Moving to the Cloud? See How Hiring a MSP Can Help

Your transition to the cloud is a critical process and involves numerous activities that affect various aspects of your business. It’s definitely not something you deal with on daily basis. So, hiring the services of professionals is a better alternative. Hosting your business on the cloud is an opportunity to enjoy flexible, expandable data management sources while cutting down on expenses. But before migration, businesses must weigh the advantages and disadvantages of the cloud environments. These are better known by experts as they are well-versed with the technicalities of the cloud. A custom strategy is vital to get enterprises up and running faster in the cloud environment with reduced overall costs.

Here is why you need the services of managed service providers (MSPs):

To avoid investment in IT technicians – Organizations require a dedicated team of technicians to monitor the cloud migration process. However, once migration is complete, the investment will seem to be unworthy and unproductive. MSPs accept various modes of payment and you can select the one that suits your budget.

To save on the infrastructural expenses – It is wise to delegate the job to MSPs as organizations cannot afford to arrange for the computer systems that are configured to suffice the cloud migration process.

To avail the services of specially trained engineers – Many details are understood better by the specially trained engineers employed with MSPs. Your in-house IT technicians may not be able to solve issues as they occur.

Organizations may experience many other pitfalls while the process is on and at that emergency hour, it would be difficult to manage apt solutions for the problems. Manpower, bandwidth, or architecture are some of such areas where unpredictable needs may arises leading to a situation of crisis. Fortunately, collaborating with MSPs can pacify the process of your transition to the cloud with its high availability, resiliency, or disaster recovery – freeing up internal IT staff to focus on more strategic projects.

Net Activity, Inc. is one such managed service provider that is dominantly serving its customers for cloud migration and management. We are leading providers of public, private and hybrid cloud computing solutions including cloud assets, IPs and services that are customized to meet the diverse business requirements. We would like to help you through the cloud migration.

Call Harry Bhatia at 2165035150 X 206 to know about the details or visit our website http://www.netactivity.us/ to understand what we offer.

Source: http://www.netactivity.us/blog/moving-to-cloud-see-how-hiring-a-msp-can-help/

Is Aging Computer Equipment Costing You Money?

 “Oh no… Not again!” exclaims every business owner whenever new technology enters the market. Small business owners are better reflectors of what happens in the background when any of its computer equipment reaches the retirement age. Most of them tend to continue using older equipment until it completely fails; not a smart move indeed. Although this has not been the case with pro-active businessmen who meticulously keep an eye on the movement of technology, there is a certain part of the business that is hampered.

Yes. The aging computer equipment is costing you money, in fact, a huge chunk of the investment. Let’s understand the hows:

Repairing costs > Replacement costs: The cost of repairing the sluggish PCs or other computer accessories equals or even exceeds the cost of purchasing a new one. According to a global survey by Techaisle, small businesses spend $427 on the repairs of a 4 year old PC on an average which is 1.3 times costlier than to repair a PC that is less than 4 years old or replace with a new one.

Underutilization of Employee Productivity: We often miss out the technological component while measuring and assessing employee productivity. The Techaisle study revealed that an average of 42 productive hours is lost while the older PCs are being repaired which is twice as the unproductive time due to PCs which are less than 4 years old.

Struggle with the New Technology: The aged computer equipment is weak to handle the newer versions of the software. Compatibility issues are huge as the drivers get out of date. Automatic software updates force the business owners’ hands by pushing computers to their fullest capabilities. This consumes a considerable amount of hidden costs that are accountable for less productivity and profits.

Downtime Issues: Bearing the burden of non-productive hours and loss of opportunities as well as profits during the most profitable months is not what any of the businesses operate for. However, if businesses tend to push their hardware until it blows up severely bad, this is really critical. It results into a dual-end loss: replacing the old hardware along with the unforeseeable losses due to downtime.

Business Looks Outdated: As you wouldn’t walk into a business meeting wearing a 1970’s suit, your clients, employees and customers wouldn’t be impressed to see clunky old desktops and laptop computers. It wouldn’t be a pleasant scene to watch your employees struggle to connect to a local printer – they and others connected to your business naturally tend to think that your entire business is behind the times.

If you are already calculating the costs of your aging computers, it is a good start. We can definitely help you with replacing your hardware, machines, and network components. Call Harry Bhatia at 2165035150 X 206 to discuss how much it will cost you. For initial details, please visit http://www.netactivity.us/ and find out how we can help your business requirements.

Net Activity, Inc. offers services to all sizes of businesses with skilled server handling, network management and, computer maintenance including  complete IT solutions like system installation, IT consulting, data security, storage solutions, helpdesk, maintenance & support and hardware repair.

Source: http://www.netactivity.us/blog/is-aging-computer-equipment-costing-you-money/

Urgent Solutions for VoIP Security Issues

Until now, voice over internet protocol (VoIP) security has been overshadowed by the attractiveness of this new technology. But the intelligent users of today proactively raised the question of security of the internet telephony as a result of increasing vulnerability of the internet environment.

Let’s understand the vulnerabilities:

Starting with the basics, we know that these audio streams are accessible to anyone with network access. Voice over IP can be decoded by Eavesdroppers as they tap the audio conversations in an unsecured VoIP Environment. How about an eavesdropper overhearing the news of layoffs that management is planning? It can be dangerous as leaking out extremely confidential information of the management is really not what is expected of a sophisticated IT network. Hackers are all set to attack servers with irrelevant queries or requests making it inaccessible for legitimate users. This may lead to ruining the complete data structure of an organization.

What are the alternatives?

The VoIP communications may use one or more channels (TCP/UDP) connections which need to be secured – authenticated and encrypted. The VoIP network can be secured by:

• Authorization
• Transport Layer Security (TLS)
• Authentication
• Media Encryption (SRTP)

Authorization: The devices must be configured in a manner to allow traffic from a selected group of IP addresses. This mechanism shields the device from denial-of-service attacks to some extent.

Transport Layer Security: The TLS Protocol provides privacy and data integrity between two communicating applications. It allows only SIP signaling with other devices and permits applications to communicate in a way that prevents message forgery, tampering, and eavesdropping. With this, it will be mandatory for clients to set up a TLS/SSL connection to the server and exchange encrypted SIP messages on the secure connection.

Authentication: It requires the participating VoIP devices to authenticate each other before starting conversations. Thereby, it becomes nearly impossible for hackers to mislead/fake identities.

Media Encryption: SRTP (secure real-time transport protocol) is a security profile that adds confidentiality to the protocol and is ideal for protecting the voice over IP traffic. It also provides replay protection and achieves low packet and high throughput expansion by using fast–stream ciphers for encryption an implicit index for synchronization, and universal hash functions for message authentication. SRTP ensures confidentiality of the RTP payload, the integrity protection of the entire RTP packet (including protection against replayed RTP packets), and implicit authentication of the header. SRTP serves as a suitable choice for the most general scenarios as well as the most demanding ones.

Most of the VoIP vendors have pledged in to provide VoIP network services that are competitive enough to provide you a secure communication platform. The VoIP security issue is not “as” critical as it is hyped up. It’s just that hackers are alluded to interfere with the voice flowing through data networks. If you avail the services of a reliable VoIP service provider, the purpose of having an uninterrupted secure network will be solved.

Net Activity, Inc. comes along with high quality, reliable cloud-based solutions that future-proofs your communication systems. With our expert services, you will experience limitless call routing features, and an effective, intuitive user interface. For more details, please visit http://www.netactivity.us/voip-business-phone-services.html or call Harry Bhatia at 216 503 5150.

Source: http://www.netactivity.us/blog/urgent-solutions-for-voip-security-issues/

How to be Safe While Moving to the Cloud Infrastructure

We all live in an era where the digital workspace is known by the name Cloud. Unlike the earlier times, cloud migration is no longer an option; it is an imperative part of businesses responsible for speeding up processes, reducing costs and establishing flexibility. Almost all the businesses, irrespective of whether technology-based or not, due to the convenience and cost-efficiency (of course, when done right), are moving to the cloud infrastructure.

Moving to the cloud environment affects no single but many components of the business including information, personnel, expenses, security, and performance. To extract the advantages of cloud computing to the maximum, business owners as well as IT managers must diligently avoid the following mistakes that have led to hefty losses to some businesses:

• Selection of wrong service package – Many companies end up paying for services they don’t need and lose agility and control.
• Neglecting connectivity in lieu of saving on costs – You cannot afford to lose even a single minute productivity of thousands of employees which can cost you a hefty loss of thousands of dollars per minute. Some cloud computing service providers may try to lure you with cost saving options but you need to be extra careful in such cases.
• Overlooking disaster recovery exercises – A proper disaster recovery plan (not just backup) allows businesses to be stable during unfavorable situations too.
• Visioning only for the short-term – While opting for a cloud computing solution, many organizations look at their short term goals and analyze what cloud can do for them at that instant. This can lead to unintentional design limitations that could have easily been avoided.
• Underestimating the time and bandwidth required for moving large data sets – Due to network speed limits, large chunks of data require longer duration to be moved. Organizations must rationally understand that speed largely affects the cloud’s performance.

Benefits of cloud computing are many, however, in the current scenario, what speaks dominantly is how a business extracts the maximum out of the cloud computing solutions. For a better insight over cloud computing mechanism and to help you decide on the service provider you must trust, you ought to get impartial suggestions & advice from experts.

Net Activity Inc. is a leading provider of proven cloud computing solutions. Completely dedicated to its services and customer satisfaction, the team popularly addresses its customers’ diverse cloud requirements along with offering a robust environment. For more details on how our cloud services are way ahead of others, please visit http://www.netactivity.us/cloud-computing-services.html or contact Harry Bhatia at 2165035150 X 206.

Source: http://www.netactivity.us/blog/how-to-be-safe-while-moving-to-the-cloud-infrastructure/

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