7 Backup Strategies for Your Data, Multimedia, and System Files

Nobody likes backing up, but one day, it’ll save your bacon. Here are the most efficient methods of protecting your stuff, no matter what your situation.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/170688/7_backup_strategies_for_your_data_multimedia_and_system_files.html

10 reasons why you should change your IT support

1. You’re always waiting for an engineer to get back to you.
2. Often your problem isn’t fixed 1^st time, and you have to wait days for a more experienced engineers to help.
3. Once your problem is solved, another one appears meaning your back on the phone waiting for an engineer again.
4. When you call you regularly get voicemail, and end up having to phone back again and again.
5. It’s never your IT companies fault; it’s always something to do with your software or hardware provider, leaving you to try and sort it out.
6. You have reoccurring problems that never get fixed.
7. Staff have very little confidence in your IT systems, and regularly complain about their computers being slow.
8. You spend more time looking at IT problems and chasing your IT support company than doing your own job.
9. Whilst your IT Company is always reacting to problems, you think it would be nice if they would be a bit more proactive and try to prevent problems from happening in the first place.
10. You wouldn’t recommend your IT Company to anyone else.

10 Reasons why you should choose Your IT Dept.?

1.  IT Support available by phone, or web.  Average response times under 15 minutes
2. Employ experienced and enthusiastic engineers who’s first priority is to make sure you are happy and that problems are solved quickly.
3. Our engineer’s test everything, and go through the problem to make sure you are happy with the fix.
4. We use advanced customer management technology that means your call is always routed to an available engineer, if you do hit voicemail we guarantee to call you back in 15 minutes.
5. Our engineers are experienced in many different hardware and software packages, but if they hit a problem, they will always call your 3^rd party suppliers to get help, not just leave it to you.
6. It’s not in our interest to keep fixing the same problems, we will always look into what causes the problems and fix it at the root, or recommend how it can be fixed.
7. Your staff speak with our Engineers, this means we get to know your staff and their day to day problems, and over time increase their confidence in both your system and our support by making IT reliable.
8. We manage and monitor your IT systems, so you can get on with your job.
9. We often pick up on potential problems before they cause a major issue, we do this by proactively monitoring your systems.  This dramatically reduces your problems and increases reliability.
10. Customer service is key to setting us apart, we request feedback from every support ticket that is raised, our key question is would you recommend us to another company,  If not then we know we need to improve.  90% of our customers would recommend us to another, the other 10% just simply didn’t answer the question.

If your business would benefit from better IT support then call us on 01158 220 200

Ps.  If you don’t then tomorrow is just same s**t, different day.

Refer business to Your IT and receive £100.00!*

Referrals are a vital in building business relationships, and our partnerships provide our customers with a network of business service that can help their business as their needs change.  If you provide complementary technology or business related services, why not explore this partner opportunity and get extra benefits from your business contacts.

Do you know anyone that may need IT support?

We pay £100.00 for any recurring monthly business referral that you send us that turns in to a qualified opportunity.  There is no limit to the number of leads you can send us, give us 5 leads get £500.00, give us 20 leads get £2000.00.

Anyone can refer business to us, just send an email with the details to sales@your-itdeparment.co.uk and if it turns in to an appointment we will pay £100.00.

If this then turns in to a customers then you will receive 10% of the monthly recurring revenue for 24 months,  For example if we sign up a £1000.00 per month customer then you will receive £2400.00 over 2 years plus £100.00 referral fee.

Joining the referral partner scheme is easy and free, and is a great way of earning extra revenue while helping your contacts benefit from a better IT support service and more reliable IT systems.

Program Benefits:

• Partner with a national provider of IT Services and Solutions for small businesses.
• Generous one-time and residual compensation for referrals who become new Your IT clients. Referral fees accrue quickly and scale with quantity. They are paid each quarter and can be used, as you wish, towards clients, employees or as an additional on-going income stream.
• Cross and co marketing opportunities.

* Paid if the referral turns into a qualified opportunity

Interested in finding out more?

go to http://your-itdepartment.co.uk/index.php/partners/referral-partners/

Your IT Dept. is pleased to announce Ford-Mainwairing Ltd has chosen us to provide ongoing support and maintenance for their IT systems.

Ford-Mainwaring Mechanical and Electrical Engineers Limited is a family run business with over 40 years of experience in the construction industry and is now part of The Bowden Group. 

See more info: www.fordmainwaring.co.uk

If you would like to know how Your IT Dept could help your business then please call 01158 220 200 or email sales@your-itdepartment.co.uk

Your business needs effective, reliable, managed email protection against spam, viruses, spyware and other harmful malware. Your IT Dept. Email Defense Service is a comprehensive email security solution that can protect your entire network to safeguard your communication and information integrity.

For more information call 01158 220 200 or email sales@your-itdepartment.co.uk

Today we attended the first 4Networking.biz event at the boathouse beefeater in Nottingham,  I have to say I have always been very skeptical about breakfast meetings and similar events. 

 Past experience of more traditional networking groups had left me wondering what benefit they have for my business, with loads of sales people trying to sell to each other, they never had any lasting appeal.

I found the 4Networking event to be most enjoyable, I met some interesting people from all different business backgrounds, and the best thing is I wasn’t sold too.

The key is listensing to what other businesses have to offer, and if they fit with yours then great, if not at least you get to meet the people behind the businesses and get know them so you can recommend them to friends and colleagues.

For more info on 4Networking goto www.4networking.biz and we hope to see you at a meeting soon.

Your IT Department Ltd has today officially launched it’s OnDemand Support Pass service.  This service provides businesses with access to an IT support team when needed without the need to pay large up front fees or get tied into annual contracts.

New customers will benefit from £200 worth of OnDemand credit on their account once registered, and best of all its free of charge to register.

Register now at http://your-itdepartment.co.uk/index.php/what-we-do/ondemand-support-pass/

We have found a brilliant article on the PC world magazine website, showing you some of the best business applications available for the Iphone.

We find the iphones to invaluable in helping us communicate with our customers and still be productive when away from the office.  Have a look a these apps, and you will see just how powerful the iPhone is.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/169587/top_10_musthave_iphone_business_apps.html

Twitter’s site crashed on Thursday at about 3pm BST due to a “denial of service” attack – thousands of remote-controlled virus-infected PCs trying to contact the site. Though the site came back up after an hour, the company said it was “continuing to defend against and recover from this attack”.

As a result lunch plans, breaking news, links to obscure web pages, news about your cat, the thoughts of celebrities, and wondering on Twitter why your tweets aren’t appearing – all had to be put on hold. The loss will have been felt most keenly in London, which Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive Evan Williams revealed on Wednesday has more Twitter users than any other city in the world. The company’s status blog says that: “We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.”

Denial-of-service attacks – also known as DDOS attacks, for distributed DOS – happen when the controllers of “botnets” consisting of many thousands of virus-compromised Windows PCs decide to target a site. In the past banking, gambling and news sites – and even Google – have been the target of DDOS attacks. The attacks use the electronic equivalent of ringing the site’s doorbell and running away: the targeted site’s server wastes its resources answering the call. In a typical DDOS attack, there may be millions of such fake approaches. The aim is often to blackmail the site: sometimes the owners are told that unless they make a payment, the attacks will continue. Gambling sites have often suffered DDOS sites ahead of major sports events, and been warned that the same will follow when the event happens – their key time for bets – unless they pay protection money.

Whether that is the aim of this attack on Twitter is not known: the status blog, updated at 3.40pm BST, gives no other details. Twitter has become one of the fastest-growing social networking sites in the world. In an interview on the BBC’s Newsnight program on Wednesday night, Evan Williams said that the UK had the second-largest user base after the US, and that London has more users than any other city in the world – even ahead of San Francisco, Twitter’s home town.

The UK is reckoned to have about 2.4 million Twitter users according to a recent Ofcom report, though its explosive growth may mean that even that figure is out of date. DDOS attacks have become relatively commonplace online, but this is believed to be the first time that Twitter has been targeted.

As companies get larger and more geographically distributed, they can handle such attacks because their servers are remote from each other. Twitter however is still comparatively small, with most of its resources in the US.

Article from the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/06/twitter-data-computer-security