14 Feb

Client Spotlight: Metro Carpets, LLC

By Concept Technology

Most people understand the value of purchasing an extended warranty for your business server. We’ve talked here before about the downsides (and they’re severe) of letting your manufacturer’s warranty expire, and business-minded individuals usually grasp the intrinsic value of going ahead and getting an extended warranty. The guys over at Metro Carpets are no exception. In 2009, when they bought a new Dell PowerEdge server (on our recommendation), they also bought a three-year, 24-hour service warranty from Dell. In most cases a 24-hour service warranty is more than enough protection. In a small portion of cases – your worst nightmare type cases – a 24-hour warranty just isn’t enough.

Here’s an example of one of those cases. More importantly, here’s an example of Metro Carpets turning a stressful, and certainly severe, hardware problem into a manageable hiccup that didn’t affect normal business operations.

First, some background.

Metro Carpets is a floor-covering provider focused in residential building in the greater Nashville area. The company of 35 full-time employees uses 38-40 workstations powered by two servers.

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Categories: Best Practices, Business Strategy

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26 Jan

Common IT Mistakes Business Owners Make — Part 2

By Concept Technology

This is Part Two of a three part series about IT mistakes that business owners commonly make. This post will cover security, backup/recovery and Internet policies.

1. You’re Secure, Just Insufficiently

You’ve got encryption, antivirus and antispyware, a firewall and passwords set up, and you feel like your business network is secure. And it might be…on the other hand, it might not. Here’s where your security measures may be falling short.

Antivirus: Just as there’s a difference between consumer and commercial grade computers, there’s a difference between consumer and corporate antivirus. Make sure you’re using business-grade antivirus, which benefits from being installed and updated from a central control center on a company server. This gives you one place to check to see if all antivirus within your network is up date, ran last night, etc.

Your software should also be easy to manage, scalable and offer adequate technical support. Since antivirus subscriptions renew annually, corporate software has the added benefit of renewing all at one time.

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Categories: Best Practices, Hardware, Security, Software

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