Top 5 Best Practices for Small Business IT Support

Businesses, big and small, need tech support. No exceptions.

Without an in-house expert or a dedicated IT support service focusing on a small business’s technology needs, it will soon struggle to keep afloat or just fail to stay competitive in the target market due to increased operational costs, delays etc.

Whether you intend to hire a small team of your own or hire outsource IT support tasks, keep in mind the following pointers:

• Short term solutions like an in-house employee with some tech know-how looking after the health of IT systems don’t always work. A small business must establish IT support as a well perceived need within the organization and list out the tasks that need to be taken up on a routine or emergency basis.
  
• Installing new software or fixing an obnoxious computer bug isn’t everything that a tech support professional can do. Those are just basic tasks. Any small business entity trying to grow and scale should get on board a managed IT support service provider or team of professionals with relevant certifications and hands-on experience.
  
• Customer support of any kind is best delivered by people who can empathize with those who are at the receiving end. Make sure to always choose IT support companies or professionals who can offer the much needed human touch.
  
•  IT support should always be proactive. If tech support guys are visiting your office every week or keeping some employees busy on a daily basis, while trying to fix an ongoing problem, what’s the point of getting managed IT services?
  
• Prepare a monthly, quarterly and half-yearly review plan for IT support whether you've an in-house IT department or have hired another company for the job. The tech support team must be accountable and it is up to you to ensure that the investment actually pays off. 

5 Ways to Protect Your Data on Your Mobile Device

Using phones for shopping and surfing socials sites are making them vulnerable to attacks. We trust our phones more than our best buddies on some occasions, so it’s high time we took some steps to protect them.

The first thing that we all must pledge is to not to go to the aftermarket next time we need APPs. Protection will not cost money at all, but getting out of a mess can be a torrid affair.

Follow these steps and make your phone your friend for life:

1. Keep It Locked

Always feed a code in your phone and don’t share it will all. In case if it is stolen, you will buy time to save your data on the phone, while the swindler tries to break in.

2. It’s A Phone Not a Safety Vault

Just because it sleeps with you, doesn't mean it has to keep all your secrets. Limit confidential information on a phone. It should not be the default location for all sensitive information, especially not data that you cannot lose at any cost. Be smart - use a secure server or a hard drive for that.

3. Beware of an Espresso Attack

Before you plug into an open Wi-Fi in the coffee shop next time, first read about the risks. An unsecured network is a hacker’s playground. In an airport, in a multiplex there are people snooping for passwords and other data all the time. Always use a VPN and open mails in secure options only. But if you really want to out run them avoid important work in the public.

4. Be an Apps guru

Always download your favorite Apps from a trusted source like Google Play or App store only. You can be assured that once you get it from them, it comes with inbuilt safety features and will have guards against malicious attacks. The biggest mistake you can make is to download them form a third party source.

5. Have an Updated Antivirus in The Phone

People who come with the foresight of an antivirus program for the phone stand to benefit in the long run. Besides Apple users, who feel no need for it, other phone users stand to benefit by installing one today. An added layer of defense never hurts anybody.

6. Take a Trip on Remote Protection Apps

Besides taking a backup of your data, installing an anti theft APP can make you sleep peacefully at night. These APPs make it very difficult for any spamster to break into your phone. They also pin point the exact location of the phone and allow you to delete all information remotely.

Online Data Backup - Store All Your Files on the Web!

Gone are the days when people used tapes, DVDs and other such conventional methods to backup important business data. Smart companies now make use of online storage options and the reasons to do so are pretty obvious.

Taking Online Backups is Very Easy

Yes, taking online backups is easier than ever. You need not be an expert to do that.

If you know how to use Facebook, Google and other such websites, you can start using an online backup website in as little as one hour.

Sign up, fill in your personal details, choose your online backup plan and start uploading files with easy to use features including drag-and-drop. Getting started is easier than you think.

Plenty of Free Options Available
If you want to secure all of your business critical files on an online server, you can go for a premium online data backup package. However, if you just need some online storage to store pictures, songs, etc., you can make use of free services.

Many websites provide up to 10 GBs of free online storage.

You Can Automate Backups

If you wish to have all of your important files copied to a remote online server at routine intervals, you can use backup-sync or auto-scheduling features.

 

So the next time you copy a new file to a designated folder on your computer, its duplicate copy would be created automatically on an online backup server.

In case you need to create large backups (100 GBs of data, for example), you can just schedule the task. So when your employees are not in office and you can use all of the bandwidth for data transfer, backups can be created without affecting day to day business operations in any manner.

Access Data Backups from Anywhere, Anytime

Many businesses want to store their data online primarily because they want mobile access. They want their team members in field or employees working at different locations to be able to access data in a hassle-free and secure way.

Online data backup services provide exactly that.

When you backup data on an online data backup service website, it’s stored at a remote location. Multiple copies of data are stored on different servers and therefore, you can be assured of the fact that you will never lose your data in the event of a natural calamity, accident, theft or other such incident.

Choose Right IT Support for your Business in Singapore

It’s vital for business companies to deploy state-of-the-art technology for smoother operations. After all, they’re growing every second and hiring new talent with every passing day. Advanced IT solutions help employees to get comfortable with their company by having access to services such as real-time messaging and online work groups. But all this is possible only if you have the right IT partner with you.

Make sure that you trust your IT partner and your employees feel comfortable with the offered or deployed IT solutions. When choosing an IT support for your business in Singapore, you should consider following points:

1. Test Your Trust

Before finalizing your IT service contract, it’s necessary to gauge the trust level between you and your IT partner. Both parties must reach a certain level of understanding in order to avoid discrepancies that may arise in future. Remember talking to each other can largely prove beneficial in building a stronger trust in your relationship. To solidify this bond, the best way is to sign a written contract with every detail precisely mentioned.

2.  Explore Options

It’s important to look out for support skills that you want from an IT support service provider. You should conduct a background check on the company’s experience and the skill-sets, or domain expertise of the vendor. The skills of an IT service company must match with your requirements otherwise it can cause great trouble in future. A good service provider has facilities for professional training as well as technical forums for remote IT support. So, look for a partner who has valuable knowledge about IT system set-up and troubleshooting.

3. Cost-Efficiency Is Good

Some good IT service companies have a good track record, but they’re too expensive. Small businesses have limited budgets for deploying IT resources. So, choosing a cost-efficient IT service provider will help you to keep your expenses in check.

4. Work Culture

If you are new to Singapore, you may well need to communicate in English. There are many IT service companies who provide support services in English language. There are four official languages of Singapore such as English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil. If you are familiar with any one of these languages, there is no fear of communication lack. But, business entities from outside Asia may find trouble during communication unless they’re fluent in English.

5. Working Strategy

Did company management turn up on your calls? Does an engineer pro-actively check your IT records? What is the work-policy there? These are some of the questions, which need to be asked by a client and answered by an IT service professional. It would immensely help for the growth of both business entities.

Why You Should Go For a Remote IT Support

Modern day technology has enabled managed IT support services to assist customers using online software tools. These applications are quite similar to onsite visits by a technician and aid the consumers, 24x7. A series of state-of-the-art technology enables a direct intervention into the file system of the remote computer. The process of remote IT support is followed by an easy setup and offers numerous benefits such as file transfer, desktop sharing and process synchronization. By cutting down all the transportation expenses involved in onsite visits, a remote IT support service benefits both the service provider and client.

Given below are some pointers describing how the remote IT support is benefitting SME businesses in Singapore and elsewhere.

1. No Need of In-House IT Help desk

In the past, IT support services in Singapore were provided by visiting customer site to investigate the system malfunction. Nowadays there is no need for personal visits as bugs can be fixed online. This has eliminated the need to take away the device for fixing it later. Using teleconferences and video chats, the system can be made operational in the quickest possible way. Now there is no need for SMEs to hire IT teams as help is just a hand away.

2. Business Savings

Remote IT support not only lowers the costs, but also helps to save precious business time. Temporary glitches can be corrected and faulty systems can be restored by having a conversation over the phone or through live chat facilities.

3. Diagnostic Services

Cloud applications and remote IT support tools have made it easier to diagnose software as well as hardware faults in a few minutes. The softwares used to run diagnostic services at the client’s end using remote desktop service are capable of running various services such as keyboard test, memory test and scanning the hardware changes. This is all done remotely using existing network without requiring any manual assistance. More often than not, software errors are fixed remotely while hardware repairs may require onsite visits.

4. Get in Touch Anytime

The 24x7 support service of a managed IT Service provider helps clients to overcome any situation. The employees of an IT service company who specialize in the IT field are always ready to help your business, defying geographical barriers.

5. Virus Protection

IT service companies are capable of installing antivirus software on your desktop using the remote IT support feature. This helps to eliminate the possibility of data loss to any organization. It also prevents your systems from all range of malware threats that today are present in every aspect of the business.

Three Main Reasons Why We Should Adopt Cloud

From the discussions of saving pennies per hour, we’ve moved into how Cloud offers flexibility and agility to seasonal enterprises as well as large organizations. There is a growing realization among Cloud users for managing variable workloads with greater efficiency.

The obvious reason to go for Cloud adoption is not just that it is cheapest of all; what business owners seem to like the most is that they can pay-as-they-go and scale when they want!

Listed below are the key reasons why businesses around the globe are now planning to ride the Cloud wagon:

1. Ubiquity – More Power to the Customer

Accessibility from anywhere and 24x7 customer support makes it very easy for clients to store and process their data. Companies that have a distributed workforce can benefit immensely from cloud computing solutions.

Needless to mention the fact that they get the best of services at a fraction of cost they would be spending had there been no pay-as-you-go model for cloudservices.  

2. Lesser Investments Required

Cloud based applications run on a rental model where clients need not to pay licensing fees for the software, hardware or anything at all!

That means, you get the best of applications at a very reasonable price.

3. Scalable Architecture

This cost-efficient function provides flexibility in capacity deployed to successfully run a business. So, SaaS based subscription can prove largely beneficial to growing corporations and SMBs.

5 Reasons Why Your Backups Aren’t Secure Enough

When we talk about backups, people usually think of tapes, DVDs, hard disks and flash storage. Fair enough. All of these are quite useful for having a complete system backup at the end of day. A lot of people feel burned with their hectic schedule and find little or no time for taking routine backups in DVDs and hard disks.

An online backup with auto sync option is a good way to replace such old backup methods. There’re some exceptions too; some people rate offline backups as more secure alternative to online ones i.e. the Cloud storage.

Given below are 5 points which offer some of the great reasons why your cold backups are not secure anymore.

1. A Disaster Ruin Your Data

Performing a full backup may require multiple discs/disks once a recording session is finalized.

The basement area (probably) where you used to archive backups is always prone to natural calamities such as fire, flood etc. A single natural calamity can damage all of your data in seconds. Yes, they do not come around every now and then.

But, are you ready to take the chances?  

2. Data Inconsistency

Data can be replicated only when the update is complete. An erroneous or old copy of data can lead to data inconsistency, crashing the entire project.

3. Risk of Theft

Physical infrastructure on-site is prone to thefts. Unless your backups are completely disconnected from the network and stored in isolation, scammers can access your confidential data, corrupt it or just erase it.  

4. Device Failure

A hard drive or DVD crash means complete loss of data stored in it. And such failures are very common.

5. Malware Attack

Ineffective security solutions at your end may result in malware or other such attacks.