Columbus companies are preparing for the future and these are the top managed service priorities they’re concerned about.
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Your recipe for success needs to include the kind of IT security solutions that only the right MSP can provide your Columbus business.
Managed IT services and managed service providers offer something for Columbus organizations that money can’t buy: peace of mind. Whether you’re an international, multi-office corporation or one of our many Columbus small-business owners or anything in-between, a managed services partner can save your organization time, money, and risk.
What Is Managed IT?
Keeping your IT infrastructure operational requires constant monitoring by highly skilled engineers who are available 24/7, an undertaking that can be overwhelming to manage, especially with IT talent in scarce supply. Managed or outsourced IT services are the perfect solution for companies seeking an alternative to hiring their own teams, as well as the perfect way to supplement in-house IT.
Managed Services Provides Peace of Mind
It’s tough enough to run a business right now, but having to make sure that every patch is applied, that security is up to date, and that you are able to manage your data compliance requirements, as well as a variety of other IT tasks, becomes a whole separate job. To ensure that are able to remain as competitive as possible, it helps to have a team of experts on your side.
Benefits of Managed IT Services
There are a number of benefits to managed IT. When you outsource your IT, you partner with a team of experts focused on developing an IT strategy that aligns with your organizational goals, with an emphasis on IT infrastructure, IT security, compliance, and more. Here at thinkCSC, we are an integral part of the Columbus and Worthington communities – our people live and work here. They shop at your businesses and benefit from your services. They are committed to making sure your organizations run efficiently and safely – helping you stay one step ahead of hackers and threats, and your competition, too.
Why Choose Managed Services?
In addition to the peace of mind that having an MSP partner offers, there are a number of benefits to your Ohio business when you invest in managed IT services.
- A Team of Experts at a Fraction of the Price
Your organization gains access to top IT talent – talent it would cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars to attract, retain, and compensate. As tight as the market is for attaining the best IT experts, having access to the top-notch IT technicians and strategists who are employed by thinkCSC’s network operations center means that your company is in great hands. Having someone who knows your business – someone that you can turn to when you’re hiring, supporting a remote workforce, rolling out a new offering, or expanding your business – provides you with a competitive advantage.
- Predictability and Planning
Maintaining your own servers is expensive. It’s not just about keeping up with the cost of equipment and repairs. There is the added cost of storing them, keeping them cool, and securing them. You can transform your capital IT costs into a predictable monthly expense – no different than a utility cost – giving you the freedom to plan other investments to stabilize and grow your business.
- Risk Management
Having an MSP partner is like having an added layer of security. Here in Columbus, we’ve seen what can happen to a company that doesn’t know where their data is stored or how to keep it secure. But outsourcing your IT to a local managed IT firm can put you in control and help you develop a strategy for achieving compliance and avoiding risk.
What Is Included in Managed IT Services?
- Cybersecurity: Coping with cyber threats has become a normal part of doing business, but these risks can – and should – be addressed and abated. thinkCSC does more than just provide technology and facilitate server upgrades; we are an integral layer of your cybersecurity, providing the expertise you need to remain competitive, secure, and operational.
- Cybersecurity End-User Training: Continuous end-user training ensures that every employee in your company is knowledgeable and prepared for the threats they may face.
- Compliance: We offer a comprehensive suite of security services to help you combat hackers and meet regulatory compliance standards. Our technicians have expert knowledge in finding and fixing security problems, as well as assisting companies to meet PCI, SOX, GLBA, HIPAA, and other regulatory requirements.
- Network and Server Support: Our engineers make sure your network equipment, systems, and applications are properly provisioned, secured, and optimized for maximum performance and reliability, including on-site support when needed. We ensure that drivers and software are appropriately updated and that systems are meticulously maintained.
- Help Desk Support: When you face an IT issue, you need it fixed fast. When you partner with thinkCSC, we are always just a phone call away.
- Vendor Lifecycle Management: thinkCSC manages your vendors and acts as your single point of contact for any and all of your technological needs.
- Virtual CIO (vCIO): Working closely with your team, we’ll learn your business processes inside and out, and continuously work to find ways to improve them. Even better, we do all of this at a much lower rate than it would cost you to hire a dedicated in-house resource.
thinkCSC has more than 20 years of experience helping clients exceed their goals with managed IT in Columbus. We understand that business and technology are intertwined as such that you can’t be strategic about one without considering the other. We offer customized Managed IT services that you need to achieve your objectives; increase efficiency, productivity, and agility; cut down on IT costs; and ensure you have a competitive edge. Whether you want to outsource most or all of your infrastructure management, or if you simply want to optimize the systems already in place, thinkCSC provides personalized IT expertise that saves money and provides the manpower that ensures your infrastructure is always an asset – never a liability.
We would be happy to talk to you about how we can help you harness the power of our Managed IT services in Columbus to maximize your reach, impact, and bottom line. Contact us today for more information.
As the threat and compliance landscape becomes more complex and technology changes rapuidly, enterprises need MSPs more than ever.
If you’ve ever owned a classic 60s or 70s automobile (or if you’re old enough to remember them), you’ll remember how much easier it used to be to change the oil, replace the spark plugs, and complete other basic maintenance yourself. Now some car manufacturers make it complicated to open the hood, let alone handle any of the maintenance on your own. As cars become more computerized and complex, we rely more heavily on trained, certified mechanics to provide even the most routine maintenance. Your IT infrastructure has likely become just as complicated, requiring the same level of expertise to keep it running efficiently and safely. Sure, you can do it yourself. But at what risk – and at what cost?
In-House IT Is Costly
Would you always keep a mechanic on standby just in case your car broke down? That’s an expensive proposition, but it would ensure that you were never without a ride. You could do the same for your IT – hire a CIO and staff an IT department – but when you consider the cost of one or more full-time IT employees (and the difficulty in retaining tech employees in a tight talent market), you can see the cost benefit of outsourcing your IT needs to a managed service provider (MSP) that can keep you up and running for a fraction of the cost.
Outsourced IT Reduces Risk
The unemployment rate for IT professionals in the Columbus area is zero. Even if you want to have your own IT staff, finding talent – and keeping it – is costly and time-consuming. What happens when you’re relying on your own IT staff and someone quits, or when you can’t keep the position filled? Your security and infrastructure suffer. When you work with an outsourced IT firm, they assume the risk of keeping an experienced team of experts available, and they assume the financial and operational risk of having the 24/7 staffing you need to keep your business safe.
Outsourced IT Makes Planning Easier
In addition to reducing labor costs, outsourced IT allows you to control operational costs more effectively, converting variable costs into a fixed, predictable monthly cost you can plan your business around. By outsourcing IT to an experienced managed services provider, you secure access to a pool of experts who will partner with you to assess your operational needs and align your IT infrastructure and security to meet those needs, help you grow, and keep you profitable.
Proactive Response
When you outsource your IT to a company that is focused only on IT infrastructure, IT security, managed IT services, and the technology that makes businesses run efficiently and safely, you obtain access to experts who can help you stay one step ahead, not only of hackers and threats, but of your competition, too.
Competitive Advantage
Partnering with an outsourced IT company is like having an entire IT department at your disposal, with a variety of professionals and decision-makers that would be extremely costly to keep on staff. This extended reach levels the playing field for smaller businesses who could not easily afford to hire their own IT staff and provides a distinct competitive advantage.
Peace of Mind
It can be hard to quantify the value of peace of mind, but when you’re running a business – or are in charge of a nonprofit, a government agency, or a school – the last thing you want to have to worry about is whether or not your organization is compliant, protected, patched, licensed, updated, monitored, backed up, and secure. You can rest easy knowing your outsourced IT partner has it covered.
thinkCSC has more than 20 years of experience helping clients exceed their goals. We understand that business and technology are so intertwined that you can’t be strategic about one without the other. We offer customized and bundled outsourced IT services you need to achieve your objectives; increase efficiency, productivity, and agility; cut down on IT costs; and ensure you have a competitive edge. Whether you want to outsource most or all of your infrastructure management, or if you simply want to optimize the systems already in place, thinkCSC provides personalized IT expertise that saves money and provides the manpower that ensures your infrastructure is always an asset – never a liability.
We would be happy to talk to you about how we can help you harness the power of our IT services in Columbus to maximize your reach, impact, and bottom line. Contact our business development manager today for more information.
Even people who are not sports fanatics can understand that a single player does not make an entire winning team. A single star player, regardless of skill and ability, cannot bridge the gap that is created by those players whose performance is inconsistent. A winning season occurs when all players work together, recognizing and utilizing the strengths of each participant. Cybersecurity is no different.
There are a lot of factors that go into making a successful business, but the number-one factor is having the ability to remain open and operational despite any disruptions. Keeping your business operational so that you can serve your customers – providing that business continuity – would be simple if not for the what-ifs. And it’s because of the what-ifs that the Boy Scout’s motto, Be Prepared, will serve you well.
- What if there is an earthquake, tornado, hurricane, or other natural disaster that either destroys your building or makes it impossible for you to work from that location?
- What if a fire consumes your building, or a flood or water leak makes it unusable for a time?
- What if a vandal breaks into your building and destroys your equipment?
- What if, despite your best efforts to prevent such a scenario, an employee opens an unknown email attachment and delivers a virus to your entire network?
Can You Navigate Potential Disruptions?
Your customers can’t afford to care about those catastrophes that may affect your business; if they can’t still be served, they are likely to find somewhere else to go. And being prepared doesn’t just mean readying your business for the big disasters; you may experience the minor inconvenience of a single-day power outage that occurs when a road worker accidentally cuts through a buried utility line. For your organization to succeed despite the “what-ifs,” you need to have a business continuity plan.
- If your building is destroyed or inaccessible, do you have a location from which you can work and handle customer needs?
- If your equipment is damaged or infected with a virus, do you have your information backed up offsite that you can access from anywhere?
- If your network goes down, can your employees continue working by accessing your offsite backup?
- If the phone lines go down, do you have a plan in place to still receive calls from customers?
Disaster Recovery: Rebuilding After a Crisis
Your business continuity plan is designed to keep you operational in the moments during and after an unplanned disruption has occurred. It may include protocols, such as everyone works from home, or key personnel meet at an alternate worksite to keep the business operational during a disruption. But that can only work if a part of your business continuity plan includes disaster recovery.
Disaster recovery is the rebuilding of your network, system, data, and infrastructure after the disruption is over – and it ensures that you have the data you need to remain operational in the short term. Disaster recovery planning should include:
- Automated backups of critical files to an offsite location
- Access to offsite information from any location
- The ability to work from virtual machines on an alternate server
- File- and image-based backups
- System monitoring
- A team of expert engineers at your disposal to help you recover when the worst happens
Be Prepared
Don’t wait for a catastrophic event to remind you of the importance of being able to continue serving your customers. Having a plan for remaining operational, that includes backing up your data and protecting your files, is critical to plan for before disruptions occur. By the time disaster strikes, it will be too late. Ask thinkCSC to help you develop a disaster recovery plan that keeps your business running in the most difficult situations. Contact us to learn how.
It’s inevitable that more and more operations are shifting to the cloud for data storage and network security. It’s efficient, cost-effective, and makes it much easier to employ a mobile workforce. But if you don’t know where your data is being stored or who owns it, your shift to the cloud can be fraught with risks.
Ensuring Cloud Security
The best way to ensure cloud security is to know where your data is and who has access to it. And in choosing a cloud service provider, the following factors should be considered:
- Access to your data. Your cloud service provider should have adequate network availability to ensure you have access to your data in the cloud regardless of when or how often you need it. While not truly a security issue, if you can’t access your data, it’s no different than a denial of service, a cyber-attack, or a data breach.
- Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR): Your cloud service provider should make backup and disaster recovery processes their highest priority. As a business leader, you need to have confidence in knowing that your business operations will continue even if there is a disaster – either at your location or at the location of your cloud services provider. Protecting your data is a full-time job.
- Complete transparency. The cloud services provider with whom you choose to work should become a partner in your business continuity, working diligently with you to ensure your IT goals are met and taking the time to understand your specific needs, security requirements, and constraints.
- Proactive security. Your cloud service provider should offer aggressive, proactive security by providing enterprise threat detection, which screens potential threats before they become a risk to your business by blocking malicious connections, blocking threats by malicious domains, and detecting and blocking threats from any compromised device.
thinkCSC has not only invested in owning its own cloud but has developed partnerships to enhance security and services that ensure our clients:
- Avoid revenue losses from downtime
- Enjoy the ability to predictably plan business development with an OPEX approach to IT
- Enjoy the peace of mind that comes with knowing their proprietary information remains private, secure, and in the U.S.
- Are compliant with regulatory, industry, and corporate requirements
Every business has data in the cloud. To ensure your cloud security, contact us today.
Unpredictable IT costs are both frustrating and difficult to manage. Your organization feels the economic impact of both employee downtime and out-of-budget IT spend. thinkCSC’s Managed Services offering minimizes the economic impact to your IT budget by guaranteeing a predictable monthly cost and uptime for your IT environment. A managed service provider (MSP) converts your organization’s IT spend from a capital expenditure to a predictable and manageable monthly operating expense, much like a utility.
Benefits of thinkCSC Managed Services
Not only do thinkCSC’s Managed Services make your monthly IT costs predictable, but it also transforms your IT support needs from reactive to proactive. Because MSP services are a predictable monthly cost, your IT provider does not get paid when your organization has IT issues (downtime). With an MSP, your IT provider has “skin in the game” and benefits economically when your organization’s IT is running smoothly.
MSP shifts the focus, for your IT partner, to preventive efforts. Curbing issues before they happen, minimizing and preventing downtime and ensuring that your infrastructure is operating at peak efficiency helps to guarantee maximum profitability for both your organization and your MSP partner.
Organizations who have managed IT services:
- Have a managed service program that is a true partnership where the desired outcome is “uptime,” which benefits both your organization and your IT provider.
- Convert IT costs from an unpredictable and variable capital expenditure (CapEx), which depreciates over time, to a predictable and fixed monthly operating expense (OpEx), which will free up cash for those investments that drive revenue and growth.
- Have a team of accessible IT professionals whose primary focus is preventative services to avoid downtime and expensive, reactive repairs
- Have a streamlined ability to shift to cost-effective cloud-based services without risk
- Have reduced risk through continual monitoring of your infrastructure, up-to-date patch management, ongoing support for required software upgrades
- Have better regulatory compliance through state-of-the-art security, IT best practices and software license control
- Have 24/7 access to support
If your organization is seeking a way to make IT costs more predictable while alleviating the strain on your internal IT resources, consider the benefits thinkCSC’s MSP offering. Contact thinkCSC for more information.
by Tom Hastings
When we think about economic development, the first thing that often comes to mind is the efforts made to create and the retain jobs and talent in a community. Measures to improve education and training, as well as government intervention to reduce property taxes and stimulate economic growth, are regularly employed as means to advance economic development. As important, however, is the advancement of the arts in communities, including Columbus, which has proven to be a prevailing factor in economic development. Overwhelming evidence suggests that communities who invest in the arts are promoting economic growth for their citizens.
The Greater Columbus Arts Council (GCAC) advocates for the advancement of the arts and culture in the Columbus, Ohio region. As the importance of sustained job growth becomes more apparent, so does the need for efforts to cultivate a flourishing arts community. The GCAC provides mounting evidence that the arts impact our community in a number of different ways, including the attraction and retention of talent and increased tourism and convention business. The impact to economic development is profound: the Columbus region realizes $226 million in economic activity and 8,500 jobs as a result of the arts.
Economic development can’t be measured merely in short-term dollars and cents. Genuine, sustained economic development is achieved over a period of time, and the arts are an important part of that effort. While local and federal government programs may stimulate development, organizations like the GCAC are what make the community attractive to the talent we’re trying to retain and attract that will help Columbus prosper. Our community will benefit the most – economically and culturally – from the ongoing sponsorship of the arts by local business leaders and individuals. thinkCSC is proud to support the efforts of the Greater Columbus Arts Council.
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