CITOC - Houston IT Service Experts

First off, we here at CITOC hope everyone came out of the hurricane safe and sound. If anybody is in a jam and needs immediate assistance, please feel free to reach out to us. We would be happy to help you get back on your feet. For CITOC and our customers, hard work and due diligence once again paid off in the face of adversity and unforeseen circumstances. With disaster recovery plans already in place before the storm, and our outstanding technical staff manning our 24/7 support desk, we were able to ensure all our customers came out the other side of hurricane Beryl in great shape. These moments remind us of the importance of preparedness in not just our businesses, but our personal lives as well. Stay strong Houston.

So, what is the key to CITOC being in business for over 29 years? Well, as our names acronym reminds us, Change Is The Only Constant, and if you do not evolve and change with the times, you will be left behind. It use to be that an MSP was known by the quality of service they provided their customers. Then every MSP focused in on quality service and things became crowded at the top. A new metric needed to be added to create separation from competitors and the birth of response time came in to being. Now MSP's were making the claims that they would respond to incidents faster then anyone else. After a few years, it once again became crowded at the top. Next metric please! The MSP industry welcomed in Average Resolution Time! So now, not only was the service good, and the time to react to incidents fast, but the resolution of the incidents was also coming down. Welcome in the 4th Age of MSP's! Incident prevention! Now our goal at CITOC is to try to eliminate problems before users ever even experience them! How do we do this? Through our 300 best practices and the proactive monitoring of our customers environments. By applying our rigorous standards to our customers environments, and by constantly monitoring the equipment and software used every day, we are able to drastically reduce the number of incidents. This has helped our customers avoid disastrous incidents, improve overall productivity, and become more profitable. So how do we stand in these 4 areas of measurement? Customer Satisfaction: 97%. Average response time: 8 minutes. Average resolution time: 30 minutes. Incident prevention: 300% decrease in incidents within the first year. Not too shabby if you ask me 😁 We down here at CITOC hope you all have a happy and safe 4th of July!

Happy Friday Everyone! Here are some cybersecurity facts you may or may not know... 1. Only 4% of organizations feel confident about their protection vs. cyberattacks. 2. The global cybersecurity workforce is estimated to be around 4.7 million people. 3. 93% of organizations expect to increase cybersecurity spending over the next year. Take away? Time to start thinking about cybersecurity before you become a statistic.

Did you know that CITOC has been serving the managed IT needs of The Greater Houston Area for over 29 years? Also, every month, we close roughly 1000 tickets, and for every ticket we send out a survey to our customers. Our average score for those surveys over the past 6 months has been 96%. Now you know! Have a great week everyone!

A very common question we hear from business owners, is whether or not they should hire an IT person, or outsource their IT management to an MSP (managed service provider) like CITOC. Although the answer is different for each business (when is there ever an actual clear answer to anything right?), here are 5 things to take into consideration. 1. In Houston, where we are, a full time IT person on average gets paid 95K. 2. On average, one IT person can manage roughly 50 users. 3. In most cases, a server admin is separate from an IT support person. 4. If a work environment is not standardized, i.e.. different brands, different operating systems, different device types, it can add a multiplier to required IT support people needed. 5. Environments that have regulatory concerns and compliancy issues add another level of expertise required from the IT staff adding yet another multiplier. The numbers above were just pulled from Google and depending on source may differ, however, the general idea remains the same. An example... Company with 50 employees, a standard environment, no servers, and no regulatory or compliance requirements. $95,000/year or $7,900/month in personnel costs. $7,900 / 50 users = $158/month per user. That is the best case scenario for cost per user. Add more complicated environments, regulatory / compliancy concerns, and servers, and that cost jumps up quite a bit. If you have a question about what choice is right for your company, please feel free to shoot us a message and we would be happy to help you come to the right solution.

Spoofing (to hoax or trick someone), unlike in the days of Three's Company, is no joke. Criminals are becoming increasingly advanced in their techniques. Here are some great tips to avoid being spoofed... 1. If it seems odd or out of place, take time to double check. In this case, call Jeff or walk across the street and ask if he sent an email asking for a donation. 2. Hover links in emails to see if they go to a legit website. If you are not familiar with the website, your spidey senses should go off and a deeper look into this is needed. 3. Google the title or contents of the email to see if anyone else has experienced something similar. I find that the online community in general has your back. 4. Make sure to use antivirus protection. In the event that you get fooled and go to a website that is attempting to upload a virus onto your computer, having a strong antivirus program such as Webroot, McAfee, or Norton can save your behind. 5. Get into the habit of always using MFA (multi factor authentication). You are not perfect, and in those times you let your guard down, having MFA on websites and services that offer it can be a second line of defense (first being your spidey sense). 6. Try using a password manager like Last Pass and not using the same password on every website you log in to. Again, this is in case you have a slip. If all your passwords are the same a hacker can run it through a program and login to hundreds of sites in minutes to check for juicy targets. If anyone else has some tips to share with the community I look forward to seeing them in the comments. Have an amazing Friday everyone and stay vigilant! Jeff

𝗣𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 is common practice in most peoples every day lives. We apply it to our diets, bodies, minds, but oddly enough, not so much to the technology we use every day at our business. What if I told you that you are losing out on 𝗮 𝘁𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝘀𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 by not applying preventative practices to your technology at work? For the purpose of this post we will consider 1 support ticket per user per month, a 45 minute response time, and a 2.5 hour resolution time to be IT support industry averages. And no...I am not hear to tell you how much better CITOC's numbers are then these averages, I am hear to tell you about how prevention can have a drastic impact on reducing these averages and save your company a ton of downtime / money. You see, it is not about responding faster or resolving issues in less time, it is about 𝗴𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗿𝗶𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗸𝗲𝘁𝘀 𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗼𝗴𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿. Here are some tips on creating a more preventative environment for your IT at the workplace... 1. Standardize your environment. Try and have every employee use the same software, same hardware, and same security protocols when possible. 2. Stay up to date with patches and updates to your hardware and software. 3. Incorporate some sort of back-up plan so that in the event you do have a failure, restoring files is a click away when the failure has been addressed. 4. Seek out technology solutions that can potentially help reduce workload and redundancies at the workplace. By incorporating these at any level at the workplace, you can help shave the amount of tickets your company submits for support by up to half or even more. This means that a workplace with 40 employees can save up to 65 hours a month of lost time. How much is your employees time worth to you? NO, these numbers are not gospel, just the message is. I created a great spreadsheet that helps show potential savings a business can create by being preventative. If anyone would like a copy of it, or would like to learn more about this important topic, please let me know.

Just a quick note to all that we have a new Facebook page! Come visit us there, give us a follow, or a like, or both! Feel free to get involved in future conversations 😀 https://lnkd.in/gmwSWAqW

Great insight!

Preventative vs. Reactive in the MSP Space For decades, the benchmarks for MSP's has revolved around response time, resolution time, and cost per seat. As an industry, it has made the MSP space very one dimensional, where the ability to react to problems, and how much an MSP charges to do that, creates a price war, and price wars inevitably lead to poorer service. I am not an MSP mastermind, I have actually only been in the MSP world for around a month. I came from the healthcare world where our focus was on trying to help patients avoid complicated medical futures by focusing on prevention in the now. Well, when I decided to make a career move, I spoke to a few different people in different industries to find a good fit for my skill set...selling prevention. When I met Ben Farmer and David Grooms, I was excited to learn all about CITOC - Houston IT Service Experts and how they were taking a different approach to the MSP model. They believe that prevention is the future of managed IT services. Not that fast response times, quick resolutions and fair pricing is not important, but that if we focused on reducing the occurrences of IT issues by implementing preventative practices we could actually shift the perspective from being a cost to our clients to that of being a source for savings. I am super excited to be here at CITOC and look forward to helping as many people I can make the change from reaction to prevention, and from cost to savings by enabling the preventative IT approach vs. the reactive one. If you would like to connect, or learn more about what we do and how we can help transform your business from reactive to preventative, please feel free to reach out and we can talk it out.