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.
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.
--By Philip Icuss
The late Steve Jobs always preached that a stylus was never to be used in mobile computing. But as times have changed, and so have the powers at work within Apple.
The iPen, as it is called, is as a stylus that could be used on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. But we all know this will be more than just a stylus if it ever hits the market because of the simple fact that Apple is making it. Rumors have reported that it will create vibrations in cases such as when clicking on something, running the pen over a link, and other actions of this type.
You may be infected with a virus that could block you from the internet. Around 350,000 computers are already infected with this malware, called “DNS Changer.” Dan Thompson with Claris Networks and Jason Graf with Sword and Shield Enterprise Security visited WBIR to give the entire scoop. If you’d rather just watch the video, skip on down to watch.
What is the virus and how does it work?
Dan: “Essentially, DNS is a technical term that references the translation that goes on behind the scene when you and I are browsing the internet. For instance, if you type
www.facebook.com, DNS is the stuff that goes on behind the scenes that lets your computer know to go on the internet. So what the virus has done is to redirect all those requests to go to somewhere besides Facebook. It looks like Facebook, but it’s not. For every person that this virus directs to this fake site, the malware creators are making money. Some people make money on the internet by clicks, so they’re funneling all these people over to a site that’s making them cash.
Using Mac computers on a corporate network is a contentious issue for many business people and their supporting IT departments. Recently, Larry Bodie, CEO of Claris Networks decided to take a Macbook Pro on a thorough test drive on our corporate network as his primary work device. Sure, Macs are incredible devices and make personal computing a breeze for the average user, but are they as diametrically opposed to a Windows based corporate environment as people make them out to be? Larry’s response, in short, is no…and yes.