Micronet Solutions Blog

    Inquiring SMBs Want to Know... What's the Difference Between a Help Desk and NOC?   It's no secret that any growing small-to-medium sized business must monitor and manage its business technology in the most cost-efficient way. The tricky part is figuring out how to do this without sacrificing the overall experience of the end-user. End-users can be clients and customers or employees. Both rely on the efficiency of a firm's network, servers, and applications, and the availability of the company's data center.   Thanks to the evolution of managed services, it's actually possible these days to reduce costs, which strengthens IT support and infrastructure. It's just a matter optimally integrating all available resources.   It's a Staffing Conundrum for Most SMBs   Most SMBs tend to be short staffed. This isn't just another reference to the many SMBs with little to no onsite tech support. While that's true, and problematic, it's actually all opera...

    Understanding Managed Services and How They Benefit SMBs   Small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) receive a lot of calls each day from slick sales people peddling the next technology trend that's going to save them money and revolutionize how they do business. They're all too quick to caution that if you don't listen to them, you'll fall behind the times, and eventually be swimming in a sea of debt and out of business.   No doubt you've heard, or you've at least read about, the benefits of managed services. Managed services refer to clearly defined outsourced IT services delivered to you at predictable costs. You know the exact IT services you'll be getting and what you'll pay for them. There is no surprise sky-high bill for services rendered. So are solicitation calls that pertain to managed services worth listening to? We think so. Then again, we're in the managed services industry. There may be a bit of a bias here.   How Managed Service Prov...

    Are Managed IT Services Right For You? A Few Things to Consider   How do you get a small business to recognize the value of manages IT services? In the start-up environment, we encounter an eclectic bunch of personality types. There is a reason people become entrepreneurs or C-level execs. When we meet the owners or decision makers at smaller companies and organizations, we can tell right away why they're where they are. They're visionaries. They're risk takers. They're competitive. They want to be in charge.   Therefore, they aren't always quick to place the fate of their business technology in the hands of a third party. They've come as far as they have by being in control and they're hesitant to give up that control. But we've learned a few things along the way.   For example, the Type A personality is highly independent but also very competitive. So we tap into the competitive advantage that managed IT services gives them.   The Type B personalit...

    Breaking News: Downtime Kills Small Businesses   Downtime is bad news for any business whether big or small.   A recent two-hour New York Times' downtime occurrence sent Twitter ablaze and their stock price plummeting.   Google going down for one to five hours resulted in lost revenue up to $500,000 and decreased overall web traffic by 40%.   We know what you're thinking. Holy crap, Google makes $100,000 an hour? Yeah... insane, huh?   While the hourly cost of downtime for a small-to-medium sized business won't be nearly as large as that astronomical Google figure, downtime is often more detrimental to smaller companies. Smaller enterprises are more susceptible to downtime and are neither large nor profitable enough to sustain its short and long-term effects.   Downtime Leads to Unhappy/Unproductive Employees   Even the happiest of employees become dissatisfied when they can't perform basic day-to-day job functions or properly service customers or clients.   While s...

  Is That a Business Continuity Plan in Your Pocket or a Bunch of Jargon?   Technology is full of difficult jargon. To further complicate things, certain terms are often used in a different context between one publication or service provider and the next. An example of this is the usage of backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity. These terms are commonly used interchangeably, often resulting in confusion. In an effort to alleviate some of this confusion, let's describe each physical process. You will see an overlay among all three, although they are each different processes.   Backup –  In IT lingo, the most basic description of backup is the act of copying data, as in files or programs, from its original location to another. The purpose of this is to ensure that the original files or programs are retrievable in the event of any accidental deletion, hardware or software failure, or any other type of tampering, corruption and theft.   It's important to remember that t...