Managed Service Provider: The Power of The Cloud

businessman-holding-cloud-in-hands_fyirfkh_aI’ve been in business for seventeen years. For the last seventeen of those years, I have dreaded talking to casual friends about what I do.

The result is inevitable when I’m asked the question “What do you do?”

“I work with computers.”

Pause. “Say my computer has been acting funny lately, do you think you could fix it?” The problem can be one of a myriad of different things. Overwhelming spam. A detected virus. A failed hard drive.

Someone who knows me causally hasn’t seen me agonize over my work. How I struggle to return computers to normal when the catastrophic has happened. The average user will suffer with unusual computer responses when the fixes are easy, but the catastrophic forces them to seek professional help.

In the industry, its called “break and fix.” Of course, they believe in a magical wizard who knows all, sees all, and can fix all. His name is “the computer guy.”

So, when they abandon all hope, they take their computer to “the computer guy” sheepishly admitting that they couldn’t keep this event from happening.

Unfortunately, at the moment of crisis is when the fixes are usually the most costly. For that reason, I have always winced when I get asked the question, “what do you do?”

You see when I have to quote something, I have to tell you my rates and for an individual, that CAN be breath stopping. $75/hr. 1 hour minimum. Most repairs take 3 hours for $225.

That is usually the end of that conversation.

That is also unfortunate. I want to help. I want to add value to every person, so it is frustrating that I get contacted at the end when the destruction is the worst and the costs the highest. In most cases, I end up telling them to go to The Geeks (Best Buy) who have all kinds of tools and automation and can usually fix most things for about $150.

I am so thankful, however, that there is now a new alternative to Break and Fix. My partners call it “Monitor and Maintain.” What a better way to approach life. Rather than waiting till there is a loss of function, why not check in routinely and keep things up to snuff?

Because of the Internet, the growth of “Cloud” services like Amazon Web Services, and some very, very smart programmers, we no longer have to wait until the system fails for proactive work to occur. We can make sure your computer is up to date on its latest patches, we can actively detect suspicious activity which might indicate that an unknown and undetected virus is at work, and we can actively check every connection made from your computer to the Internet to confirm that it is a legitimate connection. On top of that, we can maintain perfect images of your computer so that if anything goes wrong, we can restore you back to functionality within minutes or hours instead of days and weeks.

And beyond that, we can also take a partnership role in protecting you from identity theft and ransomware by ensuring that your computer does not contain unprotected personal identifier information (PII) and does have good backups of your most precious resource, the documents that you have created.

A recent IBM study has estimated that every data breach in 2015 cost business $4.0 million and that each lost PII record was worth $150. Most ransomware has priced the threshold at which a person is willing to pay to get back their documents is $500.

Because of the power of the Internet, though, your cost to protect yourself from these threats is much lower. Today, we can protect you profitably for as little as $8.95/mo ($107/yr). With full active and recovery services starting as low as $226/yr.

Managed Service Providers are here to help you ensure your family’s future and security 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Timely, proactive, and cost effective, a Managed Service Provider, like me, could be your answer to looking at the world a little less fearfully.

Please visit my website and check out more about what Managed Service Provider means to you and your technology today.