Displaying items by tag: IT Support for Small Business

Thursday, 01 December 2011 07:50

Top 10 Criteria for Selecting an IT Consulting Company in Los Angeles

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.

1. Years In Business - This seems like a non-merit based criteria. However, this speaks a lot to the staying power of a company. In computer network support industries, companies that do not deliver a consistent service with stable response times and problem solving capabilities do not stay in business as a company for longer than 2 to 3 years. This is a big issue in large metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles where there is an overabundance of IT techs who claim to be good. It is important to be able to deffirentiate between claims and the facts.

2. Staff Selection Criteria - If your potential IT provider tells you that they rely solely on years of experience and/or certifications for selecting their staff, then this is an indication of potential future problems. We have interviewed hundreds of candidates over the years and have a good understanding of what works. Strong analytical skills are a prerequisite in this industry, much more so than certifications or decades of experience.

3. Staff Contracting - If the staff that the IT services company uses are not dedicated full time employees, than that indicates that the organization does not dedicate resources to staff training, development, and is also a potential security risk.

4. Operations Department (Helpdesk) Organization - It is critical that there is a very high degree of internal organization within the IT support company because in this field of work the most important elements in delivering a quality service is full retention of all the voluminous information about systems and works being done and communications among the staff, management, and clients. This is a much more strenuous environment in this respect than many other service industries.

5. Large Customer Base Similar to Your Business Needs - Believe it or not, a provider with a large customer base is good indication. As long as that large customer base is similar in needs to your organization, this can serve as an indicator that this IT company is doing things right. This is also an indication that the provider will have much more depth and breadth of experience and be more creative with solutions to infrastructure related needs.

6. Comprehensive IT Offerings - IT companies that deliver a limited pool of services can not grow with or even meet the current needs of the client. You don’t want your IT support to be learning on you how to solve problems and how to implement a new system that your business needs. A company that has experience in supplemental IT offerings can support your business needs on any issue. General products to look out for are, Cloud Hosting, Managed Services Platform utilization, Anti-Virus integration, off-site and on-site back up synchronization, data replication services, Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) management, Voice over IP (VOIP) support and implementation, Server Management, and much more.

7. On-Site Service - If the provider is prepared for expedient on-site response, then you could be in for a lot of hurt. In large cities such as Los Angeles it is easy to find IT contractors. Many IT service companies can get someone out to you once in a while, but if they are not locally staffed with the trained in-house staff members, they can’t help you when your servers are on fire. They can’t help if this is a big picture issue and they send a local person who is not familiar with your environment.

8. Multi-Tier Support Staff - If the staff that supports your firm does not have multiple tiers of support than that is also an indication that they do not have the depth of knowledge and experience that is so good that they want to make tiers to keep them away from the everyday troubleshooting tickets. Truly talented and proficient staff is usually not on the first line of support and are available for serious problems to be escalated to them. You as customer definitely should want an IT Consulting firm that has that kind of expertise so that when you are in a deep technical hole, they will be able to solve it.

9. Multi-City Presence - Business network support firms that are able to replicate their success in multiple geographic markets and are successful for a number of years demonstrate even a higher level of management and organization sophistication. This is evidence that their abilities are superior and should strongly me looked at. However, there is a downside here. Some such companies have become bureaucratic in their systems and have grown beyond their abilities to be effective. This issue needs to be evaluated on a trial basis.

10. Proof of Work - The real test is to have a provider perform several small projects with multiple communication steps in each. This will give you a feeling of their technical abilities and even more importantly their information sharing and communication systems. Also, if they are not willing to do such a trial is a testimony to their knowledge of weaknesses in this area.

vSphere 5 Is VMware's Jump into Data Storage Virtualization

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.

WMware Reformulates the Data Storage Decision
It appears that IT Consulting providers everywhere will be rethinking their approach to data storage designs with the addition of a slew of new features in the vSphere 5. Now it is possible to share storage seamlessly across different servers as if it was a single drive. This means that the traditional Storage Array will be meeting the end of it’s life cycle to be replaced by a Private Cloud Concept enabling users to pool their data in virtual, easily transferable, and reliably replicated drives. This has significant bearing for IT support providers for small business because now they have a capability to deliver to their clients capacity and capability to run large applications at much lower costs of data storage and distribution.

Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (SDRS) is a feature that aggregates storage among different and distributed data volumes into a single pool. SDRS provides load balancing for data storage and traffic to ensure optimum space allocation and I/O bottleneck avoidance. Further features include Policy Based Management, Profile Driver Storage through a user defined policy, and auto deploy. This level of data pooling combined with customization of policy and control allow a new level of scalability for a fraction of the cost of comparable configurations prior to vSphere 5.

Just to understand the the capability of this product we can look at it’s maximum technical envelop, with includes the ability to generate up to:

32 Virtual CPUs
1 TB of Memory
1 Million I/O Operations Per Second in Network Throughput

This ability to support large applications through robust processing power allows for:

Simplification of IT Infrastructure
Reduced Costs of Equipment
Reduced Costs of IT Consulting
Capacity to Process More Data Faster
Increased Flexibility of Data Storage
Increased Redundancy and Backup of Data
Reduced Cost of Data Storage and Backup
Increase in Functional Use of Application Data

vSphere 5 features such as VAAI, VASA, SDRS, Storage vMotion enable it to be a comprehensive Cloud solution that includes not just the server environment, but the reason for the server’s existence, its data. Computer network support professionals are at the forefront of the deployment and maintenance of virtualization products and need to keep pace with the rapid expansion in data storage and redundancy that vSphere has created.

The New Trend
Now that this creation has been released, we foresee an acceleration of transition to virtual storage methodology, starting with large enterprises. vSphere 5’s data storage features are designed primarily for the large enterprise / data center environments. This technology will not stop there and will fairly quickly make its way toward the lower segments of IT services, into small business. It would be wise for the CIOs to direct their IT support for small business providers to analyze their data storage processes and prepare for the future.

Complete Services
VMware offers multiple complementary services that allow IT Consulting providers to deliver complete and comprehensive virtualization solutions that include not only cloud computing itself, but also data storage control, redundancy control, and security control. vShield App with data security, for example, brings protection from network based attacks for sensitive data. This control for IT support for small business providers control and flexibility that their customer will demand more and more now that the potential is there.

Backup Solutions

The TTIG managed backup solution is a safety net on steroids, providing daily motoring and confirmation of the integrity and safety of all data under management. Step into controlled environment of TTIG Disaster Recovery and Data Redundancy Planning.

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Security Solutions

In today's world of data vulnerability, we provide your organization with the best security practices, continuous risk assessments and even managed security monitoring when necessary. Our approach is comprehensive, our solutions increase security. Control Your Data!

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Managed IT Services