A Brief Explanation of Disaster Recovery Every business has some type of business continuity plan, and if they don?t, they should. It outlines the actions that need to be taken to ensure that your business isn?t mortally affected by negative situations. Within this plan is disaster recovery, which is a specific plan to get your operations up and running after a ?disaster?. Here are a few examples of disasters that could affect your business? continuity: Natural disaster – Flood, hurricane, tornado, wildfire, electrical storm, worldwide pandemic; the list goes on and on.  Human error – Accidental, negligent, or deliberate situation an employee puts the business in which causes a disaster-like result. Cyberattack – Data breaches can be some of the worst, especially when people?s sensitive information is involved.  Failing Hardware – If the right component goes out at the right time it can have devastating effects on your business.  No matter what problems your business has to deal with, getting your resources back up and running as fast as possible should be one of the core priorities of any negative situation. The reality of the situation is that every minute your business breaks continuity is a massive problem, and can lead to some very unpleasant results.  The Importance of DR The first thing you need to know about your disaster recovery policy, is that it has to be created with the notion that it?s a matter of when, not if, you will need to use it. The statistics reinforce this idea. Three-out-of-five businesses that experience a prolonged system outage will be out of business within two years of the event. So, even if you are able to get back up and running again, the lost revenue may eventually catch up and ruin your business. With that knowledge, the first suggestion we?d make is to stay calm. A business owner?who has toiled and taken his/her business from a one or two-man operation to an organization that people and their families depend on?needs to make calculated decisions to get their business back up and running properly. Acting impulsively will often lead to making decisions that will further hurt your business? chances of returning to normalcy. The first real action that needs to be undertaken is to contact the people that will need to know that a disaster has occurred. Setting up a call list to notify people that need to know is a good practice. Since the focus has to be on getting data accessible, once department managers are notified, they can decide how and when to notify their subordinates. Regardless of how you plan to set this up, communication will be key to get your business back up and on track.  One of the most important parts of a disaster recovery strategy is to have digital copies of everything. We suggest using a Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) service that backs up data incrementally and saves multiple copies of data in a network-connected device, as well as in an offsite data center. Having a comprehensive backup is a core strategy of any disaster recovery platform.  Depending on the disaster, you may need to find alternative means of managing your workforce. Being able to provide your staff with that ability in the face of a disaster is extremely useful to keep revenue […]

Let?s go over a few best practices that can help prevent you and your team from losing technology as work is done remotely. Organize, Organize, Organize When working on the move, it can be only too easy to lose track of your assorted possessions?especially if you don?t have a proper means of carrying them from place to place. Therefore, investing in a carrying case of some sort and keeping your technology arranged inside not only helps ensure you have what you need to be productive, it also helps you to be sure that you can get everything out and away and back into storage more efficiently. Of course, you should also double-check that everything is where it should be every so often, especially when you?re in a public place. Keep Your Carrying Cases Closed Here?s the thing: the easier it is for someone to sidle on by and take something, the more likely they are to do so. How often have you seen someone walk away from their laptop bag with their laptop out in the open? How often have you seen someone carrying around a backpack or a messenger bag with it open, their devices practically falling out? It may not seem like a huge deterrent but keeping your carrying cases fastened up can greatly discourage someone from trying any funny business. Help Your Tech Stand Out Making your technology distinctive?adding noticeable stickers, using brightly-colored peripherals, and the like?can provide extra benefits when it comes to keeping track of it. First of all, if you do happen to leave it behind somewhere, it makes it much easier to describe to someone so that you can claim it. Secondly, making it more noticeable will help make it less likely for you to forget it in the first place. Finally, the more recognizable and distinctive it is, the less likely it is that someone will try to abscond with it. Keep Track of Your Technology With More Technology Finally, there are many tech solutions available that are intended to help protect your other gizmos. Of course there are the applications that both Android and iOS have built into their platforms to help locate a lost device, and there are also other add-on solutions and physical dongles that serve the same purpose available. Investing in a few could be what prevents you from losing a far more expensive device and the valuable data it holds. While White Mountain IT Services can only do so much to help you keep track of your IT solutions, we can do far more to help you get the most use out of them. For assistance in managing your business technology, give us a call at (603) 889-0800 and ask about our managed services.

With today?s ISPs delivering faster and faster speeds to businesses, much of the bandwidth a business uses is lost. By choosing to utilize a cloud-hosted VoIP solution, your company gets more for less. Your organization is paying for access to massive amounts of bandwidth anyway, why not use that bandwidth to slash your communications costs? Let?s take a look at the various types of VoIP that are available and why the switch may be just the thing your organization needs.  What is VoIP? Voice over Internet Protocol is just that. The ability to make calls, and have a feature-rich platform that provides all the services that your traditional phone system offers, for a fraction of the cost per user. If this seems too good to be true, consider that the VoIP market is growing rapidly (over 15 percent per year). It works through your organization?s Internet connection rather than through dedicated phone lines. So, instead of having to pay for a separate system or add expensive hardware, VoIP provides an organization the immediate cost reduction without a discernible shift in functionality.  Hosted VoIP technology can be hosted either onsite or in the cloud, but since you won?t have to pay for and maintain hardware with the cloud-based platform, the cloud-hosted version will save you money. It is still a completely managed and maintained PBX server, but instead of having the system in your office, your organization can access it through web-based applications typically available on both desktops and mobile devices. Benefits of Hosted VoIP We?ve already outlined the cost reduction that?s possible with VoIP, but there are some other benefits as well. They include: Easier to Manage: Switching to VoIP eliminates your relationship with the phone company. More than that though, VoIP doesn?t need special hardware, it can use the same wiring and switches as your LAN. Unified Communications: Installing a VoIP platform likely means that you are able to unify your organization?s communications platform, giving your staff the option to communicate multiple ways at the click of a button. Functionality: A VoIP platform can integrate with all types of business-management software to provide easy access to the communication capabilities that often make business run better. VoIP also has innovative features like Voicemail-to-email transcription, interactive voice recognition, and integrated chat. Scalability: When you onboard new users and need to add a line to your business, it?s as simple as a couple of clicks. VoIP makes a lot of sense for the growing business and the established enterprise, alike. If you would like more information, contact our professional consultants today at (603) 889-0800.

Why Would You Go Paperless? Most people in business don?t understand how expensive paperwork is. The frequency that workers create new documents, print those documents, and file them makes paperwork one of the costliest endeavors at your whole organization. So, to answer the question, businesses go paperless to reduce costs, but that isn?t the only reason.  Another is that by going paperless, you can get all the documents and files your organization saves at any time, from nearly any device or location. How does this happen? Workers scan physical documents to create digital files and then store them in a database where a simple search of the document management system (DMS) will return any file stored on the system. Best yet, the files in the DMS are actually stored in the cloud, so files can be retrieved from any place at any time, on most devices.   It may seem simple, but how many documents and files do you keep in your filing cabinets right now? Scanning all those documents takes a lot of time and effort; and does cost a bit up front. Industry averages are about 7-to-12 cents per page to scan and upload to the DMS. It might seem like a lot of money when you consider the thousands of files your business will need to scan to have a reliable and comprehensive solution for your business? document management, but that cost pales in comparison to the money your business is spending right now on a paper filing system.  One thing that?s nice, however, is moving forward with a paperless system is easy (once you?ve fully implemented it). You don?t need a traditional scanner for every document, most smartphones can simply scan a document by snapping a quick photo of the page, and then you can push the document into your digital filing cabinet. How Does This Equate to Cost Savings? It?s simple. Once your files are stored in the database, you never have to worry about paying people to physically find a file. All they need to do is search the DMS and the document in question is available almost immediately. The cost in filing paper files and in file retrieval is substantial. More than that, by storing this information digitally, and using a comprehensive backup solution, you will never lose files. Studies have shown that large organizations lose one file every six seconds and employees average about 20 minutes to find a file. That cost goes way down when all it takes is seconds. More than that, the physical files that you have to keep take up space in your office. Some businesses, like many professional services, keep a lot of files and the more space they take up, the less space is in use for operations. With paperless solutions, you can move those files to less-expensive offsite storage and use your current office space more efficiently. How to Get Started Would you like to learn more about implementing a paperless DMS into your office?s technology strategy? Reach out to White Mountain IT Services and our team today by calling (603) 889-0800.

Discord Discord was developed as a video conferencing solution for gamers, and operated in that fashion for a number of years, but over time it gained popularity because of the number of communication options that the software presents. Some organizations have gone so far as moving from more traditional collaboration apps to Discord because it is effective.  At its base, Discord is basically a conferencing application that is free to use. Users can create their own servers and use them to host several types of communication such as video chat, audio chat, and text messages. You can easily share screens and do it all in real-time. This is the part about Discord that gives it its benefits. Discord offers bots that help keep users focused on a task and offers organizations a great option as a team-building app. Without the massive list of useful integrations found with titles like Microsoft Teams and Slack, Discord doesn?t provide a lot of the tools built in to those other platforms, but is an extremely useful tool for collaboration nonetheless. Microsoft Teams Microsoft Teams? biggest benefit is a direct integration with Office 365. In a single window, users can view their Outlook-based communications and calendars, as well as create, share, and edit work found on the Microsoft Office platform. Shared workspaces are abound in Office 365 from apps such as OneDrive, OneNote and SharePoint. It provides a centralized platform in which to communicate, manage, and delegate work.  Microsoft Teams also offers a bunch of active integrations that provide third-party applications access, building on this cache of apps regularly. This provides teams with tools that aren?t native to Office 365. More than that, a direct integration with Skype provides meeting capabilities that fuel collaborative endeavors and push initiatives along faster.  Slack Slack, much like Microsoft Teams, is an extraordinarily useful tool for teams looking to collaborate. is a collaboration software designed to make project-based management easier. It is set up as a chat program with forum-like resources and a massive amount of integrations available to teams of people. Therefore, users can customize their Slack experience to meet their needs. The platform is used by millions of companies so the application integrations are current and updated with new features regularly.  In utilizing Slack, companies can work to replace a lot of the other traditional business communications such as email and text messaging and are available on desktop platforms and mobile platforms for continuous communication.  Is your business looking to add to its collaborative toolbox? Would any of these three work for your needs? Does your organization utilize any of these? If so, leave your experiences in the comments section below and return to our blog regularly for more great IT content.