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What a Los Angeles IT Support Company Should Do

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Outsourcing Los Angeles IT support can be wonderful or it can be a nightmare. The difference stems from how outside companies go about providing their services. Here are a few things your IT company should do to make sure everything goes smoothly.

Understand Your Business and Existing Software

Too often, IT support companies try to use one-size-fits-all solutions that actually fit almost no one. For example, they’ll provide call-in support that’s only available during standard business hours even if your company is using its computers 24/7. Alternatively, they’ll recommend that everyone use the same suite of software even if half of it would be of no use to you.

If your company has been struggling with one of these cookie-cutter providers, it’s time to make a change. Your provider should come to your company and stay as long as it takes to get a good feel for how you do things. They should learn all of the ins and outs of your software and systems so that they can offer true help when their techs are approached with problems. If they suggest new solutions, they should choose ones that you can integrate without undue disruption to your current processes. Then, you’ll get the benefits you’ve been looking for.

 

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Best IT Support Company Downtown Los Angeles

 

Offer a Variety of IT Support Services

Since every company is different, a Los Angeles IT support company should offer several support options. A full range, going all the way from business-hours call-in support all the way to full IT department operation, ensures that everyone can quickly get the help they need. Such a range of services also ensures that your outsourced support provider can keep up with changes at your company. This is essential for growing companies. Businesses that are on their way up may go from needing to ask a few IT questions all the way to requiring full support in just a year or two. When your company is growing like that, you don’t want to have to turn your attention from its essentials just to find a new provider.

Offer Consulting Services

Sometimes, there’s no getting around the fact that your current software or hardware solutions really aren’t solving anything. That’s when you need to bring in something new. If you have little or no idea what that “something” should be, you need to be able to turn to your IT support provider for suggestions. A good provider is willing to come to your location to discuss your needs, watch current operations, and then suggest the best solution for your budget and requirements. These providers won’t just suggest whatever is easiest for them to handle. They’ll truly look for the options that will work best for your specific operations.

Offer IT Management Services

Sometimes, companies need more than just “support.” If you’d like to outsource your entire IT division or its management, a full-service provider will be able to handle the job.

Be Up on Modern Developments

There is a fine line between being modern and being so cutting edge that everything is in perpetual beta. The best IT support companies will suggest options that are both modern and stable. Of course, it also needs to suggest the solutions that will actually be helpful to your business. Your company can then get all of the benefits of newer developments like cloud-based software and hosting – without increasing the risk of system instability.

These are just some of the things that set GeekTek above the cookie-cutter IT support houses. To learn more about us and how we can help your company get the most from technology, just contact us. We’ll be happy to set up an initial consultation and suggest the services that will best help your company.

How Los Angeles Businesses Can Use Cloud Computing

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Cloud computing has almost completely taken over the IT world for both individuals and businesses. At its root, it is simply the practice of using services, software, and even hardware that are hosted remotely. While it first seemed like there wouldn’t be a point in this, it has turned out that there are many significant benefits. This is why the practice has spread so widely over just the last few years. Here are some of the ways your business can use it to save money, improve security, and help prevent data loss:

Cloud Hosting

This replaces the old practice of using your own servers in the traditional way. Instead of running your own facility or physically placing servers in rented data center space, you set up an account at a cloud hosting provider. What makes this different from traditional server hosting is that the plans offer much more flexibility. It used to be that if you needed to change the amount of disk space or processing power your company used, you’d have to migrate to an entirely different machine. With cloud hosting, there is no such requirement. You just click the right buttons on your account screen and you’re done.

Cloud Computing – Software as a Service

This is likely the most popular form of cloud computing. Instead of buying software, you sign up for an account that gives you access to your desired program. What’s the point of this? Believe it or not, it’s not just to keep the money coming into the software companies. They provide many benefits for signing up, such as:

  • Automatically applied updates
  • The security power of a big software company
  • Security against disaster-related data loss
  • A stable operating environment for the software
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Cloud Computing Is Popular In Los Angeles

Automatically applied updates make it so that you don’t have to go through downtime during the process. It’s all done on the company’s side, and they make sure that customers still have access while they handle the technical aspects.

Cloud service companies also have the money and technicians needed to ensure that the software and your data are as secure as possible. You won’t have to either try to figure out security settings for yourself or hope that your technician gets around to applying patches.

Disaster-related data loss is all but unheard of with SaaS. That’s because the provider will store your relevant data on its servers, which puts it out of range of any fires or other disasters that befall your physical location. For even more protection against data loss, you can easily download backups to your computers so that a disaster on the provider’s end won’t be able to get to it either. This way, at least one copy of your data will be available to you at all times.

The stability of the operating environment is something that is usually talked about by techies, but it’s very important. Many software crashes result from the fact that IT providers don’t know every possible environment that their software will be running on. By hosting it themselves, they only have to worry about one actual operating configuration: their own. It’s far easier to prevent crashes under these conditions.

Conclusion

With these benefits, it’s no wonder that cloud computing is popular in Los Angeles and is still growing every day. Popular corporate software dealing with things like accounting, other recordkeeping, word processing, and more are already offered in this format. Hardware, such as servers, PBX systems, and similar machines have also been moved to the cloud. Contact us to learn which of these offerings we think are worth using and to find out other cloud-based services that we suggest you adopt for your company.

Different Levels of IT Support in Los Angeles

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Your business depends on computers for normal operations, and any interruption to present software applications leaves employees without the tools for their jobs. During a business interruption, you can direct them to focus on other tasks, but there’s an immediate impact on overall productivity. While this kind of disruption is manageable at times, it can become a pattern that hurts your business, especially without reliable IT support. It’s important to build the right level of technical support for all personnel so they may perform in accordance with their individual job expectations. We understand that your organization will have changing needs throughout the year.

Our Level of Services Can Grow With Your Organization

As your organization adopts IT support in Los Angeles, it makes sense that you will adjust the level of services over time. The most flexible companies can respond with different levels of support under dynamic business conditions. Here, we discuss several scenarios that require someone on your staff to manage service demands, which allows our technical team to be more responsive:

Initial IT Support

There is the initial level of support that employees need from IT people every time we perform a major new installation of hardware or software. When employees see us coming, they get that feeling of anxiety that they must learn something new. With a little bit of training and some on-site support, they will soon learn to use any new system or application.

Also Read: What a Los Angeles IT Support Company Should Do

System Failures

There are also times when some or all systems in your IT network can fail. There could be a power outage or a major server that goes down. This feels like the business is temporarily crippled, which can make it difficult to meet customer needs. When employees cannot use their computer applications to do their work tasks, they may bombard the helpdesk with complaints. We cannot always give them the answers that they want, but letting them know when interrupted services will be restored is our specialty.

Software Upgrades

A software application that your company already uses may require updates when bugs are evident or when a newer version becomes available. As your trusted IT people, we work with your contact to schedule upgrades at non-peak times, but sometimes this process can slow the network down or temporarily lock people out of applications. Employees need to understand that software upgrades will lead to access to better tools for doing their work.

Also Read: What Makes for Good IT Support in Los Angeles?

The Takeaway

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Levels of IT Support in Los Angeles

These scenarios and more make it crucial to have the right point person requesting your current needs for our professional IT services. We want you to have a good working relationship with our IT support firm. Our relationship will grow over time through two-way communication and delivery of all support that you request within your budget.

Planning is Key

We encourage you to appoint a lead technology officer in your company. This might not be a person’s main job, and you might not have anyone on your staff who can do it. You might even need someone from our side of things to act as a temporary CIO, especially if you want to plan major IT upgrades. We understand that your company may not appreciate all existing gaps in IT infrastructure or know what upgrades to make. We can help you plan how to meet heightened levels of need. When you request additional support so that employees can satisfy consumer demands, we will be there to help. Every person on your staff will have a learning curve as we make IT improvements, especially to feel more confident about using new hardware or software. Our IT experts can take the time to support every operational area.

To adjust services based on changing business demands, please contact us. We provide expert IT support in Los Angeles.

Why You Need Los Angeles IT Support for Better Data Integration

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Many of today’s companies recognize the need to bring their existing data infrastructure to the next level. They want to compete in the IoT world. They know that other companies already use predictive analytics solutions to anticipate what consumers will do. However, not all companies are sure how to create the right data infrastructure for their people to use for decision-making. In fact, the ability to analyze business intelligence data is expected to keep improving. It’s really a matter of your company choosing the right data solutions.

Moving Towards Data Integration

We find that many companies in Los Angeles want to move towards better data integration. Without upgrading your company’s tech stack capacity, it’s hard to use real-time data, such as website clicks and user-inputted information, for business decisions. You want to package data for specific uses in your own internal databases. With data processing throughout your company every business day, instead of at the end of the day, your servers can easily distribute refined information to anyone in the company, which they then use for strategic decision-making. To leaders without an IT background, the process of data integration is mysterious, but very necessary for the company’s future success.

Also Read: Different Levels of IT Support in Los Angeles

What Does the CIO Say?

The need for increased data integration is usually the purview of a company’s CIO, or chief information officer. A company with a CIO has the expert leadership needed to plan and implement the transition to full data integration, which is crucial to a consumer-driven business model. A company without CIO leadership can temporarily hire a virtual CIO to advise on improvements to the IT infrastructure. Based on present business conditions and predicted trends, either type of CIO can offer a strategic perspective and determine how the budget will allow for immediate improvements. Along the way, a company with data integration needs will benefit from reliable Los Angeles it support, and we have a full staff of IT professionals whom you can trust.

Also Read: IT Consulting and Outsourcing a CIO

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Los Angeles IT Support for Better Data Integration

 

Get Help

We work on a project basis, provide managed IT services, and handle simple desktop and server support, just to name a few. It all depends on your company’s needs. We want to help your organization understand what we offer. In this blog post, we look at how data integration is something your company can’t afford to ignore. We want you to understand the answer to this question: How do you move a gazillion bits of data through a queue in real time?

One approach is data streaming through a solution such as Apache Kafka, a tool developed by LinkedIn. This is just one example of how companies build data infrastructure for their streaming processes, and it’s based in part on open-source software. Kafka is a publish-subscribe messaging system that involves the distribution of data over multiple servers. One Kafka broker will easily accommodate hundreds of megabytes of reads and writes per second from thousands of clients. Each client is a server on the company’s computer network.

Why use one system like Apache Kafka for all of your database needs?

When we build server systems for clients such as those incorporating Apache Kafka, we help the client organization use a single set of servers as a central data hub. Believe it or not, just one cluster of Apache servers can do the entire job. This kind of system can expand in capacity without taking down any of the existing servers, and it handles data streams through partitioning. This is a process that essentially spreads data loads over a cluster of servers. Each data stream is larger than what one server can process.

We can help you choose the right combination of servers to process real-time data and use it for predictive analytics. For details on achieving better data integration, please contact us today.

Also Read: What a Los Angeles IT Support Company Should Do

The Los Angeles IT Support Forecast Is Cloud Services With A Chance Of Virtual CIOs

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Entering a partnership with a Los Angeles IT Support provider is the key to leveraging your LA-based small business with the expertise of professional IT management you need to compete in the modern business marketplace.

Managed Information Technology Services

There is no better way to say it; the future of business calls for lean and well-managed services, cloud computing, and virtual CIOs. Small companies can join the big leagues by focusing on core business competencies with technology experts assisting in partnership roles.

Your small firm may not have the resources of global corporations, but support is more available and less costly than it was even five years ago. Because of outsourcing services and the cloud, you can now have a share of resources that is bigger than your company could obtain previously.

Of Stars and Boulevards And Virtual CIOs

Your Chief Information Officer, if you have one, is the knowledgeable leader to whom you can turn for the right guidance and advice on what direction you take in technology. That means working to define and optimize your information systems. Now you can have the consultative support of a virtual CIO, who will collaborate with you to leverage the resources that larger companies take for granted without the associated high costs.

Access to support from an experienced CIO gives you a strategic edge that, until recently, has been the exclusive domain of large corporations. A CIO is vital for small businesses that must compete with global brands for contracts now. By having a CIO on your team, you can contend with larger competitors successfully.

The strategic guidance you gain from a CIO is critical to future success because change is the only thing that is permanent now. Disruptive technology has changed the business landscape in the last decade, and you can only expect more change to come. The incentives for innovation are so great that there are agents of change everywhere, and some will succeed and profit from the disruption they create.

The good news is that this state of affairs gives startups and small businesses the opportunity to enter bigger markets, but to join in you need to have the strategic insight of an executive information consultant as a partner and a CIO to render support.

 

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Los Angeles IT Support provider

Support To Save LA from Bad IT

Decision makers in companies have to start somewhere, and it depends on many things including luck as to how those decisions work out. Sometimes you look back and wish you would have done things differently, sometimes you get rewarded for your choices, and then there is that time that you just need to find help to get past the tech disaster that resulted from negligent IT services support.

The impact of inadequate IT support is even more devastating than you might expect. We are all dependent on our digital connections now, and it can bring your business to a halt if the support is not there. The only rescue from bad support is a strong dose of outstanding support to facilitate the recovery of your company, and this needs to come from IT professionals who understand what it takes to rescue companies from services that went wrong.

Los Angeles IT Support Based On Principles

GeekTek is a forward-looking IT support provider for Los Angeles-based companies. We combine professionalism with respect, discretion and integrity to deliver efficiency, reliability, and satisfaction to our clients, these principles guide us in every phase of the relationships with our customers.

We provide managed consulting services and cloud services as a committed partner in small business IT management; this includes GeekTek CIO services and bad IT service rescue. Whether you need support to find the right strategic direction or to recover from IT contracts, contact us to learn out how we can make the vital difference for the future of your company.

Let Managed IT Services Get Your Technology in Order

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As your company’s IT needs grow, it becomes harder to keep everything in order. Both software and hardware become obsolete over time, security patches need to be applied, and everyone who has any IT trouble needs to be helped. At first, it seems easy to keep up with things, but it doesn’t take long for the demands of the rest of the business to take the time that was once devoted to technology.

The best solution for this is to outsource your company’s IT needs. Managed IT services in Los Angeles can handle every aspect of your IT so that you and your staff can concentrate on the rest of the business. Here are some of the services they do:

Managed IT services in Los Angeles

The Initial Consultation

Good IT service providers don’t just set you up with a subscription for a generalized support call-in service and then leave. Instead, they come in and audit your current IT systems and operations, compare these with your business’ needs, and devise a full solution that will meet all of your tech-related requirements. By starting with this extensive consultation, they can be sure that what they offer won’t leave you hanging.

Once this is done, you’ll be offered a number of solutions based on what aspects of your IT operations you want them to manage. Even if you do turn out to only want telephone support services, you’ll get a better solution than you would if you went with a cut-rate provider. This is because a good, full-service provider will provide help that is based on your company’s technology and specific software and hardware configurations – not a generic help desk.

Also Read: 10 Things Our Managed IT Services In Los Angeles Can Do For You

Most companies will want more service than just call-in tech support. For example, your company may also need:

Hardware Suggestions

Computer hardware stays current longer than software, but it still becomes obsolete or insufficient on a regular basis. Your consultation will reveal aspects that are better off upgraded, hardware components that your current system is missing, and components that you can do away with. Making the recommended changes will make your systems more efficient, less prone to failure, and more stable. Often, upgrading or adjusting your hardware will increase software stability as well.

Software Suggestions

The software is what you and your staff will interact with the most, so your IT management company will spend the most time working with it and helping those in your company work with it. First, your IT consultant will suggest better types of software, needed upgrades and updates, and add-ons that will help you use technology to handle more of your business needs. You may be surprised to find that many of the things you are doing are now better done with cloud-based software and services. Using the cloud provides many benefits that can’t be matched with on-site installations, such as automatic updates and better security.

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Los Angeles Managed IT Services Provider

Also Read: Managed IT Services for Law Firms

Ongoing Management Solutions

Once everything has been upgraded and tuned, it’s time for the ongoing IT management services to begin. Depending on the size of your company, you may need anything from an onsite CIO and team all the way down to a call-in service center. Thanks to the extensive technology audit performed at the beginning of your relationship, the company will be able to suggest the perfect level of service for your needs.

After a plan is agreed to, techs will be brought to your location and trained in your specific hardware and software configuration. This will ensure that they can provide quick answers to tech questions that are genuinely useful. Your company’s IT needs will be fully taken care of, and you’ll be amazed at how much more efficiently things run.

To learn more and set up a consultation and technology audit, just contact us. We’ll be glad to help you get all of the benefits from IT that modern technology offers.

Anaheim Managed IT Services provider

Los Angeles Managed IT Services Provider