By the DynaSis Team

Every day, small and midsized business (SMB) owners are bombarded with seemingly conflicting messages regarding how IT solutions can help them best run their businesses. With so many options to consider regarding corporate security, productivity and cost efficiency, it is not surprising that some of them stick their heads in the sand and do nothing.

Unfortunately, with SMBs becoming favorite targets for cyber attackers, and with corporate competition increasingly fierce, that is the worst possible way to operate. Here’s one example:

A business owner has been operating with a “break-fix” mentality, which means he or she only makes technology purchases when something breaks. This is a reactive operating strategy, but many business owners take this path because they believe they cannot find the time or budget to manage their technology proactively.

This approach has always been financially inefficient and detrimental to productivity, and DynaSis has long recommended that business leaders team with a knowledgeable, trustworthy IT consulting partner, such as a managed services provider or an IT services firm, to help them create and implement a technology roadmap that includes staged upgrades and improvements.

Today, however, the break-fix approach has become more than inefficient. Outdated, network-connected equipment, such as networked printers, likely has no built-in security protections. Such machines are more likely to be operating with open Internet connections, and hackers know that. Furthermore, competitiveness in today’s market relies on providing workers with modern technology. Organizations that persist with the break-fix model invariably fall behind.

In other words, making smart, planned technology improvements helps organizations foster productivity, security, cost efficiency and competitiveness—not to mention employee satisfaction. The question then becomes: how does the business owner know which improvements are smart?

To help our readers, we have prepared a chart of technology Do’s and Don’ts, in terms of best practices. The list only scratches the surface, but it’s a good place to start.

These are just a few of many examples where smart technology choices are beneficial to your company, its personnel and its bottom line. If your technology environment is inadequate or outdated, your employees cannot achieve their missions, and customers may perceive your physical space—and your firm—as dated. Similarly, if your approach is too lenient, you could be throwing away money, productivity and security. A knowledgeable, expert IT support company can help you evaluate your options, minimize your risk and keep your equipment operating in peak condition.

Selection of an IT outsourcing company is a very important business decision. For almost a quarter century, Atlanta’s small to mid-sized businesses have relied on DynaSis’ for managed IT services, internet security, and 24 x 7 x 365 helpdesk support. Today, with cybercrime becoming an ever-increasing threat, DynaSis has become an industry leader in network protection and ransomware prevention. Please take a tour through our website at www.DynaSis.com or speak with a technical expert at 678.218.1769.

By the DynaSis Team

Although the majority of business owners (87% per one survey) have adopted cloud computing in some form, that doesn’t mean they understand it fully. Every day, we hear from business owners who want to explore the cloud further but are not familiar with the various aspects of cloud computing. What’s Software as a Service, and how does it differ from Infrastructure as a Service? What is the difference between a public cloud and a private one? What are the criteria for selecting a provider?

To help business owners familiarize themselves with these important issues—and to help them choose the right cloud provider—we developed a white paper, Big Cloud Little Cloud, that is available on our website. To pique your interest in learning more, this article will explain the various cloud services—one of the most confusing aspects of cloud computing for many business owners.

The Cloud as a Service

Unless an organization runs its own data center, all cloud “products” are actually services. The company licenses one or more cloud-based elements hosted in data centers run by IT solutions firms and made accessible (served) to the company. The three main categories of cloud service are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). There are other “services” that are often add-ons for companies deploying IaaS, PaaS or SaaS.  These are Desktop as a Service (DaaS), Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and Backup as a Service (BaaS).

Software as a Service: With SaaS, software vendors host their applications on cloud servers and provide access to organizations and their personnel on a subscription basis (usually billed per user or per “seat”). The hosting company handles all licensing, upgrades, IT support and other aspects of the solution. Office 365, Salesforce, and Gmail are all examples of SaaS.

Infrastructure as a Service: IaaS is a hosted solution where a IT services vendor licenses server space in its data center. Organizations use IaaS to store and access corporate files in the cloud as well as to run applications, host websites and more. Some IaaS offerings include email, office productivity and other software, eliminating the need for firms to deploy and manage these solutions.

Platform as a Service (PaaS): PaaS is similar to IaaS, but it is more commonly used by organizations that develop, deploy and manage their own applications. PaaS solutions include hosted servers, operating systems, and other elements of a computing platform. In some scenarios, companies can also run third-party applications and store files and other assets on their PaaS resources, as well.

Desktop as a Service (DaaS): DaaS is often a front-end solution for an IaaS deployment. Personnel access cloud resources through a desktop portal that can be opened on any desktop, laptop or mobile device, eliminating the need for organizations to own and maintain desktop computers.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and Backup as a Service (BaaS): Both DRaaS and BaaS provide hosted backup of an organization’s files, sometimes with selective (file by file) access. However, DRaaS generally creates complete system images that organizations can restore to recover their operations after a major outage. DRaaS solutions also may create backup images more frequently than do BaaS services, but this capability varies widely from one solution to the next.

As you can see, these solutions vary widely in their scope, and the specifics can be dramatically different from one provider to the next. As a result, we recommend organizations work with a qualified managed IT services firm, such as a managed services provider, to devise a plan. We go into detail about selection criteria in our cloud white paper. We hope you will find it helpful.

DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and midsized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premises managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.

The ROI of Outsourcing

By the DynaSis Team

If you are a small or midsized (SMB) business owner, how many times have you wondered, “Would it be less expensive to outsource a job rather than to retain staff in house?” For some functions, such as legal advice or trash collection, outsourcing is an obvious choice. For other roles, ranging from accounts receivable to marketing and beyond, the evaluation is more difficult.

A variety of “resource costing” tools, which SMB owners can use to calculate the hard costs of many functions, are available online (see one example, here). To arrive at a figure, most determine the time it takes an employee to perform relevant tasks and then multiply that number by the blended (pay plus benefits) rate for the job. Some include other factors that might be minimized or eliminated by using a professional (or an automated solution) to perform the work. These include the cost of space, supplies, and training, and even the cost of errors or other failures. Once the total cost is determined, SMB owners can compare it against the quote from a third-party provider to determine if there is any savings.

The problem with this approach is that it cannot account for benefits that are not quantifiable, nor can it project the gain or loss from things that do not happen. In our experience, nowhere are these intangibles more prevalent than with outsourced IT.

As a professional cloud and managed services provider, we sometimes hear from SMB decision makers that having in-house IT staff is less expensive than outsourcing IT services and IT support.

Invariably, the business leader is making his or her calculation based on hard costs, alone. They haven’t considered financial impacts that cannot be quantified or predicted. Consider these two examples:

• If a firm’s ecommerce website goes down at 2:00am and an employee doesn’t discover the problem and fix it until 9am the next morning, how much existing customer good will—or how many potential new customers—will the organization lose? Lost revenue can be calculated based on historical figures, but these other two factors are impossible to determine.
• If a sales pro wants to fine tune a proposal at 5am but the network is down and he cannot gain access to the corporate system before his 8am meeting, will the lack of last-minute polish impact the prospect’s opinion of the firm? Whether or not he lands the business, no one will ever know for sure.

With IT solutions, there are many such variables that firms should consider when determining the ROI of outsourcing. Following are just a few:

• Lost negotiating power from not proactively managing vendors.
• Added costs of hardware equipment failure for not planning staged upgrades.
• Reduced employee satisfaction and productivity caused by desktop computer problems.
• Lowered gross revenue (and productivity) from network outages.

Although highly competent, in-house IT professionals can minimize some of these issues, those workers  come at a high price. Furthermore, rarely can SMBs afford to keep their IT staffs fully updated on all certifications and training. As a result, most lack the know-how to deploy the automated monitoring and maintenance solutions proven to substantially reduce downtime compared to traditional IT approaches.

For some business functions, keeping the work in-house may be the most cost-effective approach. For many others, and especially for IT, outsourcing provides strategic business advantages that are beyond the reach of SMBs with in-house staffs. Increasingly, progressive SMB owners are recognizing the value of assigning critical functions to the experts.

For small to midsized business owners and executives who are concerned about managed IT support services and network threat protection, DynaSis is one company that has been at the forefront since 1992. In this ever evolving world of cybercrime, crypto virus and network access protection have become critical to every company’s security. DynaSis also provides 24 x 7 x 365 outsourced IT services, with its own trained staff for helpdesk, real-time monitoring and the DynaSis Business Cloud, for highly secure data storage and backup. You can find out more by calling us at 678.218.1769, or checking out our website at www.DynaSis.com.

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By the DynaSis Team

With all the news about the wonders of cloud computing, many small and midsized business (SMB) owners may wonder if they are making a mistake by not adopting cloud technology. Yet, they also have concerns, ranging from security issues to availability of offsite resources if Internet connections go down.

Depending on the SMB’s business model, location, and level of technological sophistication, these may be valid concerns. Yet, there is no doubt that cloud computing provides big benefits, and SMB adoption is accelerating. In a round-up of cloud computing “facts and figures,” Forbes noted that the cloud market for SMBs will double between 2015 and 2020, from 37 percent of U.S. SMBs to 78 percent.

The good news is that decision makers don’t need to choose between an off-site cloud and their current on-site systems. With a hybrid setup, they can have both—and they can selectively choose which resources to run in the off-site cloud. With this approach, often called a hybrid cloud, some data and other business assets remain hosted on company servers while others are run and accessed remotely.

The two sets of resources are tied together so that they run as a single, cloud-supported solution, with their on-site resources essentially serving as a “corporate” cloud. Yet each of the components can be configured differently to meet designated security, backup, and other requirements.

To determine if a hybrid cloud is the right approach, SMB owners must evaluate their current needs and future plans, as well as their ability to support on-premise systems. Such an evaluation is often difficult and time-consuming for business owners, who may benefit from the help of an objective, qualified outsider such as an IT solutions or IT consulting company.

If you are currently evaluating your resources for a new or expanded cloud deployment, consider these factors:

All Cloud Solution

• Most cloud-hosted services include updates, backups, monitoring and upgrades at no additional charge, reducing the need for IT staff.
• Cloud solutions generally have lower upfront costs, reduced hardware requirements and less overall maintenance than on-site equipment.
• Cloud-hosted products provide on-demand remote access to all authorized individuals with an Internet connection.
• Clouds are highly scalable (storage can be increased quickly and easily).

All On-Site Solution

• If the firm has a custom setup, such as a database resource that supports a customized application, on-site storage is likely the best solution.
• If the company operates under strict compliance requirements that require sensitive data to be hosted behind a local firewall, on-site may be the only option for those resources.
• If the organization runs software or services that interact with systems not connected to the Internet, the cloud may not work.
• If the company already has a large IT services department with professionals trained in varied roles, the cloud is less attractive.

Hybrid Solutions

If you like the benefits listed under All Cloud but some of the All On-Site criteria apply to your organization, a hybrid storage and delivery model could be the perfect option. With hybrid delivery, for example:

• You can store the majority of your assets securely in the cloud but meet compliance requirements with a secure on-site server.
• If you have a mix of out-of-the-box and customized applications, you can optimize delivery of the “standard” applications through the cloud but maintain your custom ones on-site.

A hybrid solution also allows you the flexibility to test a variety of cloud delivery and storage approaches to find the perfect mix for your firm.

Reputable managed services providers can help you evaluate and make these decisions and can also help you move resources to the cloud safely and securely. Some managed services companies offer ready-made hybrid solutions that include ongoing IT support.

Specializing in managed IT services and network security, Atlanta based DynaSis has been supporting small to midsized business for almost a quarter century. Among the services we provide are cloud computing through the DynaSis Business Cloud, 24 x 7 x 365 helpdesk support, and real-time monitoring enabling us to deal with “issues” before they become problems. For more information, please call DynaSis at 678.218.1769 or visit www.DynaSis.com.

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By the DynaSis Team

In today’s IT-driven business world, networks have become the arteries that keep information pumping through a company. Yet, the technology of the networks themselves—what makes them operate most efficiently—is still a mystery to most people who use them. The good news is that there are now monitoring tools that can tunnel through networks, pinpoint their issues and often resolve them without human involvement.

Unfortunately, many companies still don’t use them. A study of 547 US and European-based network and security operations professionals found that 45 percent of IT staffs monitor network and application performance manually, instead of implementing network monitoring tools. As a result:

• Seventy-seven percent accidentally reported incorrect information to management teams.
• Eighty-seven percent reported the cause of a network event they weren’t certain was accurate.
• Seventy-three percent had currently unresolved network events.

This isn’t surprising, because networks are incredibly complex. They are webs of network hardware—firewalls and routers, for example, connected to dozens (if not hundreds) of endpoint devices, from desktop PCs and tablets to printers.

Furthermore, network hardware has become so adept at resolving or bypassing conflicts and other glitches that a few problems might not cause an outage. The issues mount until an outage occurs, at which time IT support staff must unravel a tangled web.

Even the most dedicated IT services experts cannot manage the current generation of networks (and their systems) manually, which is why monitoring tools were developed. They are fast, efficient and inexpensive, and they work with virtually no load on the system. More important for network security, monitoring tools can pinpoint network dangers that are not technically faults, such as unauthorized devices operating on the network.

Minimizing System Slowdowns—and Outages

So, what do monitoring tools do to help with network stability? They identify and monitor all connections and their relevant information and activity. They can also automatically fix a variety of minor problems that impact network speeds—before they become major problems.

To help ensure business health, monitoring tools can identify issues that require manual intervention before they cause an outage. They provide ongoing alerts and reports that properly trained IT solutions professionals can act upon. Any number of elements can cause an outage or significant slowdown, from excessive connection attempts that might indicate malware is attempting to penetrate the corporate firewall to an improperly configured device that an employee slips onto the network. Some can be resolved automatically, but others require attention, and fast.

Of course, like any tool, monitoring tools are most helpful when they are used by a qualified professional. For this reason, business leaders often work with a managed services provider (also called a managed IT services firm)—even when they have an internal IT department—to deploy these tools and follow up on any issues they detect. Such assistance not only reduces the incidence of system downtime dramatically; it also has been proven to free business resources, fostering innovation and a greater competitive edge.

DynaSis has been Atlanta’s premier IT support services provider for more than 23 years. As an IT company working with small to midsized businesses (10 to 150+ users), DynaSis has developed a unique 12-layer approach to network threat protection, ransomware prevention and crypto virus threat elimination. The DynaSis Business Cloud functions through a highly secure environment with full real-time data backup. Please contact us at 678.218.1769 or visit our website at www.DynaSis.com.

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By the DynaSis Team

On Tuesday, June 14, 2016 from 12:00-2:00 pm, the DynaSis Team will host an Open House at its new headquarters, located at 950 North Point Parkway, Suite 300, Alpharetta, Georgia. All of DynaSis customers, partners and associates, as well as local media, are invited to attend. At the event, one of our favorite local barbecue restaurants, ‘cue, will serve a luncheon to all attendees.

DynaSis’ move marks a milestone for our organization, as we have not only doubled our size but also expanded our systems to enhance the IT support and IT services we offer our customers. Recognizing the increasing challenge that small and midsized businesses (SMBs) face in today’s technology-centric, threat-laden landscape, DynaSis has taken significant steps to ensure it will remain the area’s most proactive managed services provider in coming years.

A recent study of IT security among SMBs, conducted by Wakefield Research, found that only 37 percent of IT decision makers felt their organizations were fully prepared to manage IT security and protect against threats. Equally concerning, fewer than 25 percent have a dedicated, in-house cybersecurity team or individual. Improvements we have incorporated into our new facility to directly address these shortfalls for SMBs include:

• New seats in our Network Operations Center and Help Desk departments.
• The addition of 300 percent more monitoring screens for support personnel to view situational awareness data for service delivery.
• A research and development lab and a dedicated training area.
• New, cloud-based IOT (Internet of Things) alarm, access control and surveillance systems.

During the event, visitors will have the opportunity to meet some of the DynaSis Team as we lead guided tours that showcase our new offices and equipment and explain the inner workings of the Managed IT Services model. As a thank-you to the Atlanta community for its years of support, we will also donate $10 to the Atlanta Community Food Bank (ACFB) for every Open House attendee. For the convenience of attendees, we can accept donations of canned and boxed goods and forward them to the ACFB on donors’ behalf.

For more information, or to RSVP, please email events@DynaSis.com

For small to midsized business owners and executives who are concerned about managed IT support services and network threat protection, DynaSis is one company that has been at the forefront since 1992. In this ever evolving world of cybercrime, crypto virus and network access protection have become critical to every company’s security. DynaSis also provides 24 x 7 x 365 outsourced IT services, with its own trained staff for helpdesk, real-time monitoring and the DynaSis Business Cloud, for highly secure data storage and backup. You can find out more by calling us at 678.218.1769, or checking out our website at www.DynaSis.com.

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By the DynaSis Team

Several recent reports have highlighted the growing importance for small and midsized businesses (SMBs) of outsourcing their IT functions. There is also new evidence that SMB owners are actively embracing the use of managed services.

Per a 2015 report from the MSPAlliance, an international association of cloud computing and managed services providers (MSPs), North American firms spend approximately $154 billion annually for managed services. The MSPAlliance also reports that SMBs are at the top of the list, in terms of adoption. Benefits cited by the SMBs contracting for managed IT services include increased operational performance, decreased operational risk, reduced IT costs and accelerated innovation.

The IT solutions offered as managed services range from computing, storage and networking resources to mobility strategy and management, expert, 24/7 support for users, and even telephony services. Some IT support companies offer ongoing monitoring, management and maintenance of the underlying infrastructure (with service guarantees).

The most engaged MSPs also offer IT consulting and strategic planning services to help organizations create roadmaps of upgrades and improvements, maximizing budget while minimizing downtime. With all of these options potentially—but not necessarily—available, SMB decision makers considering managed services must both identify their own priorities and vet their candidates carefully. Following are a few issues to consider.

• Does the technology partner focus on the business goals of its clients when it makes a recommendation? Providers must develop offerings tailored to the client’s business goals rather than recommending a cookie-cutter service plan.
• Does the partner take a long-term view of relationships and act as a trusted advisor? MSPs that see value in ongoing technology roadmaps help their clients be more resilient as market conditions change.
• Is the service portfolio comprehensive? Even if your company is outsourcing only a few functions initially, identifying an MSP that can grow with you will ensure you never have to manage multiple vendors.
• Has the MSP identified and addressed your technology pain points? The most qualified IT partners should perform assessments and make recommendations based upon your vulnerabilities, not just on their strengths.
• Does the MSP value and commit to close communication? If the provider doesn’t offer a timetable for regular meetings with account managers, reports that show the effectiveness of the engagement and periodic formal reviews, you won’t be able to benchmark the value of the relationship to your firm.

In the long run, many organizations find that contracting with an MSP for all IT services is the most cost-effective solution. This is especially true when the provider offers proactive monitoring and problem resolution, which is proven to reduce outages significantly. With virtually all SMB staff requiring computing resources, IT outages quickly become costly based on wasted staff resource alone. When the cost of lost sales and goodwill are factored in, the price tag is even higher. For even the smallest providers, the new reality is that uptime is no longer optional.

Selection of an IT outsourcing company is a very important business decision. For almost a quarter century, Atlanta’s small to mid-sized businesses have relied on DynaSis’ for managed IT services, internet security, and 24 x 7 x 365 helpdesk support. Today, with cybercrime becoming an ever-increasing threat, DynaSis has become an industry leader in network protection and ransomware prevention. Please take a tour through our website at www.DynaSis.com or speak with a technical expert at 678.218.1769.

By the DynaSis Team

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With bad news about cybersecurity hitting the media nearly daily (including recent attacks on healthcare organizations), it’s hard for a business owner to know what to do. It’s also easy to think, “Let’s focus on securing what we have and not add anything else to the mix.” Certainly, securing corporate assets (along with training the employees not to expose them) is a sound idea. However, refusing to explore new ideas and technologies out of concern for security isn’t the safest strategy.

One approach that has proven security value is virtualization. With virtualization, a company’s files and other digital assets are distributed by designated criteria and stored, not all together on one physical or cloud server, but rather on multiple “virtual” servers. These are discrete partitions, each of which can have its own level of security, access control and other protections, yet all can reside on a single on-premise or cloud resource. Assets can be separated by user, with each department or employee having its own virtual resource; by security need, with public, private and sensitive/proprietary files each on different virtual servers; or by any other criteria.

It may be a bit confusing to imagine how a group of files on a single server can be separated so completely, so here’s an analogy. Consider an overcoat with one or more hidden pockets. The wearer can put his wallet and all other valuables into one hidden pocket, but if a thief finds the pocket, everything will be gone. He or she could also divide those valuables among several hidden pockets, reducing the chances of the thief finding all of them—and increasing the time it takes. One or more pocket could be secured with multiple defenses, making those valuables the safest, of all.

Expanding this example, imagine now that owner is carrying candy for his or her small children and a present for the spouse. He or she puts the candy in a hidden pocket at the waist, but puts the presents in a zippered breast pocket. Upon arriving home, the children can find the candy quickly, because they can reach—and know how to open—the right pockets. However, they won’t be able to reach or see the hidden present intended for someone else.

That’s exactly how virtualization works. It isolates data in the manner that the corporate decision maker desires, making it more difficult not only for outsiders to find it, but also for the firm’s own “children”—employees—to discover files they are not supposed to see or access. Virtualization also makes is easier and less expensive to secure mission critical resources, since the most aggressive security efforts can focus on a single “pocket” rather than the entire coat.

Virtualization used to be considered one of the more advanced IT solutions, but that is no longer the case. Managed services firms routinely orchestrate virtualization for their customers. However, the best, most experienced managed IT services companies proactively work with organizations to ensure virtualization solutions optimize security and productivity while minimizing cost and complexity.

Selection of an IT outsourcing company is a very important business decision. For almost a quarter century, Atlanta’s small to mid-sized businesses have relied on DynaSis’ for managed IT services, internet security, and 24 x 7 x 365 helpdesk support. Today, with cybercrime becoming an ever-increasing threat, DynaSis has become an industry leader in network protection and ransomware prevention. Please take a tour through our website at www.DynaSis.com or speak with a technical expert at 678.218.1769.

By the DynaSis Team

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We recently saw an article on virtualization that also discussed “data protection.” That is not surprising, given that a Google search of the term “data protection” returns 269,000 results. What caught our attention was the use of those two words to describe protecting corporate data from loss or corruption. While that is the traditional technology definition of data protection, it is different than data security, which is protecting your data from unauthorized and/or inappropriate access, storage or use by insiders or outsiders.

This distinction has been muddied recently by issues surrounding data privacy. One example is the demise of “Safe Harbor”– a policy agreement that governed how U.S. entities would handle the data of European Union (EU) citizens. The agreement expired and is being replaced with a new approach, Privacy Shield, which you can read about here. Articles about it, and the negotiations between the U.S. and EU, often referred to “data protection” as a quick way of saying “ensuring data privacy through clearly defined safeguards.”

The Scoop on Data Protection

To set the record straight from a technology perspective, data protection is a collective term for a firm’s plan to evaluate, catalog and protect information assets from application/user/machine malfunctions and errors, malware or other detrimental software, and facility outages/disruptions. Data protection encompasses such efforts as backup, storage and recovery.

As mentioned above, data protection also includes preventing or limiting data loss due to malware attacks. However, for the purposes of this definition, it doesn’t include data privacy or intrusion detection/prevention. Those efforts are vital to organizational safety, but from the viewpoint of an IT support company, they fall under the category of data security.

When managed properly, either in-house or through a managed services provider, data protection should include data lifecycle management (DLM). With DLM, organizations proactively control data not only during its effective useful life but also afterward, when they no longer need ongoing access to it but may be required to maintain it for compliance or other requirements. DLM covers data archiving as well as data disposal in a manner that does not allow its retrieval.

Data protection can also include such efforts as continuous data protection (CDP), where automated technology updates enterprise backups as changes to the primary systems are made. Backup generally occurs on a schedule that corresponds to the business owner’s risk tolerance, which might mean truly continual backup or could involve taking a “snapshot” of the data every hour, day or even week.

Data protection is a big, complicated and important topic requiring an in-depth IT solution, so we will discuss it frequently, sharing news we come across. Next week, we’ll discuss desktop virtualization, a type of virtualization that be a boost to data protection, when configured properly.

Specializing in managed IT services and network security, Atlanta based DynaSis has been supporting small to midsized business for almost a quarter century. Among the services we provide are cloud computing through the DynaSis Business Cloud, 24 x 7 x 365 helpdesk support, and real-time monitoring enabling us to deal with “issues” before they become problems. For more information, please call DynaSis at 678.218.1769 or visit www.DynaSis.com.

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By the DynaSis Team

Almost as long as there have been heroes and villains, there have been stories about “super powers”—superhuman or supernatural abilities possessed by normal humans. So prevalent are these “powers” in history and fiction that Wikipedia lists more than 250 of them.

Organizations can have (or appear to have) super powers, too. While they may not be paranormal or supernatural, the most successful businesses all have attributes that make their customers and competitors say, “How do they do that so well?” “It doesn’t seem possible!”

Here’s an example. Some businesses not only anticipate when customers need to reorder products; they also project what other products and services the firms will want or need, next. They know exactly when to approach their customers, as if they were reading the decision makers’ minds.

In reality, these companies and their sales people are likely harnessing and analyzing available data to discern patterns and then making educated assumptions. Ten years ago, this wasn’t possible, but a new crop of business intelligence tools is revolutionizing the information and insight available to proactive firms.

Technology Has Super Powers, Too

Super powers can appear in any area of the business. Since DynaSis is an information technology (IT) and managed IT services firm, our President, David (Dave) Moorman, focused on technology when he began exploring super powers. At first glance, one might assume that technology super powers are all related to operation, such as the ability to keep systems and networks functional 99.999% of the time.

Although availability (along with mobility and security) is a cornerstone of business success, it’s not, by itself, a super power. Dave determined that the greatest technology super power is something most organizational leaders don’t consider. He calls it “technology capability,” which he defines as “an organization’s ability to create business value through its IT assets and competency.”

IT hardware and software can support business functions, but by themselves they don’t propel a company’s success. Similarly, having workers that can use technology at a basic level may get tasks done, but it won’t take a business to the top. Rather, companies that develop true IT capability are those that have adopted the most appropriate technologies and are using them in the most effective ways—and whose employees are working with them in a collaborative, connected fashion.

As Dave noted in his article, Technology Capability: Your Business “Super Power,” which you can download here, “IT assets alone do not equal capability. How a company makes use of those assets, and how well it integrates them—both with one another and across the enterprise—is what drives organizational prosperity, competitiveness, agility and innovation.”

Such an approach promotes outcomes where the total accomplishment is greater than the sum of its parts. In doing so, organizations can take a significant step towards becoming a business “super power,” themselves. In the article referenced above, Dave digs into the specifics of how organizational leaders can begin this journey by developing IT capability for their own firms. We hope you will enjoy reading it.

For small to midsized business owners and executives who are concerned about managed IT support services and network threat protection, DynaSis is one company that has been at the forefront since 1992. In this ever evolving world of cybercrime, crypto virus and network access protection have become critical to every company’s security. DynaSis also provides 24 x 7 x 365 outsourced managed IT services, with its own trained staff for helpdesk, real-time monitoring and the DynaSis Business Cloud, for highly secure data storage and backup. You can find out more by calling us at 678.218.1769, or checking out our website at www.DynaSis.com.