The new flashy set of PCs your company just bought last year are becoming outdated, and you don’t have enough IT staff to maintain them. The same goes with servers, wireless printers and faxes. If this is your current situation, it might be time to consider changing the way you obtain and manage your hardware. Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS) is a pay-as-you-go model where you pay your Managed Services Provider a monthly fee while they take care of all your hardware upgrades, maintenance and management. Here are 5 reasons HaaS might be a better answer for your business.

1. Save money

The first reason is simple: money. For SMBs, cash flow is a crucial matter. By shifting to HaaS you can say goodbye to the tedious and costly process of having to buy all the hardware outright. By paying a monthly fee to a Managed Services Providers (MSPs), you can turn a big capital investment into a small, manageable operational expense that leaves you money for other urgent matters.

2. Kiss out-of-date tech goodbye

Given limited financial resource, it’s not easy for SMEs to catch up with the latest technology. In a highly competitive business arena, you cannot win the game with your century old CPU while your competitors benefit from the latest technology. By using HaaS, your MSP has a responsibility to ensure that all of your hardware is capable of handling tasks efficiently, and they will achieve that through hardware upgrades and replacements.

3. Better maintenance

Buying new hardware isn’t the end of everything. Like most things in life, hardware needs to be taken care of. And most of the time, SMEs lack the proper expertise, knowledge, or even time to maintain it. HaaS solves this problem by letting your MSP do all the hardware management for you.

4. Better scalability for your business

As time progresses, your organization grows and changes, which means the needs for IT equipment changes too. HaaS solutions allow you to scale up or down as your business needs change so you don’t have to stick with unnecessary tools you no longer use.

5. Improve security

When it comes to security, software isn't the only thing that needs to be up to date -- your hardware does too. HaaS makes it easy to update to newer hardware, which is crucial to ensure adequate security. For instance, if you need a more powerful backup and recovery solution, your MSP will help you obtain new equipment as needed.

Thinking about switching to Haas but not sure where to start? Why not contact us today? We provide a variety of HaaS solutions tailored to suit any business’s needs. Tell us your IT requirements and let’s see what we can do.

Whether it be sending an important email to a major client or watching the season finale of your favorite series, a stable internet connection is needed. In order to gain the competitive business edge, there is literally no room for constant page refreshes and never-ending buffering. These ten tips will not only speed up your Wi-Fi but also get you ahead of the competition:

Router centralization and elevation

For optimal signal strength it is best to place the router in the middle of the room, away from other electronics without any doors or walls obstructing it either. It’s always good to keep the router high since routers tend to spread signals downwards, meaning the higher you place it, the more coverage you’re going to get.

Reposition antennas

Try positioning them perpendicular to each other, one being horizontal and the other vertical. Reception is maximized when your device and the transmitter are both operating on the same plane. Former Apple Wi-Fi engineer, Alf Watt, attests to this theory: “perpendicularly positioned antennas ensure optimal wireless reception”.

Use powerline network adapters

Multi-story housing prevents routers from being centrally located, so the next best thing is to use powerline network adapters. These devices work by utilizing the electrical wiring in the walls. First off you would have to plug it in near to and connect it with your router through an Ethernet cable, then plug in the second adapter after you have chosen a room for network coverage. Connection will then be delivered.

Wireless security

Setting up wireless security prevents your network from being compromised by external threats that lead to undesired downtime. After logging into your router’s admin page, change the encryption method to WPA2 and select a password that’s easy to remember.

Utilize heat mapping software

This allows you to see what your wireless heat map looks like, showing you exactly how much coverage each area is getting. With this information, you’d be able to reposition the router into an optimal position, adjust antennas or powerline network adapters to eradicate problematic areas.

Switch to 5GHz

Firstly there are two frequencies to choose from: 2.4 and 5GHz, and for homes or offices dotted with electronic devices the 2.4 GHz spectrum gets crowded pretty quickly. Solve this problem by switching to the 5GHz spectrum since it allows for more devices without cluttering the Wi-Fi.

Move to less crowded channels

Living in crowded neighborhoods or buildings mean that you share the same signal space, depending on which frequency your network operates on. By choosing the right channel, interference is reduced thus speeding up the Wi-Fi. Applications such as Wifi Analyzer or WifiInfoView helps find which channels are overflowing and which ones aren’t.

Router upgrades

Wireless and internet technology have come a long way in the past 5 years, and if your router is older than that - you might want to consider upgrading it. The easiest way to determine if your router is slowing down is to look up the model number and compare its specs with those of the internet package from your ISP.

Turn old routers into Wi-Fi repeaters

When you want to extend your network but your powerline network adapters won't do, the next best option is to turn your old router into a wireless bridge. This involves installation of custom firmware on your router. If wiring isn’t your thing, this is the best alternative of extending your Wi-Fi to the outer limits of your property.

Contact your ISP as a last resort

If nothing does the trick you should consider calling your ISP. Despite it being an uncomfortable task to accomplish it potentially saves you any future frustration. By contacting your ISP, they’d be able to diagnose the problem and provide a solution for it, at your own expense of course.

The benefits of having an efficient and stable Wi-Fi connection are endless; better communication with clients, more streamlined business operations or even watching your favorite videos without the buffering. Give your business the edge it deserves by giving us a call, we’ll gladly answer any questions you have.

According to a Research and Markets report, client virtualization is expected to drive continual growth in the IT sector. Long gone are the days of tedious one-on-one interaction between servers and systems, it is now time to embrace the automated and virtualized alternative. Mainly, there are three options and here they are:

Presentation virtualization

As hinted in the name, it is an application delivery method that delivers desktops or applications from a shared server. This enables access to client applications from a central server that is connected with clients. This initiates a presentation session through a web portal while giving them access to a virtualized application instance on a shared Windows Server OS. The only resources shared with the client is the graphical user interface as well as the mouse/keyboard.

Benefits of this presentation virtualization range from reduced user resource needs to simplicity, since applications are installed only once despite multiple users sharing the same application instance and even server level administration since multiple users are sharing the resources of the same system.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

Sharing similarities with presentation virtualization, VDI solutions are also a remote display protocol that hosts centrally-managed virtual machines (VMs) that client PCs are connected to on a one-on-one network relationship. Also known as desktop virtualization, this method utilizes a hypervisor that is in charge of hosting a dedicated operating system VM for each client individually. Due to the fact that each client is totally separate from one another on the server, this option allows for flexibility, management and security.

Why VDI? Firstly, it saves you more money since it has smaller software licensing requirements and it also reduces the need for staff to manage and troubleshoot problems. It also allows for secure mobile access to applications by enabling hardware-based GPU sharing through a secure connection from any device as well as better desktop security thanks to customizable permissions and settings. Lastly, it allows for easier maintenance - after logging off at the end of the day the desktop can be reset wiping clean any downloaded software customizations.

Application virtualization

Application virtualization is capable of allowing applications to run in environments that are foreign to the them, for example Wine allows some Microsoft Windows apps to run on Linux. By establishing a common software baseline across multiple computers within an organization, application virtualization also reduces system integration and administration costs. Finally, it enables simplified operating system migrations, whereby applications can be transferred to removable media or between computers without having to install them: effectively becoming portable software.

Not only has virtualization revolutionized the world of IT and computing, but it also has the potential to do the same for your business. Give us a call and find out which option is best for you and your unique business requirements.