Business IT Support

Having an inside view of the IT Consulting industry in several cities, we wanted to share some of the pitfalls that business owners fall into when selecting and IT Consulting Company in Los Angeles market. Whenever we bring in new clients that are switching from another IT solutions company, we learn a little more about what typically goes wrong. Based on this experience we have put together a quick list that can help business owners steer clear of poor response time, lack of experience, poor knowledge, limited capabilities, lack of value added services, high pricing, poor organization, and more.

For some reason, the predominant way of hiring and paying an IT Support company seems to be an hourly rate, despite it making much more sense to hire a Flat Rate IT Support company. You simply get better service without any tricks when hiring a flat rate company, and hopefully by the end of this article you'll agree.

Firstly, it creates a strong incentive towards productivity, instead of stringing out problems to find themselves more work. It's only natural to turn a one-hour problem into a five-hour problem when it means you're being paid five times as much, but that leaves you, the company paying the IT Support company for their time, without results for five hours while paying significantly more than you should have to. There's no reason to pay more for less when the alternative is right in front of you. 

It also encourages a culture of doing it right. Having a managed services system will make your life easier, and holding your Flat Rate IT Support company to do a complete checklist of proactive work is dead simple. You know that they're going to be there, doing the work you hired them for as fast as possible, because to do otherwise risks being replaced by a company with better support. Instead of worrying about hourly wage, they're concerned with doing the best job possible. 

Perhaps most importantly, it means that your network's stability will be constantly monitored, and that ensures maximum stability. Instead of hiring your IT support for short bursts, you'll have hired a company that's working with you constantly, without any expectations of more pay for more work. They'll do the job they're hired to do, and get paid exactly what you told them you'd pay. It's that simple. It's no different than a salaried position at any job. Instead of promoting time-wasting and procrastination, you're paying them to be there, all the time, doing their job constantly. It just makes sense. 

Replacing your hourly-waged IT support with a flat rate IT support company could be the best thing ever to happen to your business. It replaces a culture of time-taking, part-time work with one of doing it right the first time, and making sure that problems are prevented instead of solved. All of this produces stability for both the client and the support company, and ensures that down times are minimal. Flat rates are simply the best option possible.

Health care facilities have a history of a mismatch of resources devoted to computer network support and their objective IT support needs, especially when HIPAA and HITECH compliance are taken into account. This approach by mostly small operators of nursing homes has led to a trend of fines and closings of facilities due to poor data security and lack of data security compliance.

Nursing and Health Care Facility’s IT Needs

How to Chose an IT Provider for a Nursing Home

It is critical for the IT consulting firm to have extensive industry experience that can be leveraged to efficiently maintaining the facility’s specific network and application needs. It is inefficient and risky to entrust IT operations to IT consulting firms that do not possess specific and extensive skills in the clinical support packages currently used by the industry, such as Quick Care, Keane Care, Accu Care, and Point Click Care.

It is even more risky to rely on IT support firms with no concrete understanding of how to maintain standards of data process and data security in compliance with HIPAA and HITECH regulations.

Organization and Supervision
Having appropriate experience is not enough to guarantee compliance and efficient operations of the computer network of nursing homes. The IT Support company is obligated to demonstrate a level of internal organization that can ensure that it can expediently and timely respond to all the needs of the a nursing home chain at the same time and in multiple locations. Also, all work performed must be supervised by the IT provider and quality control has to be performed before the work is finalized. Such operations require a high level of organization and strict adherence to company policies.
Industry Participation
It is very important for IT Consulting companies that provide IT support to the skilled nursing home facilities and chains to conduct continuous industry specific learning. That means that the provider needs to be involved in various professional health facilities and nursing home associations. Having a computer network provider that is a member of the industry associations is a big plus in analyzing which firm to select for the responsibility of maintaining and upgrading IT networks for convalescent homes.

 The challenge of selecting an IT Consulting company in Los Angeles is composed of multiple layers that must be understood prior to making a decision. It would appear at first glance that this formula would be the same in any region, however, practice proves otherwise.

Up until the release of the vSphere 5, WMware provided a platform for data centers and IT services providers a great virtualization tool in order to extract the best of redundancy, fail-over, and process functionality. The decision, however, on data storage was still up in the air as far how to best setup, locate, and backup, data storage and it’s redundancy features. For businesses that have their computer network support outsourced, this is offers a greater level of control via that provider.

It is the first time in history that a virus has been turned into a military missile. It infected over 100,000 computers worldwide and yet caused damage to only computers inside Iranian Nuclear facilities in Natanz and Bushehr. Better than a bomb, it was sabotaging the Iranian nuclear program for more a year and half without notice, nor explanation for the stalled progress. In fact, Stuxnet virus is still causing damage to that program as evidenced by a total halt in operations for a week during a month of November 2010.

Why should we, private citizens and businesses, care if a suspected conglomerate of intelligence agencies from the West got together to build the most complicated virus ever created with 15,000 lines of code that estimated by experts to have taken 10,000 man hours to build? Why should IT firms be concerned with the exploits of a unique weapon that can’t be adapted to anything other than the Iranian nuclear equipment?
What this virus has done is the equivalent of a tactical conventional strike on the Iranian nuclear program, less the human loss of life, less the open war, less the disruption of oil supplies, and plus the open ended situation to which Iranian experts still have not foreseeable solution. Most new weapons are created by states and subsequently become adapted for use among the general industry and population. The genie has been let out of the bottle and now it is up us to plan and foresee the future of our operations, our infrastructure, and our data. While Stuxnet itself is not coming to the computer near you, and even if it does you will not know it nor will it ever do any damage, this is the just opening salvo among nations, private enterprise, and hackers. Future attacks will not be aimed just at slowing your network Down, nor just at stealing data. The concept of targeting equipment, while masking its misuse has been validated and is the most dangerous threat to date because the breach is continuous and not detectable.

BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLANNING
It is not just for public corporations. Businesses of all types have to plan for various kinds of business interruption events that could cause a disaster. Business interruption can be caused by fires, earthquakes, sabotage, regular viruses, and planned intrusion attacks, among others. Setting up on-site and off -site backups is not all that companies need to do. To weather the storm, businesses need to create a comprehensive plan to continue functioning, regardless of the interruption. Some things to consider are alternative office space, PCs, desks, chairs, transition process, data migration, PC and server imaging image retention.

Having backups in today’s competitive and technology dependent environment, where many documents are never converted into hard copy form, is not only a prerequisite to a minimal business continuity, it is flat out insufficient. A prudent IT Manager usually considers such as the frequency of backups to ensure that any data loss would not cause a serious loss of data. Also, a not to be overlooked is the issue of a period of retention of backups. Many online/offsite backup solutions offer extended backup periods. This is highly important because we see it all the time; some subset of data was corrupted, erased, or sabotaged only to be discovered after the backups have been erased. Speaking of subbotage, disgrunteled or incompetent employees erasing data is an enormous risk and a vulnerability because they know best the weaknesses of the system. Companies with poor internal IT controls  usually have very little ability to mitigate this risk and even less recourse after the fact. Therefore, it is critical for IT Managers to setup and enforce very detailed access levels, password security, and logging of activity.

A critical aspect of today’s operating environment is business owners’ recognition that maintaining control, security, and integrity of their business technology infrastructure is not a hopeless task. Business continuity planning and IT process optimization could be a source of a competitive advantage, when approached with serious understanding of the potential benefits that they can bring to any organization’s effectiveness. The converse of that approach is the increased exposure to either intentional or happenstance subversion of the organization’s process, as the Iranians have so unwillingly demonstrated to us