By Rachel Noe
Searching for a managed services provider and determining exactly the services your business needs is an easily overwhelming process. There are many options available to you. We have been asked many times what different
managed services there are and how an organization might employ them. As an entry in our Q&A series, we take a look at a few of the different managed services options available to you through a provider like Claris.
Managed Computer Support
Let’s say you have the IT hardware but lack the time or technical staff to maintain it. This is a common experience among growing businesses, and is the point where managed computer support comes into the picture. This service ensures that each issue that affects your company’s devices is handled by a competent technician with experience resolving issue. This can also include remote monitoring of computers (and other hardware), which enables your provider to resolve many issues remotely, minimizing the effect on your workday and productivity.
Here at Claris, our core values are more than some phrases on a plaque in the hallway. We hire by them, work by them and live by them. While we believe everyone at Claris embodies these traits, we want to take the chance to point out a few individuals that really exemplify our core values. Today we introduce Travis Evans and how he embodies one of our favorite core values:
Work Smart, Play Hard
Meet Travis Evans, Backup Specialist, ukulele aficionado and Claris fun-maker. Travis embodies our core value of “Work Smart, Play Hard” in his passion for excellence and endless creativity in making Claris a better place.
Do you store all your personal documents on a personal computer or through a personal cloud? According to Gartner, Inc., by 2014, most of us will be utilizing such cloud-based platforms as Dropbox and other applications to store our documents and access them across a range of devices. While this may not be news to many of our tech savvy readers, Gartner’s report, “The New PC Era: The Personal Cloud,” has broken down five of the “megatrends” that have led to consumers moving from a culture tethered to a personal computer to a culture of mobile personal cloud users.
Megatrend 1: Consumerization
As technology has changed, so have consumers. In short, users have become more technologically savvy, and this has resulted in people who expect very different things out of their technology, says Gartner’s report. The rise of social media has given consumers a platform to make their thoughts and wishes known, and consumers themselves have, in some cases, become the innovators in the technology world.
It is common knowledge that China has a central place in global technology growth. And while much of the country’s activities are tightly kept secrets, recent news shows how China is taking its information technology (in the literal sense of the word) “underground”.
China is so highly populated that real estate prices are ranked among the highest in the world. So Hong Kong is intensifying its innovation and building underground data centers to help curb costs. According to some sources, two thirds of the land in the region has “high to medium suitability” for cave digging, which makes underground data centers an ideal option. The subterranean data centers would supposedly lower the risk of both physical attacks and most natural disasters.
China hacking US businesses has been all over the news lately. A report by Mandiant, a security-consulting firm, outlined a deep-dive investigation into where, how and who China was cyber-attacking. And the report has many US businesses watching their backs. Mandiant uncovered that the Chinese government currently has an army working on hacking into private businesses in the U.S. Dan Thompson and Mike Smith from Claris Networks visited local stations in Knoxville and Chattanooga to discuss the security threats to businesses’ information technology.