Top Ten Information Technology Concerns for Small Business
1. Cost
Technology needs to be cost effective. Often, buying the lowest priced item means poorer performance and quality, with little or no service and support. When purchasing technology and related services, you have to factor the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). The TCO is defined as a financial estimate whose purpose is to help consumers and enterprise managers determine direct and indirect costs of a product or system. It is a management accounting concept that can be used in full cost accounting or even ecological economics where it includes social costs.
Simply put: Buying a new PC for a business does not end with the price tag. Software upgrades, anti-virus updates, securing access to networked resources are all a necessary and expensive cost of doing business. Let Nine Virtual Technologies provide you with an affordable and hassle-free vOffice to fit your business’s needs.
2. Security
Nine Virtual Technologies provides security and peace of mind in 3 ways:
Physical:
Your information is business-critical and must be treated as such. All of your information is physically stored on our servers hosted in North Carolina, and duplicated for redundancy to our sister datacenter in Florida. We maintain redundant internet connectivity, servers, and electric generators. Also, the facility is physically secured with an alarm system and all of our equipment is monitored 24×7.
Transmission:
Further, we protect the transmission of your data through the use of Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnels. All of your data is transferred to and from your location with the highest level of encryption possible.
We use PayPal, know universally for online payment protection, to process payments for Nine Virtual Technologies services.
Access:
We put our years of industry experience to work for you. Employees only have access to the programs, folders, and files you allow. Additionally, each desktop is a virtual controlled environment, where employees cannot add or delete programs without your approval. Due to the nature of our virtual controlled environments, it also makes it extremely difficult for virus or spyware to infect your desktop. Viruses typically execute and infect systems by utilizing an employee’s access credentials. We avoid these scenarios because we do not give employees enough access to the system for a virus to be able to penetrate beyond their desktop.
3. Support & Administration
Nine Virtual Technologies provides you with the support you need to keep your business running. We provide a Help Desk to assist you with your day to day questions regarding software, email, and your desktop environment. We organize your network file folders with ease of management in mind. We secure access to the files and folders you request.
You can be assured only the employees you request will have access to the “Finance” folder. Additionally, if an employee terms, call us and we will disable their account immediately. We can provide you access to their data so work doesn’t skip a beat. We can deploy your new employee’s account in the same day you request.
4. Accessibility & Flexibility
Nine Virtual Technologies can improve your technology environment with accessibility, flexibility, and security without increasing business investments. Access your virtual desktop from any PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android-based device and access email from virtually anything. We offer flexibility by offering you a range of configurations to fit your IT and budget needs. You may lease desktop equipment from us or use your own.
5. Mismatched Technology
Most small businesses and non-profits have blended IT environments: mismatched computers and laptops purchased at different times, with different software configurations. This makes it difficult to support each of these devices without a full time support staff. Nine Virtual Technologies offers a homogeneous desktop environment for you and your staff. All desktops are identical, with the same software loaded and accessible. With the addition of our optional 10Zig thin clients, office moves and relocation becomes easier. Since all of the terminals have the same configuration, you do not need to move an employee’s terminal from one office to the other. You simply login with your Nine Virtual Technologies assigned username and password and your virtual Desktop will appear just the same as it did in your previous location.
6. Knowledge and Expertise
We want you to concentrate on running your business and not worrying about technology. We put our years of experience to work for you. We design and maintain your virtual office (vOffice) with the latest technology and security available. We seek to grow the technology offerings of our vOffice solutions in parallel with the growth of your business.
7. Disaster Recovery
When disaster strikes, you can be sure your data will be recovered swiftly with Nine Virtual Technologies. We leverage the expertise of AppAssure technology to back up all of your data on a daily basis. The backed up data is stored in our datacenter, but is also duplicated to our sister datacenter in Florida for extra safety.
Additionally, due to the redundancy we have in place, our servers and network connections are backed by multiple telecom and energy companies. Even if all of the vendor connections suddenly become unavailable, we have enough generators and battery backup to power Nine Virtual Technologies for months!
8. Compliance
With constant changes in business regulations, it is a challenge for small businesses and non-profits to dedicate the time, money, training, and expertise to stay in compliance. With Nine Virtual Technologies, we give you the power and experience of our trained staff to insure you stay in compliance. With the assistance of our Help Desk, support portal, and optional training your employees can get the answers they need fast. When changes in regulations occur, you can pass that off to us. We will make the necessary changes to your vOffice to make sure you stay compliant. This saves you time and money, since this is included at no extra charge.
9. Staff Training
When you join Nine Virtual Technologies, we provide a 1 hour “Getting to Know Your vOffice” tutorial for your entire staff. This is conducted online through a webinar with one of our corporate trainers. As new technologies become available, they will be installed on our Demonstration Servers, where your staff can login and test new features before they are integrated into your environment. If your staff needs additional training, we can provide custom sessions tailored to your business needs.
10. Technology Staffing
Small businesses and non-profits with only a few employees find it difficult to afford or justify an IT Staff. Typically, the business has to pay for “per incident” support. This means you get a virus on a PC and have to call Geek Squad to come clean it for $130.00 per virus. This can get extremely expensive. Additionally, your rate of incident occurrence would be less if you had constant software upgrades and systems monitoring. However, this is the burden most small businesses struggle with every year when it comes to IT budgeting: Roll the dice and pay for “per incident” support at absorbent costs, or hire a full time Information Technology Technician.
Nine Virtual Technologies is your third choice. We provide you with a virtual Technology staff of unparalleled support through our vOffice solutions.
