Coleman Technologies Blog

First, let’s delve into what ITAM actually covers.

Understanding ITAM

Consider all of the internal resources that your business uses, with the exception of your living, breathing employees. Everything that’s left can be considered an asset. ITAM narrows this down further into specifically the assets that pertain to your comprehensive IT infrastructure. This includes:

• Hardware (like workstations, servers, printers, etc.)
• Software (antivirus, productivity titles, etc.)
• Any Peripherals (Keyboards, computer mice, other devices)

With these assets identified, ITAM assists you in tracking their purpose, how they interact, and other crucial details. This means, as you’ve likely realized, ITAM covers a considerable breadth of your resources, which makes it important that you keep it organized.

How ITAM Helps

A well-organized ITAM can help you save time and hassle by streamlining your processes, simply by keeping the data you need in a manageable and accessible record. As a result, you can make a variety of processes easier through improved data. This data can also help inform you of potential issues, or of the minimum requirements you have to meet to implement change.

Making the Most of ITAM

As promised, here are a few ways that you can optimize your use of IT asset management practices.

• Make it a proactive process. Managing your technology assets needs to be something that you start before you are required to do so, and that isn’t abandoned after reaching a certain milestone. This will help keep you prepared for a wider range of circumstances.
  
  
• Leverage automation. While Excel used to be an invaluable tool for asset management purposes, there are better options now that don’t require you to contend with spreadsheets that extend into the thousands of rows. Not only are automated solutions easier to manage, they come with a valuable set of added features to make your work life that much easier.
  
  
• Track your assets. This one especially applies to your software. There is often a difference between what an agreement says can be deployed, and what can be deployed practically. Keeping your agreements and receipts helps you pass audits by proving compliance.

Coleman Technologies can assist you with your IT assets. To learn more, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.

What is Voice over Internet Protocol?

Traditionally, telephones work by sending electricity through the phone wires and phone lines and having it converted back into sound. Today, they have figured out how to do the same process through the Internet. Sounds are sent as data packets over Internet wires and then they are unpacked to make sounds again. VoIP is the product that has come from this innovation. Basically, where you once had to have an expensive business telephone system hardwired to your place of business, you can now do the same for a fraction of the cost by using your company’s bandwidth to send and receive calls.

How Does VoIP Work to Save Me Money?

VoIP presents several options that work to save your business money. They include:

You’re Paying for One Less Thing

Your business telephone system has worked, but the cost is high. Of course, you’ve needed it, but today, VoIP offers just as much in the way of features as a dedicated telephone system, but it does it through your Internet connection; a service that you almost assuredly have and use regularly. 

VoIP is Easier

Since VoIP is delivered via your Internet connection, your staff no longer needs additional infrastructure--such as a wired connection for every phone--to be able to make calls. You can scale your hosted VoIP solution up and back as you need. What’s more, for many solutions you can utilize your staff’s personal devices as reliable work phones through the use of a mobile app. That’s much easier.

VoIP is More Efficient

Most VoIP solutions enable you to provide them with an auto attendant feature that provides directions to callers. This reduces the time that people need to be on the phone. Clients get connected with the person they are calling, while employees won’t need to deal with their phone ringing and causing interruptions.

There are many other benefits to VoIP solution. If you would like to learn more about implementing VoIP and saving money in the process, reach out to Coleman Technologies at (604) 513-9428!

How Does This Happen?

An employee had access to data that they weren’t authorized to have. According to Trend Micro, they were able to “gain access to a customer support database that contained names, email addresses, Trend Micro support ticket numbers, and in some instances telephone numbers. There are no indications that any other information such as financial or credit payment information was involved…”

This employee, who remains unnamed, apparently had planned to steal data, and ended up being able to bypass the internal protections Trend Micro had in place.

Since the data had more than enough information for a scammer to use to trick a user into believing they were calling from Trend Micro (all it really takes is a name and phone number, and knowing that they use the product), this kind of data has a great deal of value to scammers. It gives them an easy way in to steal money from unsuspecting people under the guise of Trend Micro tech support.

Be Wary of Any Unsolicited Tech Support Calls

This isn’t a new problem, and it definitely isn’t only a problem for Trend Micro customers. Fake tech support scammers have been around for years, often preying on older, less-technically-savvy users. They use scare tactics and feign urgency to get their victim to hand over credit card information or allow remote access to the PC. 

More often than not, these calls will come in saying they are “Microsoft Windows Support” or some general computer support. If the scammer thinks they are targeting an individual at a business, they might say they are from the IT department.

It’s important to be wary and educate your employees so they know the proper channels for getting support requests handled. 

The Other Lesson - Don’t Let Employees Access Data They Don’t Need

As a business owner, you need to ask yourself who has a little too much access. Can all employees wander into folders on your network that contain personal or financial information? 

An employee should only have access to the data that they need, although it’s also important to not make it too difficult for an employee to do their job. Establishing the policies for this can be tricky but setting up the permissions on your network just takes a little work with your IT provider.

Enforcing security policies, like controlling who has access to what data, requiring strong passwords, and setting up multi-factor authentication can go a long way in protecting your business and its customers from a rogue employee running off with data. An ounce of prevention is worth a ton of damage control, in this case.

Need help? Our IT experts can work with you to lock down your data. Give us a call at (604) 513-9428.

Fiber optic cable is a network cable that contains small strains of glass fiber. Those glass strains are covered by an insulated casing. They transmit data through light. They are often not much thicker than a human hair. They are made up of the core, which is the pathway for light to travel. The core is surrounded by a layer of glass called cladding that keeps light in via reflection to avoid signal loss and keep transmissions true as the wire bends. 

Since the transmission of light is so fast, data can travel long distances quickly.  These cables provide higher bandwidth and can maintain the integrity of data transmission over long distances. Today, this technology supports much of the world’s Internet, cable television, and telephone systems. Their main benefits include:

• Higher capacity data - The amount of data that a fiber optic cable can carry exceeds that of traditional copper cable. Fiber cables are rated at 10 Gbps, 40 Gbps, and 100 Gbps. 
• Longer Distances - Since light travels for much longer distances without losing strength, there is less need for signal boosters. 
• Less Interference - Copper cables require shielding to protect it from electromagnetic interference, but this shielding doesn’t always work. The physical makeup of fiber optic cables works to avoid this outside interference. 

Most fiber optic cable is installed to run long-distance connections, there are some Internet providers that roll out fiber optics for direct access to customers. They are deployed the following ways:

• Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) - Fiber that is laid to support the use of media services to residential buildings.
• Fiber to the Building (FTTB) - Also called Fiber to the Block or Fiber to the Business - This is fiber optic cable that supports commercial buildings.
• Fiber to the Curb of Node (FTTC/N) - This is fiber cable that is laid to the node, while copper wires complete connections to customers.
• Direct fiber - Fiber that leaves the central hub and is attached directly to a customer. Some of the most expensive network cabling on the market. 
• Shared fiber - Much like direct fiber, but at the end it’s split up to other customers. 

Deploying fiber optic cable to your place of business is possible, but it is extraordinarily expensive. Due to the mounting costs associated with it, it may not be an option unless your provider is rolling out new infrastructure. 

If you would like to learn more about the technology your business uses, and what kind of effect it can have on your business, return to our blog regularly. 

Times have changed.

Today, the professional services industry is experiencing somewhat of a makeover. The effort-based expectations of the past are being replaced with outcome-driven expectations, leaving many professionals looking to technologies to help their businesses manage this shift in expectations. Typically, businesses begin their quest for efficiency by automating mundane portions of the business. This creates cost savings and promotes speed. The problem this model presents for professional services firms is that they don’t have many parts of their business that can be automated.

Since the front office and the back office of many professional services firms have some form of disconnect, and much of the work dictates that a person handles the intricacies of that work, automation isn’t really an option. That doesn’t mean there aren’t ways for professional services to utilize new technology to promote faster, more accurate, and more efficient operations. One way that professional services companies can improve is by making a digital transformation.

What Is a Digital Transformation?

The digital transformation refers to shift from analogue systems to digital ones. Over the past twenty years many analogue systems have been retired to make way for digital ones. This includes cloud-hosted solutions for time and resource management, productivity and collaboration, and even for the archival of information. The added efficiency a professional services firm can gain from committing to digital systems--especially in the processes listed above--is sure to quicken the pace of your business’ operations. Let’s take a look at the technologies some of the most utilized professional services companies are beginning to use. 

Medical Practices

Medical practices have been improving their IT under mandate for almost a decade. How has the digital improvement gone? A study from 2018 showed that 60 percent of practices that have upgraded their information systems have had a positive experience, while 23.5 percent had (what they’re calling) positive-to-mixed results. Only eight percent reported having a negative experience implementing technology. It took healthcare officials at every level working together to achieve digital transformations that help fuel electronic health records and other technologies used to help curtail cost redundancies and promote the delivery of comprehensive care.

Law Practices

There are a lot of lawyers that like to continue to do things the way they always have. After all, it is one of the oldest professions and there is a standard of decorum that many lawyers adhere to. In many ways the legal profession remains unchanged. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t using technology. The profession as a whole may not benefit from automation as much as other professionals, but it still does benefit through other solutions like document management, mobile management, and other digital systems often utilized with remote workforces. 

Most professional services firms are, like most other businesses, using information systems to improve operations and be the best firm that they can be. If you are working in the professional services market and would like to learn more about how your firm would go about making a digital transformation, call the professional service experts at Coleman Technologies today at (604) 513-9428.