- What is a Managed Service Provider?
- Just like your car needs maintenance and monitoring, so too does your IT environment. A managed service provider provides the ongoing management, monitoring, and support for all areas of your IT environment to make sure you stay secure, up to date, and meet the needs of your business goals and plans. We are an extension of your company there to lend an IT helping hand whenever needed.
- What exactly is "The Cloud?"
- You hear people talk about "The Cloud" as if it is some magical place where all your data lives in a happy little world full of unicorns and fairy tales. In reality "The Cloud" is nothing more than you using resources on someone else's equipment. Rather than you buying servers for email, web, file storage, etc., why not let Microsoft, Amazon or Google foot that bill and you just pay a monthly fee to use their services. But if it helps to imagine your data in a nice unicorn inhabited fairyland, please don't let us stop you.
- Explain VOIP?
- When talking about phone systems we get this question a ton, and in reality there is a very simplistic definition. In the "Olden Days," every phone had to have a phone line that was then tied back to a phone system. Physical wires connected each phone so when a phone call came in the system new which wire to send the signal. Jump forward to today and we have the lovely Internet that we can rely on. With VOIP (Voice over INTERNET Protocol), you can simply plug a VOIP phone into any jack or wireless network that has a connection to the internet. The phone automatically reaches out to the hosted phone system, hopefully hosted with Strategic Technology, and the phone system now sees that phone/extension and can route calls to it over the internet.
- Do I Really Need to "Eject" USB Drives?
- If you are impatient like me, any time you unplug a USB device from the computer you simply yank the cable and walk away. But as I tell my kids, you "should do as I say and not as I do." The problem with just yanking a USB drive from the computer is that your computer is constantly reading/writing to that drive. If you just yank it, it could be in the middle of a process and your data may become corrupt. So YES, you really should "Eject" a USB drive, which tells the computer to finish any jobs it has and safely eject the drive.