Smart Hands vs. Remote Hands

 There are a few things we need to know when we talk about remote hands and IT Smart Hands.

Remote hands

Remote hands can include things like securing wiring, checking port numbers, observing or reporting indicators on devices, basic environment monitoring, and restarting the server. These data center services are provided under a data center contract at no additional cost.

When talking about remote hands, keep in mind that these are all things that can be done without on-site data center technicians entering devices. When a technician really needs to join the team, we enter the smart hands area.

Smart hands

Smart hands involve more complex tasks than remote hands. These data center services include colocation device management, firewall configuration, media and supply management, complex cable configurations, device testing and troubleshooting, circuit and rack and stack testing. Smart hands are services that are generally billed hourly.

It is important for us to clarify which services are in remote hands and which are in smart hands when we speak to a data center. We do not want surprises on the first invoice. Unexpected costs are never fun.

Remote hands and smart hands in the data center come in handy when we don't have anyone available to manage the task. Or maybe the person who normally does this is out of town and needs someone if necessary. These are the two reasons why we want to use experienced data center technicians.

Ask in the data center what is included and what is not, so that we cannot experience surprises with the next invoice. If you have any questions about how RACK59 can support your placement project with our support services, please arrange a site visit or contact us using the button below.

Smart Hand Services: When Your Time is Worth Money

In your company's IT department, the point comes when a task must be performed and no one is available or cannot process it. Maybe it's after business hours. The task can be small or large: basic diagnosis; Plug in a cable. Add IP addresses to a firewall. Regardless, no one is available. And the task has to be done, otherwise there are serious consequences. So it makes sense to get a Managed IT Smart Hands Services from a company like Externetworks. Your time and that of your employees are best used for tasks that grow your business, and not for maintaining your IT infrastructure.

On-site assistance service

For many growing companies, maintaining an expensive and highly trained IT team onsite 24 hours a day may not be profitable. For some, this may never be a realistic part of their growth model or business plan. However, these companies continue to require certain services to be provided to meet their operational needs. This is where an intelligent hand service system comes into play. Smart Hands offers the highest level of service, offering remote management, facility customization, and device troubleshooting 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The cost of a Smart Hands service plan is often offset by minimizing downtime and service interruptions by freeing key people for other important tasks and automating daily maintenance tasks and services. With Smart Hands packages, companies don't have to give up control or adaptation of their infrastructure. Immediate responses to data breaches not only improve your company's productivity, but also reduce the risk of liability issues.

What Kind Of Tasks Can Smart Hands handle?

Smart hand packs vary according to your business requirements, as do the tasks involved. The best way to think in smart hands is as a concierge in a busy hotel. They always meet your requirements and can also react immediately to urgent circumstances or questions as soon as they arise. A concierge can also work with other clients, but information is not shared, so there are no security issues. A concierge provides you with the highest quality support in limited areas, rather than trying to act as your swimming guide and instructor. Smart Hands employees use their resources more efficiently to perform various functions towards their external staff. Smart Hands services may include:

•      Configure a firewall

• Complex cable configurations

• Placement device management.

• Test devices and fix error.

• Rack and stacking services

• Shipping and receiving

• Automated maintenance

• Backups

• Pack and unpack

• Inventory

• Detect and respond to threats.

• Moving equipment

• Operating system and server installation.

• Power cycle

• On-site / off-site technical support and troubleshooting

• The remote server restarts.

• Cloud cross-connect

IT Help Desk Technician Roles and Responsibilities

  IT Help Desk Technicians job description include: Serving as the primary purpose of contact for clients looking for specialized help via telephone or email, Performing remote investigating through indicative systems and relevant inquiries, Deciding the best arrangement dependent on the issue and subtleties gave by clients

 

Occupation brief

 

We are searching for an able Help work area specialist to give quick and valuable specialized help on PC frameworks. You will answer inquiries on essential specialized issues and offer exhortation to unravel them.

 

An amazing Help work area expert must have great specialized information and have the option to convey adequately to comprehend the issue and clarify its answer. They should likewise be client situated and patient to manage troublesome clients.

 

The objective is to make an incentive for customers that will help protect the organization's notoriety and business.

 

Duties

• Fill in as the principal purpose of contact for clients looking for specialized help via telephone or email

• Perform remote investigating through indicative procedures and relevant inquiries

• Decide the best arrangement dependent on the issue and subtleties gave by clients

• Walk the client through the critical thinking process

• Direct uncertain issues to the following degree of help staff

• Give exact data on IT items or administrations

• Record occasions and issues and their goals in logs

• Development and update client status and data

• Pass on any criticism or recommendations by clients to the proper inner group

• Distinguish and recommend potential enhancements for techniques

• Prerequisites

• Demonstrated understanding as an assistance work area professional or other client care job

• Well informed with working information on office computerization items, databases, and remote control

• Great comprehension of PC frameworks, cell phones and other tech items

• Capacity to analyze and resolve essential specialized issues

• Capability in English

• Superb relational abilities

• Client arranged and cool-tempered

 Skills and Qualifications 

Solid Computer Skills and the Ability to Troubleshoot and Diagnose Problems, Familiarity with both PC and Mac Hardware and Software, Experience with Network Repairs and Analysis, Good Customer Service Skills, Ability to Communicate Effectively to assist clients with fixing their issues and feel happy with the experience, Writing and Editing Skills to help recorded as a hard copy and refreshing manuals, Education in Computer Repairs and how to Troubleshoot Problems (a few employments may require a degree from a college or specialized school), and Specific Knowledge of other required Computer Systems for various workplaces.

 

7 Best Practices of Successful managed Service Providers

 The managed service provider (MSP) market is growing. In a MarketsandMarkets study, sales in 2019 were estimated at more than $ 193 billion, a compound annual rate of 12.5%.

The study also indicated that the percentage of companies using MSP increased from around 30% to 50% in the last year alone. However, these are just the macro numbers. The growth of individual MSPs varies considerably. According to the study, a significant proportion of MSP has seen their business grow 20% or more annually. However, about half of them only grow about 10% or less.

We are now four months away in 2018 and I think it is fair to say that none of us really knows what to expect in the coming months, with global changes that will have consequences for all of us. So how can we ensure that as an IT company we do everything we can to remain successful and decisively profitable? Through my conversations and discussions over the past few months with Datto MSP partners in Asia, I have been able to identify some of the important best practices that have been shared by the most successful companies and that I would now like to share with you Some Managed Services Best Practices:

1. Be the person you are going to

For managed service providers, it is important to define exactly what your company is doing, what services it specializes in, and what advantage it has over competitors in your area.

It is important to be able to communicate the value of your business to potential customers. An effective way to stand out from other IT providers is to develop a high level of experience in a specific area or areas. For example, an MSP that focuses on serving SMEs in health and finance, or an MSP that specializes in a particular service or technology (for example, disaster recovery and backup). This decision should depend on your personal preferences and potential clients in your area. By serving clients with similar requirements, you can accumulate experience over time that can be applied to all clients. Suddenly you will be the "go to" person for something.

2. Be picky about customers.

Many new IT service providers take on whatever job they may get. This makes sense when you are just starting out, but as your business grows, it is important to be more selective with your customers. The first step: identify your ideal client. This is determined in part by your specific areas of expertise, but additional factors must be considered. For example, it is important to consider the effort required to support the customer environment. When it comes to current customers, don't be afraid to cut ties. In general, if a client does not fit well, it is best to end your relationship with him.

3. Build customer trust

It is important that IT service providers strengthen customer trust by accessing and protecting their private technologies and data, on which their livelihood depends.

Always be sure to keep your promises, since without them there will be no trust or relationship. Offering unbiased technology advice to your clients will make you a trusted advisor. Of course, you must generate sales and make a profit, but that does not mean that you are selling your customers the most expensive products you can. It is more important to recommend technologies that help them succeed regardless of their costs. Providing customers with the right tools and first-class technical support builds trust and ensures a long-term business relationship.

4. Standardize technology offerings

Standardization enables you to develop expertise in the technologies you use, reducing the time and effort required to implement and manage them. This also makes it easier to manage relationships with a limited number of providers. Be sure to choose technologies that support many different IT environments. Many successful IT service providers publish a catalog of services to ensure that current and potential customers understand the options available to them. It must be so detailed that there is no confusion about what each service offers, but not so technical as to lose it in general.

5. Prize for a victory

Developing a pricing strategy is about achieving the desired and / or required margins for the services you provide. It is important to understand your own costs - look at what you need to make a margin and then make a profit. Many IT providers, especially those who are new to the business, make the mistake of underestimating their services to beat the competition on price. Instead, think about how you can make your services stand out from the competition and tell us why your service is getting a higher price. IT service providers use a variety of pricing models today, and theirs will be determined by your business needs. Many IT providers pay per user or per device, while others choose a fixed-price model or a hybrid of the two.

6. Develop a sales and marketing process.

Many IT service providers have problems with sales and marketing. In some cases, this is because they come for technical rather than commercial reasons. Others, especially small businesses, may not have time to spend on sales and marketing. If you want to grow your business, it is essential to develop a repeatable sales process.

7. go to school

Education is essential in a constantly changing industry. Peer groups are a popular choice for IT service providers who want to continue their education. These groups meet locally or online and allow members to learn from each other in formal and informal settings. Members are encouraged to network and share ideas. Another option is to request certification of certain technologies that you use to provide services. Many technology providers offer specific product training and certification programs, and there are several organizations that offer more general IT training opportunities. Continuing education and certification are essential to remain competitive in an ever-changing industry.

The Difference Between traditional and Modern Web Design Projects

 I started learning simple web design. Then I learned more complex areas like open source web development. When I started PHP3 it was the preferred flavor and not much was happening in the CMS space. Oh how much has changed since then! But it's not just technology that has changed over the years, our overall approach to custom application web design services has changed over time as well. Today I want to analyze two approaches to web design strategy. The first is the traditional approach that we have all focused on for many years. The second is a modern approach that sees web design as it has always been, although many have never admitted it, which is an iterative process. Let's dive in!

Traditional web design

From the beginning, marketers and business owners took an approach to website design that was comparable to any other physical asset in their business. They saw a website as something to create, configure, and forget about. This concept worked well for a long time. Businesses go through a design cycle every few years, resulting in a completely new website every time.

How did these processes work? Well, the strategy has often been driven by business interests. And by the term "commercial interests" I mean, in many cases, the whim of one or two people in a certain company. Early web design projects were often led by an entrepreneurial ego. Not always, but often. The strategy employed was somehow based on vanity: looking better than the other (that is, the competition) and producing an experience that showed the maturity of the company or some other artistic "vibe" management that could be expressed wanted.

These projects were often large, almost always complete redesigns or complete conversions. As such, they were costly and life-long endeavors that often put a bad taste in the mouths of the people responsible for putting them in place.

Companies have been notoriously bad at hiring agencies or designers / developers to work on these projects. Procurement was a disaster and often resulted in a poor RFP process, resulting in the lowest bidder taking a project home and not having the client adequately consider the agency's skills or creativity.

These factors led to the traditional "one-time" approach whereby clients closed their project, pushed it live, and let it sit and age over time. We all did ..! I was guilty of the same with our own website. It was comfortable to sit back, loosen up, and do your thing.

Here's the problem ...

The market is constantly evolving. And your website should too. The traditional model eliminated the idea of ​​constant monitoring and improvement based on data. This led companies to argue about their website design project because they saw it as an occasional opportunity to get it right. And most of the time, other business challenges got in the way that resulted in your distraction from completing or completing the project. In fact, there must be a better way?

The modern approach

The modern approach could also be called the more sensible approach. It makes sense from many perspectives. It's a way to get less of what they'd like to chew on in terms of project scope for companies. From a marketing perspective, it allows for constant experimentation. There is no single technique or strategy that is defined as "modern web design", but some concepts that are strategically combined define this modern approach. Some have tried to define this methodology in a single framework, eg. Eg B. Growth oriented design, although there are some flaws in the way they try to implement it. Ultimately, this is a philosophy that is more than just one way of doing things.

Focus on the audience

In many ways, outdated web design projects were internal. A CEO wanted to redesign or a marketer wanted to establish important product details. A business owner wanted to sell products or there were a different number of changes that had more to do with themselves. However, no one really looked at the end user. In the early days, clients didn't bother with their own analysis when considering a design process. In many ways, we have catered to clients' personal preferences rather than challenging them to think of the client. I think the agencies were part of the problem.

Today is very different. Data rules and internal strategies follow data. We are no longer in an innovation economy, but in an incremental optimization economy. As a result, website owners are more in tune with what customers want to do on their websites and are more likely to listen to analytics to optimize those experiences.

In some ways, it is sad that we are behind this innovative era. We started this company before mobile devices had web browsers and long before websites had to respond to all these different devices. At the risk of beating myself up, this was before CSS was a central part of our design processes. You will be amazed at what I can do with nested tables!

The current environment has also changed dramatically. Without getting too involved, we are no longer interested in fully advancing the possibilities of online experiences. We have replaced Flash with HTML5 and improved our core libraries to gain experience, mainly to make our lives easier. Of course, we also have more sophisticated CMS platforms. But we have not developed the medium further. This, in turn, is due to our optimization economy, which is focused on the audience. While it's great that everyone is working hard to make things better, I miss the old days when we had something new and innovative to play with every year. For the moment, however, we remain focused on our audience, its goals and objectives until a new round of innovation is presented to us.

Get started fast

Today, projects seem to start and then iterate at a faster rate than before. Mainly because the new methodology is designed for iteration, it takes some of the focus off to make it perfect the first time you launch it. I find that many projects today start with migrations from old systems, like archaic CMS platforms, to new ones, where they can then quickly iterate because the foundation is more robust and flexible (more on this in a minute). We talked about exactly this project scenario on this blog a few weeks ago.

If you feel like you are moving quickly on a project, you are probably working at a pace that is common today. Knowing that you can react and make changes later changed the game for website design projects. You can tear it down and let it break. I find this speed to be very positive for almost everyone involved up to the first deployment. Agencies love to produce quickly, and clients must show management profits. A quick migration or launchpad site that is designed, developed, and implemented doesn't have to be perfect to build momentum and start making constant improvements.

Iterate early and often

As long as you have a solid foundation to build on, the iteration will literally start on day one, if not earlier. I firmly believe that the current client / agency relationship is not an all-in-one relationship. Today it's about smaller upfront commitments and longer-term maintenance / continuous improvement models. Marketing teams must continue to respond quickly to changes in the market, new approaches to competition, and the availability of new techniques and tools.

We see it on our own website, where never a week goes by without optimizing any element of our content, web browsing, search engine optimization, or marketing automation processes. And we are a small company ... you can imagine what groups of companies should do. If you are a commercial marketer and don't get involved in these iterative changes, you will definitely be left behind.

Make the transition

If you're an organization that has traditionally focused on the old style of running a web design project, chances are you're somewhere in the redo cycle. Especially since the process never changes. With each turn of the cycle you can move to this new methodology. However, to do this, you will need to make some adjustments to your technology, company culture, and marketing strategy.

Step 1: adapt culturally

This is an important consideration. Before you can move into the modern world of web design, you must culturally adapt your organization to the concept. This means accepting a method to do something quickly that is based on data points, repeats quickly, and knows that perfection is a moving goal. For the most part, the administration is slower to adapt to this concept. Everyday technicians, designers and marketers are already determined to participate. Therefore, it is up to those interested in changing their company's methodology to educate and convince management that this is the path that leads to faster success, faster learning, and most importantly, an economic decision. smarter with one. demonstrable ROI leads. Easier said than done, I know. But it is achievable.

Step 2: plan and budget accordingly

The old method was expensive and there were always high start-up costs. The new world has many more moving parts, and running costs are spread out over time. First, you have royalties. Many parts of the digital ecosystem need a license today. CMS, marketing automation, analytics, asset management, more analytics ... this all adds up and needs to be budgeted for.

Because this approach is iterative, you should also plan ahead for what help and assistance you will need. It does this in a number of ways. You can hire an internal team to help you, or you can hire an agency. Of course, we find it difficult to be impartial about what you should do. But seriously, agencies offer you the flexibility of a versatile team of experts in various disciplines who can support and support your ongoing needs. Individual employees tend to be somewhat more limited in their skills, which can hinder progress.

Regardless of how you do it, you need to budget and plan for ongoing support so you can make the quick and iterative changes your new methodology requires.

Step 3: build the base

Finally, as you transition to this new workflow, you need to make sure you have the right technology. You want a website with the right technology, something stable, compatible and flexible. You want to make sure you have the right tools like marketing automation, CRM, analytics, etc. Having a foundation is critical to success. So your first project should solve fundamental problems with your tech stack while getting to market quickly. If you do this correctly, it will be easier to work with everything later.

10 Advantages of outsourcing your recruitment function

 Since you work in the recruiting and recruiting field, you need to better understand the challenges of finding a replacement for your best recruiter or retaining your best recruiters. This can be a long process. And most importantly, you can't afford to suffer setbacks as you grow. Rise, a newborn offshore recruiting company, will help you address all your recruiting problems with a single solution.

Offshore Staffing Services  is a business process that companies can use to hire employees. We, the RPO providers, drive the entire process in accordance with your culture of value and business objectives. Below are the benefits we offer to companies like yours: -

1. Lower Costs: We help you save costs by offering you reasonably lower cost recruiting consultants who work like your team.

2. Scalability: Offshore Recruitment Services provides your business with scalability and the ability to serve high volume projects but with lower margin.

3. Flexibility: We are flexible and can expand or reduce your team in a few weeks. And most importantly, pick, interview and choose the skills of your team members at our facility.

4. Prioritization: With the ORS solution, you can prioritize which accounts can be outsourced to your ORS partner and which accounts can be best managed by your internal champions.

5. Quicker Response: Whether it's implementation or expansion plan, we're fast with all of our processes, yet meticulous and detail-oriented.

6. Access to multiple services: We offer multiple solutions so that you do not have to hire multiple service providers for different services, just one, Rise.

7. Reports and Analytics: Offers all our clients advanced report analytics. These analyzes include various benchmarks, performance metrics, data reports, and customer analytics.

8. Better ROI: You can get a better ROI by reducing your costs and eliminating all unwanted costs like infrastructure, hiring and training, labor, and resources.

9. Perfect Functioning of Recruitment Processes: We know that your processes are based on your experience and work well for your clients. That's why we inherited your recruiting processes on your team at Rise so they can function as your team.

10. Strength to expand: Overseas recruiting services give you the strength and confidence to continue your upward growth.

5 Advantages of Custom Application Development

 Custom application design services can offer significant advantages over standard solutions, especially when it comes to business process management and digital transformation.

There is no perfect software.

Regardless of what configuration you are promised, buying standard software will always involve manual manipulation of data to bundle your software stack or some clumsy inefficiencies to tolerate, ultimately leading to spoilage. ROI.

But it does not have to be like that.

Custom applications are not as expensive as you might think and offer significant advantages over standard solutions, especially in terms of business process management and digital transformation.

Here are 5 benefits of custom app development that our customers have recognized.

1. Automate repetitive tasks

Custom apps make everyone's life easier by automating boring and repetitive tasks.

It does this in two main ways.

Move data automatically

Custom apps are not just about a custom user experience or interface, they are essentially a showcase.

And you can build a great user interface with your existing out-of-the-box solutions. In fact, front-end design is often what out-of-the-box solutions do well, as a good user interface is largely a measure of how strictly you can stick to the established UX path. .

For example, a shopping cart on an e-commerce website always means the same thing.

But where custom applications shine is in their ability to convert your idiosyncratic data into the formats you need.

In order to run efficient business processes, data must be able to flow seamlessly between different systems. This order must be made in both cases. However, a custom app can make it much easier by automating the process instead of manually exporting, converting, and reloading it.

Manage workflows automatically

Every day, teams spend a lot of time moving projects through workflows or waiting for a project to move to the next phase.

Suppose you need to email a manager to get approval for something.

This additional manual step that is repeated over and over again can seriously affect business efficiency:

• You must remember to send the email

• Your manager should receive the email

• Your manager should respond to the email

It may seem like a small thing, but over time, these micro-hurdles add up to long delays.

2. Facilitate collaboration

Organizations have increasingly complex systems to serve customers.

The days of the various departments are definitely over, if not over.

Organizations must be adaptable and leverage the expertise of their roles to better serve customers.

The content is a perfect example.

Even a simple blog post can include marketing, freelancers, executives, products, and sales.

This means that collaboration takes on a new meaning.

However, out-of-the-box solutions tend to be poorly integrated with each other. To work together, employees have to switch from one program to another, generally relying on instant messaging or email to help them.

Not working together within the programs has non-trivial consequences:

• The processes take longer (because the "official" workflow does not reflect reality) or the processes are extremely ad-hoc and can fail.

• Systems are difficult to automate, if they can be automated at all.

• Systems are difficult or impossible to scale.

• Institutional memory drives processes, not operations, that exist independently of the people who built them.

Besides avoiding these results, facilitating collaboration is just a good idea as it has many side effects.

For example, with custom apps that connect existing technology stacks, employees can spend more time doing what they really love (and what helps the business) and less time moving data from A to B.

Second, the ease of collaboration makes working with other teams and departments enjoyable and ultimately improves results.

After all, simple collaboration makes companies more dynamic and agile. Knowledge travels further and faster, and companies can respond more effectively to new ideas and temporary opportunities.

3. Everyone can access the data they need

The back office functionality spends a lot of time and effort merging data from different sources.

Financial data is an example of this. Suppose a CFO needs to consolidate data for an annual report. They may have to work 10 different positions in the company. It takes time to request data, receive spreadsheets, and look up specific numbers.

If it's a once-a-year process, the list of problems an organization needs to fix is ​​likely to be low.

But what if you go through this process for weekly reports? Or monthly license plate updates?

There are dozens of regular processes that require data import and transformation, processes that can be time consuming and frustrating to complete.

A custom application, or extended functionality from an existing CMS, can help disable this layer.

First, customization automates workflows so less data has to be compiled manually.

For example, a custom CMS can automatically generate a report that includes all the information you are looking for in your monthly dashboard update. This level of detail just doesn't exist in out-of-the-box solutions.

This enables you to automate the workflows that make up your business processes.

Second, over time, you can begin to optimize business processes yourself by giving users access to data and information in a format where they can actually use it.

To understand this point, let's take a step back.

Organizations track and store a large amount of data and produce a continuous stream of new content every day. As Nate Silver said, it is no longer about collecting data, now it is about identifying the signal through noise.

Therefore, companies have developed many tools to achieve this. For example, Google Analytics to track website data and CMS to publish content.

Each of these tools provides centralized and optimized access to data, as well as the ability to quickly create and publish content.

Most organizations, however, have not yet realized the real value of these types of tools: they allow anyone to quickly and easily access information with custom permissions.

This means that you can generate a report safely and automatically to speed up your reporting workflow.

However, by developing custom applications, you can directly improve the business process that workflow is part of.

In other words, you can give board members direct access to data and content so no process takes place.

By enabling access to data, organizations can redefine the processes they need to run to run their business and ultimately reduce process overhead to maximize efficiency, visibility, and growth.

4. Security

If you have a custom application or advanced CMS, your data will be more secure (on average) than if you use a ready-to-go solution.

Why?

Because you are a much smaller target.

Assuming your security equates to out of the box solution. Different, but just as safe.

If a bunch of hackers break your software, they get your stuff.

Which of course is a problem.

However, if a group of hackers discovers a ready-to-use solution, they get all their customer data.

For you, as a customer, the result is the same: your data is in your hands and it shouldn't be.

But how many hacker groups do you think are interested in specifically breaking into your company? Probably not that many.

Especially when they can be divided into 10 or 10,000 companies with the same amount of work, depending on the success of a ready-to-use solution.

This means that even if your custom app security is 1 hack per 1,000,000 attempts, it may only be attempted twice a year.

Large out-of-the-box solution providers defend dozens or hundreds of attacks every day.

They are just basic stats.

5. Maximize investment in technology

Finally, the development of custom applications and, in particular, the expansion of the functionality of a CMS, can help an organization to maximize the investment in technology through the use of tools that are already known.

The problem with buying new tools, rather than expanding existing ones, is that users don't use them (or don't want to use them). Technological acceptance is always a challenge.

Even if the platform is intuitive, there is always a learning curve for some users. Upgrading your team is a long-term project that must be managed as such.

Suffice it to say that shopping is difficult.

If you create a custom software application based on an existing tool, adoption is much easier:

Interfaces and systems work as people think (since they are already familiar).

Working methods remain relatively static

The tools look like existing tools (since you can customize the layout) so the user interface is as expected.