Tag: IT consulting service

IT service provider
IT Consulting, Managed IT Services

Technical Support vs Managed Services: Which One is Best for Your Business?

Written by Layer One Networks Published

You may not give it much thought, but the IT providers you choose to support your business can significantly affect your bottom line. You’re losing money if you’re experiencing downtime due to poor support. Even worse, if you’re being overcharged for services you don’t need, that’s money that could be put to better use elsewhere in your business.

So how do you know which type of IT services provider is right for your business? Let’s examine the differences between technical support and IT-managed services.

What is Technical Support?

Technical Support

Technical support is a service that provides help with technology-related problems or questions. This may include troubleshooting issues, providing information, or fixing hardware issues like replacing broken parts on computers or other devices.

Technical support is a reactive model and can fix problems after they’ve already caused damage to your company. Technical support is like the traditional firefighter role for computers. When something goes wrong with your system, you call tech support and they run in to put out the flames.

It is offered to help businesses on a case-by-case basis. For example, if a computer or device malfunctions or stops working, technical support will be provided to help fix the problem. If a virus infects an entire system or individual machine, technical IT support will be offered so that the infected computer can be cleaned up and restored to its original state.

What is Managed Support?

Managed Support

Managed services refer to a service delivery model in which the service provider takes on full responsibility for monitoring and maintaining the customer’s infrastructure. This includes applying patches, updating software, installing new versions, and more. In most cases, this also provides access to a help desk that handles simple requests and escalates issues to more complex levels as required.

Managed services is a method of outsourcing day-to-day IT management as a strategic method for improving operations and cutting expenses. Through an IT consulting service, businesses can access resources they wouldn’t normally have access to due to budgetary or skill limitations. The company’s employees will be able to focus their attention on running the business while their provider takes care of the IT needs.

Technical Support vs Managed Services: Which One to Choose?

Technical support and managed services are two of the most common types of IT support, but they’re very different. Choosing one over the other can have a major impact on your company’s future success.

Technical support is a reactive service that responds to issues as they arise. IT managed services, on the other hand, are proactive. It anticipates possible problems and takes measures to prevent them from arising.

But which is the best for your business? Let’s find out.

When Do You Need Technical Support?

Technical Support

Technical support is a more generic way of describing IT services. The term can be applied to almost any aspect of IT services – from software installation and application maintenance to general troubleshooting and ongoing system management (including installing patches, updates, etc.). It can also involve other elements such as providing strategic guidance for decision-making or helping train employees on how to use new tools.

  • When you need regular support: Your business needs regular technical support to keep your IT infrastructure running smoothly.
  • When you require a highly experienced team to solve issues quickly: There are times when you encounter a particularly hard IT issue for which you need experts to handle. This is when a technical IT support team can step in and solve it for you with minimal downtime.
  • When you handle tech that requires specific expertise, several technologies are pretty narrow and something that many IT technicians may not be exposed to. In such times, having access to a tech support team that’s expert in your tech is useful.

When Do You Need Managed Services?

On the other hand, managed services are usually provided by a third-party company that specializes in IT solutions for businesses. If a business has a problem, they simply call on the managed services provider (MSP) to fix it rather than trying to troubleshoot it themselves or calling a technical IT support specialist.

Since IT managed services are an ongoing partnership with your IT consulting firm, they can help you in numerous ways. Let’s look at some situations when you need managed services:

  • If your systems aren’t properly maintained: Your IT infrastructure and systems require regular maintenance to ensure they’re running efficiently and securely. If they aren’t properly maintained, they can become slow, prone to crashing, or vulnerable to hacks and malware. A managed service provider will maintain all your systems so that you don’t have to worry about them crashing or getting hacked.
  • When you have outdated technology: If you are still using legacy hardware and software, you may need to consider IT managed services. With the rapid pace of technological change, you need help keeping up so that your business can stay relevant and competitive.
  • When you have plans for future growth: The right IT partner will help you plan for future growth. They will ensure that your current systems can handle the additional pressure of an expanding team or client base.
  • When you want to save on costs: While managed services do come with a monthly fee, businesses often save money in the long run because their technology is performing optimally at all times. By regularly maintaining your systems and infrastructure, small issues are fixed before they escalate into bigger problems that cost more to fix.

When Do You Need Managed Services?

On the other hand, managed services are usually provided by a third-party company that specializes in IT solutions for businesses. If a business has a problem, they simply call on the managed services provider (MSP) to fix it rather than trying to troubleshoot it themselves or calling a technical IT support specialist.

Since IT managed services are an ongoing partnership with your IT consulting firm, they can help you in numerous ways. Let’s look at some situations when you need managed services:

  • If your systems aren’t properly maintained: Your IT infrastructure and systems require regular maintenance to ensure they’re running efficiently and securely. If they aren’t properly maintained, they can become slow, prone to crashing, or vulnerable to hacks and malware. A managed service provider will maintain all your systems so that you don’t have to worry about them crashing or getting hacked.
  • When you have outdated technology: If you are still using legacy hardware and software, you may need to consider IT managed services. With the rapid pace of technological change, you need help keeping up so that your business can stay relevant and competitive.
  • When you have plans for future growth: The right IT partner will help you plan for future growth. They will ensure that your current systems can handle the additional pressure of an expanding team or client base.
  • When you want to save on costs: While managed services do come with a monthly fee, businesses often save money in the long run because their technology is performing optimally at all times. By regularly maintaining your systems and infrastructure, small issues are fixed before they escalate into bigger problems that cost more to fix.

Want to hire an expert team to provide technical support or ongoing managed services? Reach out to our firm offering managed IT services in Corpus Christi to discuss your IT-related needs.

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IT Consulting Services
IT Consulting

How Can IT Consulting Services Help the Manufacturing Industry?

Written by Layer One Networks Published

Gone are the days when the manufacturing industry involved a lot of manual work. With the implementation of new technologies, automation has become the buzzword in manufacturing. The speed and efficiency of operations in manufacturing right now are growing at an inconceivable rate thanks to data-driven models and simplified tools.

The cutthroat competition in manufacturing has forced all sizes of businesses to align themselves with the digital revolution. With modern IT consulting service and expert development solutions, companies can embrace the new technologies quicker and help their employees adapt to the new working styles.

As a growing manufacturing industry, here is how managed IT services and technologies are helping to scale and improve efficiency.

5 Ways IT Consultant Services Can Transform Manufacturing Plants

There are thousands of ways IT services can bring a change in a manufacturing unit. It all starts with identifying the best technology for your operations and ensuring that it’s compatible with the rest of the plant.

Once you start implementing new IT solutions and technologies in your plant, you need to implement them in all aspects of the plant to achieve uniform growth — and ensure high ROI and operational efficiency. IT consultant service can help your manufacturing unit in many ways:

  • Improve the Efficiency of the Production Cycle

A good majority of a plant’s success depends on how efficient your plant production is. When you get the help of an IT consulting company, they can analyze far behind the production and look at the little details that compromise this efficiency, and suggest quick and simple IT applications and toolkits that can prevent that.

You can also automate various sections of a production cycle, utilize the new tools in the market to integrate with the rest of the process, and make sure that the final output contributes to your ROI.

  • Integration with IoT

You don’t need to visit the location of your measurement tools anymore with IoT devices.

You can install IoT channels with your critical measurement units to make or break your output efficiency and use an automated control system that intuitively manages production levels.

You also need the assistance of managed IT services to deploy these units, set up the IoT network with proper routing, and integrate all of that with fully functional software. This way, you can sit at the control station, monitor the measurements, and let the software modify the input channels to get the desired output.

  • Automate Compliances

A manufacturing plant needs to comply with a lot of regulations. It can be local, state, and central regulations, not to mention the industrial standardization audits. 

With so many regulation guidelines to follow, it can be a real problem to keep track of everything and ensure that the plant is running within the due guidelines. But with automated compliance regulation systems, you can automate the majority of monitoring the compliances. You can set notification alerts when a compliance requirement is deviated and take remedial measures to keep them within limits.

This could save you a lot of time and help your employees focus their working hours on something more productive.

  • Equipment Upkeep & Monitoring

You can detect any equipment troubles ahead of time with the right IT solutions. 

Whenever equipment fails, you need to stop the operation to either fix it or replace it. It can cause significant downtime, which again contributes to loss of production.

To avoid such issues, you can install IT monitoring solutions to keep an eye on the parameters of your critical equipment. Since this system will have all the historical data of the equipment, you can also conduct proactive upkeep before the equipment starts the trouble. This will save you a lot of downtime that goes to waste. Instead, you can still keep your plant running and perform preventive or proactive maintenance to nip the issues as they begin.

IT Consulting
IT Consulting

  • Protection Against Cyber Threats

Every manufacturing plant uses technology to a certain extent. And with the development of technology comes the rise of cyber threats. 

It’s vital to protect your IT systems against cyber threats with the best of the security systems, firewalls, anti-virus programs, malware protection programs and ransomware prevention algorithms.

Just installing these programs on your systems isn’t enough. You need to regularly monitor the communication, network and device usages to make sure that there isn’t any dormant malware present silently feeding on your information. 

Since at least a part of your operation is dependent on digital means, it’s crucial than ever to implement the best security solutions to protect your plant from unwanted online threats.

Conclusion

IT consultant service can do a lot for a manufacturing plant. From improving operational efficiency to preventing unnecessary downtimes and improving output quality, there’s no limit to the probabilities of including IT solutions in manufacturing. As much as we enjoy the pros of IT services, we also need to safeguard our systems with the proper IT security measures.

At Layer One Networks, we offer security services in Corpus Christi and the surrounding areas that reinforce your digital protection. We also work with manufacturers, helping them to optimize their operations and implement new technologies. If you want to consult us for any IT services, reach out to us now.

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Business Security
data security services

Importance of Zero Trust Security for Your Business

Written by Layer One Networks Published

The way in which businesses operate today is a far cry from what it was a couple of years back. The hard truth? The information is no longer as secure as we thought it was.

With so many hacking attempts and everyday news of security breaches, it’s becoming harder to trust any person or technology. In other words, zero trust sounds like the best idea.

This forms the crux of zero trust security, where every person or access is considered hostile until proven otherwise. This zero trust notion was first introduced in a paper in 2010 by John Kindervag from Forrester Research. Soon the term caught on, considering the volatile and technologically advanced world we’re living in.

A zero trust solution for data security essentially means that every request isn’t trusted until it’s verified. And this happens every single time a user tries to gain access or sends a request. So, why should you consider zero trust security for your business? Let’s find out.

5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs Zero Trust Security

At LayerOne Networks, our security experts have implemented zero trust security systems for some of our clients. In this blog, we’ll explain why you need to include zero trust security as a part of your managed IT services. 

1. You Need Additional Protection for Integration with Third-Party Services

Many times, we tend to link our software with other third-party applications to improve productivity. Or, we use multiple tools to build an application. For example, software developers may use third-party services for logging, authentication, and other similar needs. So, in the end, even a single software may have a host of different applications that have access to the information.

This is when zero trust security plays a crucial role. When every single request passing through the application is verified, we can prevent access or attacks from happening through these third parties. 

2. You Get Complete Visibility into the Logins

The zero trust security works with the notion that the system is already compromised and has to verify every action. While it acts on the process of verification, it never trusts anything. 

So, the visibility of the traffic to the application plays a central role in the security. Every single network log, access, the location of the access, and other details are recorded. The security team can monitor these movements of data and the login details for every single one of the users.

You can also use this data to analyze the attacks or attempts of hacking to pinpoint the exact location, user, and nature. One important point to note here is that zero trust security also monitors the DNS traffic, which is usually unchecked in traditional systems. This helps to avoid unauthorized data access and predict exfiltration.

3. You Need to Maintain Data Security Even with the Remote Work Culture

Ever since the pandemic hit us more than 18 months back, the remote work culture has become a norm. Many companies have permanently allowed for WFH, while some are still in the transitional stage. 

If you have some of your employees working from home, we have to realize that their home networks wouldn’t be as secure as our office networks. It is easier to hack into your enterprise using the home networks.

Zero trust security becomes helpful in such cases since it already considers that the threat is in. It suspects every single request and interaction to and from the application, which means it can stop and verify new instances of request from the WFH employees and prevent any security attacks.

Data Security

4. You Can Reduce Your Vulnerability

Let’s face it. Every organization that has some amount of dependency on online tools and applications is prone to cyberattacks. And we also have lots of vendors, external service providers, and freelancers that have access to our network. So when you’re switching IT providers or moving to new freelancers, they may still have access even after they’ve stopped working for your business.

When there’s something you can do to minimize your vulnerability and increase your security, it’s essential to consider it. Otherwise, you can’t imagine the consequences of your customers’ sensitive information and operational data falling into the wrong hands.

Zero trust security disallows application access until the user can positively prove their identity. It analyzes the way the device or the user is communicating, the network through which they’re communicating, and puts them through various authorizations to verify them.

Every communication through the application is checked for malicious attacks, which means your business operations will be better protected than most other security systems.

5. You Can Minimize the Security Tech Stacks

As more and more cyberthreats are cropping up and hackers are coming up with new ways to gain access or threaten organizations, the security stacks that are needed to protect ourselves have also increased. So when you want the manpower to implement so many of these tech stacks, you need to hire a big security team to build and manage them. 

But with zero trust security, you can do away with most of the security tech stacks and replace them with a single device in the cloud that monitors every piece of communication. You can minimize the complexity of the projects and the technologies needed and to save on employee costs.

Wrapping Up

In today’s distributed organization, the importance of data security has increased by folds. Zero trust security can reduce your vulnerabilities and improve data protection through the application. 

LayerOne Networks is one of the top IT consulting firms offering managed IT services, data security solutions, and IT consulting services. If you have a business in Corpus Christi and are searching for ‘IT services near me,’ then reach out to us now.

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