If you’re familiar with fast IT infrastructure, any performance issues are probably noticeable to you. For people used to slow IT, it might not be as noticeable. Unfortunately, slow IT is ignored as something that happens, but it doesn’t have to be that way. You can make small changes to your IT to speed up performance. Faster performance means more productivity, fewer mistakes, and more manageable applications. Cost is the Primary Reason to Avoid Upgrades The primary reason for disregarding slow network performance is money. IT infrastructure costs money, especially when shortages in specific hardware occur. Memory shortage makes the cost of computer and network equipment skyrocket. Having hardware on-premises is generally expensive, but you don’t need to host it in-house. Cloud computing cuts the high costs of having IT infrastructure hosted in-house. You pay for the equipment that you use rather than buy the hardware outright. For example, a new server could cost thousands in hardware, but it might only cost a few hundred dollars a month if you spin up a virtual machine in the cloud. The cost of the hardware isn’t the only expense, so a few hundred dollars a month for a virtual machine is much more affordable than hosting the hardware, finding the real estate, and keeping staff to support it. Finding Staff Can Be Difficult and High Cost When you have a very small office with just the owner and a couple staff members, you can host your own hardware without the need of any support. As you grow, you will come across issues where you can’t figure out how to properly configure hardware or remediate a technical error. You need IT support staff to help. IT staff are expensive, so many businesses avoid upgrading to high-performance equipment to stick with the infrastructure that they are already familiar with. You need IT staff to manage more advanced infrastructure, and more than one staff member is often needed if your business grows. The cost of staff and the requirement to build a new department for IT often makes business owners apprehensive about upgrading their IT infrastructure. At some point, businesses need someone to manage their IT and support user questions, which is an expensive addition to their corporate budgets. Inexperienced Businesses Might Think Slow is Normal Not everyone knows what 50Gbps internet access feels like, so a slower network environment might seem normal to some businesses. The cost to upgrade to a faster internet plan is often negligible, but the cost to upgrade network hardware can be expensive. As people continue to work with the slower infrastructure, it becomes the norm and employees think that slow performance is not an issue. The fact is that these slowness issues can interfere with productivity. Harm from performance issues is one of those hidden productivity hindrances. For example, suppose that you have slow applications from older network hardware. Your customer service people take more time to look up customer issues and research into their problems. The performance issues with your network environment could be reducing the number of customers an employee can manage during their daily activities. The longer it takes to handle a customer issue, the angrier customers can get. The domino effect from slow network performance can be hidden as other issues. Apprehension with New Technology If you haven’t worked with new technology or migrated to the cloud, you might be apprehensive to make changes without knowing if you will struggle to work with your new infrastructure. Many people keep their original hardware and software to avoid disruption from changes. Employees need training to learn new technology, and this can seem like too much of a burden for small businesses. It’s especially difficult when small businesses are extremely busy and employees are already overworked. Most small businesses stick with what they already know, but new technology can speed up productivity, make it easier for employees to handle their daily activities, and help with business continuity. For example, data backups and disaster recovery will keep the business running even after a natural disaster or cyber-incident. Choosing New Infrastructure Requires a Professional If you don’t know how to fix performance issues, you probably don’t know what hardware and software to buy. Even if you decide to work with cloud computing, you still need to know what to deploy. Deploying new resources for your business requires a professional, either as a full-time employee or a consultant to give you guidance. You might even need onsite support from IT consultants if you don’t have the onsite stuff to help deploy the right infrastructure. Poor performance often requires scaling resources horizontally, meaning that you need more servers and hardware to support your business. Professionals will ensure that these resources can be scaled with your business. You shouldn’t need to continually upgrade your infrastructure after a short amount of time. Instead, your infrastructure should scale dynamically, which is one of the benefits of using the cloud. Delaying Change The need for infrastructure is often put off for another day. Small businesses have several expenses to think of as their business grows, so IT is often put on the back burner. This can be a mistake when infrastructure gets so out-of-date that it poses productivity limitations and keeps the business from growing. You don’t want your infrastructure to be the cause of your business being unable to grow, so it’s time to build a plan and deploy upgrades. Instead of delaying your business growth from your infrastructure, you can engage with professionals that can help you build an IT roadmap, plan out your infrastructure deployment, and maintain your IT so that it runs at peak performance. You also need professionals to monitor your environment to identify any ongoing issues and solve them before you suffer from downtime. If you need help with an IT roadmap and know that your performance is hindering productivity, contact us today to find out how Corporate Technologies can help. FAQs

Small businesses need an IT roadmap to guide them through the growth process. It’s a common mistake for small businesses to wing it, which leads to expensive oversights, changes to incompatible legacy systems, and chaos in their network environment. Instead of unorganized IT, building an IT roadmap gives much more efficiency to IT budgets and provides scalable systems.  Decide Why You Need IT This point might seem obvious, but it’s an important first step to organize your goals. You might already have IT for authorization and sharing files, but you might need additional IT infrastructure if you want to build an application for customers to book appointments, check their orders, or communicate with your staff more efficiently than email messages. The purpose for your new IT infrastructure depends on your business goals, but it will help you decide what infrastructure you need. You might need help with infrastructure deployments, but you can identify your future business goals. These goals are then tied to IT. Goals tied to IT can then determine the right architecture, software, and hardware necessary to complete your goals. Some goals might require the rollout of cloud infrastructure. For example, the use of AI requires cloud computing for affordability. You can tie in AI infrastructure with your applications for intelligent predictions and analysis. To determine goals, you might need to involve all stakeholders. If you are the founder and sole stakeholder, build a plan that sees your business goals aligned with IT for the foreseeable future. It’s expensive to change to another strategy, especially with IT infrastructure. You want to go over all goals so that your future infrastructure is scalable. Scalability also requires the ability to change as your business grows, so taking this first step saves you money in the long-run. Want to reduce downtime and make IT predictable? Download the 3-Year IT Roadmap Checklist (PDF) Audit Your Current Infrastructure Every environment has its own current hardware and software, so you must audit it for several reasons. The first is to drive your future infrastructure choices. For example, if you prefer Windows, maybe you prefer having Windows servers and Azure as a cloud platform. Windows infrastructure integrates more easily with other Windows products, but it’s not an absolute requirement. Your IT roadmap needs to consider integration with current infrastructure. Auditing your current environment also helps with discovery of gaps where you could be missing critical components. For example, small businesses often have gaps in cybersecurity infrastructure. These gaps give attackers opportunities to exploit them and steal data. A data breach can ruin your business reputation and cost enough to bankrupt it. A good audit will help you discover these types of gaps. You’ll see the term SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) referenced as you look into an IT roadmap. If you hire a professional to help you with an audit, SWOT is part of the process. Using a SWOT strategy, you will get an overall picture of your environment so that you can identify the right new infrastructure to add to it. A final component in an audit is identifying areas of improvement for speed and productivity. If you haven’t had a professional managing your IT infrastructure, then it likely has bottlenecks. A network that just works is different from an inefficient network harming productivity. The audit will identify these issues as well and build a plan to remediate them. Determine Your Budget and Prioritize Efforts The first plan is your ideal wish list, but you probably have a budget that limits what can be deployed initially. This is why a priority list is important. Your budget must match the priority list, so you can determine the infrastructure to roll out initially. Later, as the business grows, additional infrastructure can be added. A professional will help you decide on critical infrastructure versus what can wait. For example, if you want to work with AI but don’t have the application built yet, you might wait for AI infrastructure and save on costs initially. The initial deployment can be limited to only the necessities to save on costs.  Scalable infrastructure might cost a bit more, but it’s necessary for your future. You need scalability to ensure that IT is not your business growth bottleneck. As an example, you must deploy enough storage space to ensure that your applications can continue to run without issues. Running out of disk space can be devastating to business growth, especially if it’s not monitored. Network monitoring is one way to ensure that you stay scalable as well. It will let your administrators know when it’s time for an upgrade. Deployment and Migration After you audit and budget your costs, you then build a deployment and migration plan. This plan should be step by step instructions on deploying new infrastructure and connecting it to the current environment. Usually, the time is set up based on your office hours and low-volume customer activity. You likely want your current data migrated to your new environment, so a migration plan is also necessary. Whether it’s migration to new onsite infrastructure or to the cloud, you need a plan before it happens. The migration plan will protect from data loss and corruption and eliminate potential bugs from the environment after new infrastructure is deployed. Testing and Bug Fixes After migration, you need a plan for testing and bug fixes. A professional will always have a test plan for you to avoid any long-term revenue consequences. Testing is performed across all new IT infrastructure and monitored for any unforeseen bugs. Stakeholders responsible for productivity might be included with testing to ensure that the new environment runs as expected. After testing, the professionals can monitor the environment for any issues including cybersecurity incidents. If you don’t have professionals to monitor your environment, you can work with a managed service provider to monitor it for you. If you need help building an IT roadmap or monitoring your environment, contact us to see what we can do for

Medical institutions deal with life-threatening issues, so it’s imperative that their IT systems suffer no downtime, cybersecurity events, or hardware malfunctions. IoT is also common in healthcare. The machines that diagnose and treat patients need internet connectivity for many of their operations. IT support and maintenance are priority for hospitals, so their IT costs are high compared to businesses that can absorb issues without human casualties. Even though IT costs shouldn’t be the main priority, it doesn’t mean that you can’t manage them without affecting the resiliency of your digital infrastructure. According to the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), medical businesses can expect to spend 2-3% of their revenue on technology and IT expenses. Many of the resources you’ll need to support your IT infrastructure is cybersecurity. For example, you need monitoring, disaster recovery, VPN, and staff training to stay HIPAA compliant. For medical practices, you might need a rundown on where IT costs should be prioritized. We put together a small list of critical infrastructure medical practices need to stay scalable while protecting patient data.  Virtual Private Network (VPN) for Remote Access After COVID, many businesses adopted the practice of remote work. Of course, a medical business also has local staff always on-premises, but you might have contractors, customer service, and emergency medical personnel available remotely. These staff members need a way to remotely access patient data and business applications. To safely remote into any system containing medical data, you need a VPN. A VPN encrypts all data traveling from a user’s device to the internal network, and then from the internal network back to the user’s device. This functionality is especially important when a remote worker connects to the local environment from public Wi-Fi. For instance, a doctor might be at a conference in a hotel but remote into the business office. Public Wi-Fi is a perfect attack environment for eavesdroppers. With VPN, the doctor’s device communication would be safe from eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks.  VPN is also a requirement for HIPAA compliance. Any IT people remoting into the network from their homes or remote connections to data center servers must be protected from eavesdropping. A VPN protects the server environment from outside attackers. Any connection from a remote device to the internal network should be encrypted using VPN. Disaster Recovery and Backups Patient data is a vital component of a successful medical business, so disaster recovery is critical for your business continuity. Imagine if you lost patient data and had no way to recover it. Lost data could be life-threatening, so you need a way to restore it from backups. Backups are just one part of disaster recovery, but they are also important in HIPAA compliance. A disaster recovery plan details the steps, procedures, and recovery options during a critical outage. For example, if your network suffers from a ransomware attack, disaster recovery goes into effect. You might need to switch to pen-and-paper registration and patient management, but you will eventually recover your data. Using the ransomware attack example, a disaster recovery plan identifies stakeholders and alerts them during downtime. Professionals detect, contain, and eradicate the threat from your environment, and then they collect evidence for local law enforcement. Disaster recovery professionals might be an extra cost unless you have a managed service provider managing your IT infrastructure. Backups provide a solution for data recovery. It’s usually the last step in disaster recovery after a threat is eradicated from the environment. Backups must happen frequently, and they must be stored in a safe location away from threats. Usually, businesses keep backups in the cloud to keep them out of the read of ransomware and other threats. For example, ransomware will specifically target backups to leverage data theft over the targeted business. Without valid backups, businesses are forced to pay the ransom. Network Monitoring You need to know when a compromise happens to contain a threat immediately. Constant monitoring is necessary for HIPAA and the safety of your patients. Intrusion detection and prevention require specific infrastructure, so you might need help with the setup from professionals experienced with deployment and configuration. One wrong configuration could mean a compromise of your data, so it must be done right. As an example, suppose that a ransomware threat is introduced to your environment from a phishing email. A user downloads a script from the email that then installs the ransomware on the network. Intrusion detection and prevention immediately contains the threat to limit its damage to your environment.  Immediate containment gives your incident response team the ability to perform forensics and understand where cybersecurity infrastructure failed. It could have been a failure from lack of education, or your email filtering software returned a false negative. Containment is key to investigation without harming the medical business environment. Where to Get Help with IT Costs IT infrastructure has its own costs, but managing it is much more costly. You need help for your medical practice, and a managed service provider is a good first step. Professionals at a managed service provider lower costs of having onsite staff, and they can deploy the right infrastructure to protect your environment. Whether it’s cybersecurity infrastructure or expanding the network to support additional patients, a managed service provider ensures that your buildout is configured right. If you need to set up your medical practice infrastructure, contact us to see how Corporate Technologies can help. FAQs

Churches are notorious for having weekly events, and Wi-Fi is necessary for any digital interaction at these large gatherings. Whether it’s for broadcasting live events or providing connectivity for attendees, Wi-Fi is an easy way to connect to the internet. With its convenience, Wi-Fi comes with its own list of vulnerabilities, so it should also be secured. If you are planning a church event in the near future, here are some design and security tips for Wi-Fi installations. Use a Firewall to Separate Business Traffic from Attendee Traffic A firewall controls traffic that flows in and out of your Wi-Fi network. For example, if you have a connection to the internet for church staff, you have a firewall that protects your internal business network from anyone on the public internet. Church staff can access the internet via outgoing traffic, but incoming traffic is blocked.  The same design should be done for an event Wi-Fi network, especially if you also offer free Wi-Fi to event goers. The two networks should be separated using a firewall. Public Wi-Fi access from attendees should be on one network, and then the internal network used for the event should be another network. Allowing public and business traffic to intermingle opens the church to data eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. Most Wi-Fi routers allow you to segment networks, but it might be convenient to add two Wi-Fi routers, one with a password for the event and a second one for public access. This strategy keeps both networks separate without having much knowledge into properly configure a firewall. Both Wi-Fi routers connect to the outgoing ISP router, so make sure your ISP account has enough bandwidth to handle both traffic sources. Install Antennas and Repeaters In large events, you might need antennas or repeaters to amplify Wi-Fi signals. A Wi-Fi router receives signals when a device is in close proximity to the router, and you might have a Wi-Fi router behind walls or away from the central ISP connection. Every wall cuts your Wi-Fi signal in half, so you need repeaters or amplification of a signal especially in large gatherings where Wi-Fi connectors might be spaced apart. An antenna allows users to be further away from the Wi-Fi router and still receive a decent signal. Antennas are also useful when you have event equipment that needs to access the internet at further distances. For example, when you have an event for a large group of people, you often have attendees several feet away from Wi-Fi equipment. Antennas and repeaters placed in strategic places will ensure that everything and everyone, including event equipment have access to a strong signal to the internet. Configure Strong Passwords for Wi-Fi Access If you keep public Wi-Fi networks separated from business networks, you can leave the public Wi-Fi passwordless or configure a password and publish it during the event. Remember that no password Wi-Fi leaves it open to anyone within range, so most businesses add a simple password. Only attendees inside the event can get access to the password. This strategy reduces any unwanted connections from people leaching free Wi-Fi during your event. For business Wi-Fi, a strong WPA3 password should be configured. Give this password to event coordinators, employees, and other church staff. For an event, you might use a different Wi-Fi hotspot specific to the event to avoid data breaches or issues from short-term contractors. This caveat might depend on the location of the event. If your event is at the church, you might need additional security for third-party contractors helping with the event. Be aware that older equipment might be incompatible with the latest WPA3 security. If your equipment was made within the last 10 years, you should be safe. For example, iPhones older than version 7 are not compatible with WPA3. Most people have newer iPhones, but it’s possible that someone still sticks with older technology. Just be aware of this limitation in case anyone tells you that they cannot connect to the WPA3-enabled Wi-Fi router. Set Up Filters and Monitoring for Public Wi-Fi If anyone uses your public Wi-Fi for illegal activity, your church is on the hook. The outgoing internet router IP address is tied to every user on your network. To avoid being used for illegal activity, use filters to block websites. Filters have out-of-the-box solutions for blocking known phishing and malware domains and any domain hosting illegal content. Web filtering solutions have a list of domains that you can blacklist, but you can also blacklist based on topic or industry. You might not want public users taking bandwidth for streaming, so you can block these domains during your events. Most filtering solutions come with logging options, so you can see if any users are using the church network for inappropriate reasons. Blocking domains also benefits the safety of users. They might not know a domain is flagged as a phishing portal, so web content filters support the data safety and privacy of guests and church staff. Monitoring guest network traffic also stops attacks before they can interfere with the event. Attackers might use the event public Wi-Fi to download malware, engage in attacks on other servers, or attempt to interrupt operations. Filtering and monitoring help stop these activities. Help with IT and Monitoring If you don’t have a dedicated IT team to support a church event, it might be time to ask for help from professionals experienced in network design and security. Corporate Technologies is a dedicated managed service provider with professionals and pricing plans to support church events where technology is a primary part of operations. Our staff can help design the right solution, set up the technology to help the event run smoothly, and offer support in case of technical issues. Event network design and security done right the first time will ensure that your church gatherings are successful with no technical issues to interfere with activities. To find out how Corporate Technologies can help your church, contact us today. FAQs