options on the market, but the most convenient and popular on the market is Microsoft 365 with Outlook as your email client. You should note that having an Office subscription and a Microsoft Office 365 subscription are two different services, but you can have both for productivity. This article covers what you get for your subscription and how Office 365 (now called Microsoft 365) can help make your small business office more productive. What’s Included with Office 365? If you’re a fan of Microsoft products, you probably already know of the Office suite. You get several popular applications like PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and Outlook included in its subscription. These applications are included in the 365 subscription version, but you get a few more services. They are: You pay monthly or yearly for Office 365, and you are limited to the number of installations you get. Business plans support up to 300 users. Each plan has its own benefits and pricing structure, so check out Microsoft’s plan comparison to figure out which one is right for your business. Benefits of Microsoft Outlook with Office 365 Microsoft Outlook is an email client, but it works alongside your Office 365 subscription to support your business email with your domain. Many small business owners settle for a gmail account or a free Hotmail or Outlook account. Unfortunately, some potential customers see this as unprofessional, and you lose trust from people expecting you to have your own domain if you are a serious business. Outlook runs on your mobile or desktop computer, and you can receive your business email after you set up your email service for your domain. Microsoft 365 integrates with your business domain, so you can connect Outlook and your other productivity applications. You can then share documents with other employees without email documents back and forth. It’s a much more secure way to share documents. You can set up Outlook to retrieve multiple email addresses, so you can download (for example) your customer service email messages and your business email addressed to you. Outlook also lets you organize messages, set events, and back up messages. When it comes to business communication, you need a client that provides business-level services like Outlook. Teams Communication and Productivity Teams is Microsoft’s chat and video conferencing. It quickly gained popularity during COVID and became a key tool for collaboration in Microsoft-based environments. You might not think it’s necessary for a small business, but having collaboration and video conferencing tools can be helpful. Let’s say that a staff member is on vacation or they are working from home. They can still join a quick video call during the day with Teams. Teams lets you connect to people outside of the business as well. Human resources use Teams to interview, and staff members can create videos meant to explain products and services. What used to be Skype or Zoom is now a function for Teams. What makes Teams a preferred method to other video conferencing tools is that it integrates with Microsoft 365 and uses identity management for security. With something like Zoom, anyone can join provided that the user has a link to the conferencing software. With Teams, you have more granular control over security and who has access to video conferences. Microsoft Office but with Sharing Features Most people are familiar with Microsoft Office products, but having a 365 subscription is what helps with your business productivity. First, let’s take a look at Word. You probably use it for documentation and product information. When you create a document, you need someone to review it. Usually, you want multiple people to review it. The old style was to pass the document around in email, but Office 365 lets you store the document in the cloud and then share it with specific people. People you want to share it with  could be in the office or an outside consultant. With standard Word, you’d have to pass around the document in email and turn on tracked changes. With Office 365, you share it to a registered email and have everyone edit the document from a central location. Productivity is improved when you work with collaboration tools like Office 365, because you no longer risk overwriting changes, losing documents in an email chain, or having unsynched changes to a single document. The same can be done for all the other Office Suite of applications including Excel and PowerPoint.  Microsoft gives Office 365 users 1TB of cloud storage per user, depending on your plan. Enterprise subscriptions have higher limits, but a basic business subscription gives you 1TB. This means that each user can store business documents in the cloud rather than host them locally. From a productivity perspective, it lowers the risk of losing files from a local infrastructure crash or data corruption from a failing device. Disaster recovery becomes much easier when you have files available in the cloud. Getting Started with Office 365 Fortunately, Office 365 is just a subscription payment away, but you might need help integrating it into your small business infrastructure. Microsoft makes it easy to implement, but if you do it incorrectly you could come across issues. Also, you need to configure Outlook and your domain to handle any custom handles. If you don’t have the right staff to set up Office 365 or you simply don’t have the time to do it yourself, a managed service provider can help. Let Corporate Technologies help make your business more productive, and let us configure Office 365 to work for you. Contact us today to find out what we can do for you. FAQ

At some point in your company’s growth, you need someone to take care of your IT support. Users need help with technical issues, new hardware must be installed, and hackers are always targeting small businesses for their poor cybersecurity defenses. The best IT support model for 10-80 employees is partnering with a good managed service provider (MSP). Not only does partnering with an MSP take away most of the IT overhead, but you also know your infrastructure and cybersecurity are done right. Here are a few common MSP support models to help small businesses. Completely Outsourced MSP IT Support Not every business has overnight staff, but it’s common for staff to work late nights or early mornings. If any of your staff travels, they might need support during off-peak hours. Most small business owners don’t stop work when they clock out. Small business owners are on-call days, nights and weekends. At some point, you need support for your IT infrastructure, and you might not find it if you don’t have dedicated support. Whether you need off-peak hours IT support or simple help with your infrastructure during working hours, an MSP is there to help. A good MSP has a 24/7 helpdesk to answer low-priority calls, but high-priority critical issues can be handled with onsite support. If you need new installations, an MSP’s onsite support will work with you to figure out the best solution, deploy it with minimal interference of business operations, and maintain it with upgrades and patches. Should your network suffer from an outage, an MSP will work with you to get it back up and running as soon as possible. Every MSP has a set service level agreement (SLA) that determines a timeframe for response and resolution. For example, you might be promised a 15-30 minute response for critical issues so that you have immediate support for a fast resolution. You also have the benefit of skilled professionals familiar with IT issues and how to fix them. Outsourcing your IT support to an MSP gives you help with anything software and hardware related. If you have no one with IT experience, this model might be the best choice. Pros: Cons: Co-Managed IT Support For businesses with at least 50 employees, you might prefer to have at least one onsite dedicated IT staff member. This staff member has a relationship with the people working in the office, and it’s easy for employees to quickly ask questions from the person sitting in a cubicle down the hall. A dedicated staff member seems like the more productive choice after your business has several dozen employees. A single staff member can’t handle every issue that presents itself, so you either hire more IT staff or use a co-managed IT support model. For most small businesses, engaging with an MSP is the answer. It’s more cost effective, and it provides help to a small IT department. IT support requires network monitoring, network maintenance, and constant updates to both staff workstations and networking equipment. The entire process of monitoring and managing a network becomes overwhelming for one or two IT people. Having a co-managed support model is a nice balance between onsite staff and expenses and relying on an MSP to remediate critical issues, monitor for any issues, and bring professional support that onsite staff might not have, like cybersecurity, cloud management and deployment, and disaster recovery. The MSP works directly with your onsite dedicated staff and acts as an extension of your IT support team. Pros: Cons: On-call for Intermittent Support Only For very small businesses with less than 10 employees, full-time MSP support might not be necessary. You might have very little IT infrastructure and don’t need support but once or twice a month. If you have little need for full-time support but still need help every once in a while, a more casual contract might be the best option. You still need a contract with an MSP, but you can pay as you go or pay only when you need support. This IT support model has several pitfalls, one of which is that it can get expensive if you need help with a critical issue that takes days to remediate. For example, suppose that you have a major data breach from ransomware. You need help with containing the threat, finding out what happened, and eradicating it from your network. Most businesses also need help with recovering data, if at all possible. Without disaster recovery plans in place, you could lose your data altogether, which is why professional help should be a proactive thought rather than reactive. A good MSP will work with your budget and decide which IT support model is best for your business. If you are thinking about this model, here are a few considerations. Pros: Cons: What MSP Model is Right for You? Every business has its own requirements, and these requirements are what you should focus on when you choose an IT support model. For businesses with a budget, you should carefully consider the right model, and look for an MSP that gives you a flat-rate monthly cost based on metrics like users. It might take you time to find the right provider, but Corporate Technologies can help you find the right IT support that suits your budget and your requirements. Contact us today to see what we can do to help support your IT infrastructure. FAQs