IT for Small Business

Overview

small business person 1 mod1 If you run a small business with fewer than 50 PCs, you face many unique IT challenges. The usual thing is that a small business can become much too reliant on self-employed consultants or very small IT service companies, who just don't possess the wide-ranging skill sets that are necessary to be able to react quickly and effectively to an IT crisis or emergency. And if you're using a mass merchant or mass market service company, you know you're in trouble when they call themselves the "Repair Geek” or “Tech Monkies”.

You don't need geeks or monkeys for that matter.

But what you do need is a highly professional organization with a solid reputation and diverse group of individuals who have both the experience and training to deal with rough problems when they occur.

Decision Consultants was founded in 1994, and since then, we have focused our efforts on providing the type of IT services that large organizations enjoy, but small and mid-sized firms usually can’t afford. To accomplish this, we developed a distinctive system that combines tight overhead control, remote access and virtualization technology, sophisticated troubleshooting and repair systems and a group of engineers with both the education background plus extensive real world, hands-on experience. In addition, our Help Desk system gives us the tools we need to respond to a client’s problems quickly and it guarantees follow through, as well as, on-site service when necessary. When you work with Decision Consultants, you’ll be partnering with an organization whose center of attention is resolving your problem in the minimum amount of time and for the lowest possible cost. So when a problem does occur, you don’t have the time to wait for the next “geek” to be available. You’ll get a professional and immediate response and a return to productivity in the minimum amount of time.

The Cost of Downtime

Think about it. If you’re organization that has just 25 people, how much does unplanned downtime cost you each year? Assuming an average hourly charge rate of $26.37 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics - 2011), and an unplanned downtime percentage of 3% per year (the amount of downtime the average unmanaged network experiences); unplanned downtime has a cost of nearly $40,000 per year.


Hourly Rate			$26.37
# Of Employees			25
Hours per year			25 x 2000
Total hours per year			50,000
3% of Total hours			1,500
Total Cost of Unplanned Downtime			$39,555

And that doesn’t include other costs such as additional overtime or temporary worker pay, loss of business revenue, loss of customer goodwill and other negative impacts on your core business activities. Clearly, not having competent IT help can be is costly.

Service Options for Decision Consultants' Small Business Clients

At Decision Consultants we offer a wide range of support services for smaller organizations that provide cost effective IT service including remote monitoring, remote management, consulting and hosting. Our support system is based on the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) service delivery best practices for Help Desk support. Our system is designed to make sure that our clients get consistent service, quick response times, thorough documentation, a single-point-of-contact and tight cost control. The bottom line? Better service for lower cost.

Decision Consultants’ Remote IT Support Services include: Troubleshooting, Help Desk, Training, Security Assessments, Disaster Recovery Consulting and Implementations, Software Customizations, and Software Development and Network Consulting
Decision Consultants’ On-Site IT Support Services include: Installation, configuration, troubleshooting and testing; temporary staff extension, data center relocations, security testing, penetration testing and part-time CIO functions
Decision Consultants’ Hosting Services include: Server hosting and virtual data center hosting
Decision Consultants’ Managed Services include: Remote network monitoring, remote backup and restoration, remote network management

What you can do if you partner with Decision Consultants

Don’t depend on self-employed consultants. Because self-employed consultants have less overhead than a comprehensive IT service firm, they may be able to afford to charge a lower hourly rate for their services. But is that lower hourly rate, good value?

Too often self-employed consultants are stretched too thin to do an effective job for any one of their clients, let alone all of them. And if they happen to be busy with another project, are sick or are in training, you can end up waiting for assistance. And if the help that is needed is because of an emergency, the results can be very costly. Remember the cost of unplanned downtime calculation? A slightly lower hourly rate won’t offset the risk you run by having a self-employed consultant or freelancer taking care of your network.

All small businesses want to grow. And when you do network problems and resolving issues with your business critical applications gets more costly. As you get bigger, you’ll have more people accessing the network. When the network goes down, your costs go up. And as your network grows the problems can get more complex to the point where a “one man show” will come up against limited experience. The independent consultant will inevitably lack experience and won’t have a diverse team of engineers as backup. Worse yet, you’ll be paying the bill while they try to learn what they should already know. And any money you thought you were saving will evaporate because of the impact of lost productivity.

Get Access to Leading Edge IT Solutions. A large number of small businesses use self-employed consultants who specialize in providing only a very limited set of IT solutions. This is because they do not have the experience and resources that are needed to support multiple operating system platforms and numerous high technology vendors. Decision Consultants’ experience with enterprise organizations can be applied to help your small business become or remain successful. Enterprise environments are, by definition, more complex. Integration issues that arise with enterprise organizations require high degrees of in-depth experience and industry knowledge. Decision Consultants’ experience at delivering highly scalable, highly reliable and highly secure solutions can be applied to help your business.

Develop a Solid IT Infrastructure. Many small businesses have IT systems that were put together with a limited amount of money. As the business grows, these initial compromises can lead to problems that impede growth, create stability issues and otherwise hinder overall operational success. The first step in dealing with this problem is to conduct an accurate network assessment that identifies all of the risks that are present, as well as, a list of mitigation steps that are necessary to resolve the risks. This process creates a factual and solid basis for planning IT projects that are designed to address specific business needs. In short, a solution that exactly meets your needs.

Partner with a Solution Provider Instead of a Computer Reseller. Small businesses need to partner with organizations like Decision Consultants that can help them integrate computer systems into a cohesive information technology strategy. The decisions are perplexing. But Decision Consultants provides value to its clients by helping them steer their way through the competing voices in the marketplace. We have the tools and experience to plot a clear course to sound business decisions and by taking a “vendor neutral” approach our clients always know that we are aligning our technical experience and recommendations with a solution that is in their best interests.

Flexibility in Selecting Your Service Provider. One of the biggest problems that small businesses face when working with independent consultants is the fact that they seldom document any of the work. When they don’t document their work, they make it difficult and time consuming to transfer IT support services to a new vendor. At Decision Consultants, we always fully and completely document each client’s network infrastructure. This documentation is always available to our clients and makes it much easier if they decide to start supporting their system internally or if they want to hire another IT service organization.

Other Important Benefits of Working with Decision Consultants

Decision Consultants is a Microsoft Gold Business Partner with a Microsoft Small Business Specialist competency. And as such, we demonstrated to Microsoft our expertise in developing and supporting solutions for small business. We have experts on staff who have met Microsoft’s high standards of technical proficiency. The certification process isn’t easy. It includes a rigorous series of exams that validate the technical skills needed to successfully build, implement and support solutions designed specifically for the needs of small business.

Decision Consultants is also a Cisco certified business partner, which means that we have a similar group of engineering and technical experts that provide best practice support for Cisco’s line of networking technologies including the Cisco ASA firewall appliances, Catalyst switches, routers, VPN solutions, Aironet wireless access points and Cisco’s Voice over IP solutions. These specialists are also highly qualified in providing security solutions and they are recognized experts in this field.

Small Business Network Support Packages

Because of our work with many hundreds of small businesses, Decision Consultants has been able to develop a suite of outsourced IT support packages that are designed to specifically meet the needs of small business. These packages represent a cost effective way for a small business to make sure that their networks are being properly managed, so as to guarantee maximum uptime, high performance and rock solid security.

Decision Consultants’ support packages leverage the capabilities of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, which is a leading edge application that not only monitors the performance of your networking infrastructure (it scans the activity logs and detects problems before they become critical and disturb your productivity), but also automates all of the daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly maintenance tasks that are necessary to a sound running system.

Contact Decision Consultants for Help with Your Small Business Network

If you are looking for technical help for your small business network, call (855) 507-6747 or send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it