Connecticut's IT Managed Services Blog

Xerox eConcierge is giving extended warranties to users of their eConcierge program. If you haven’t heard of eConcierge we covered it in our previous blog post. It’s a great client for SMB’s who wish to save time and money by using Xerox’s software to monitor all their printers from one location. Xerox makes it simple by informing you whenever your ink is getting low from Xerox and other branded printers. But what makes it truly time saving is the fact that they provide you with a link to the exact ink cartridge you need to replace, no need to search for the model number of the printer or the specific ink cartridge number.

To make this offering even more tempting Xerox is giving its users the ability to extend their printers warranty, for all Xerox printers and multifunction printers. To qualify you only have to download the free eConcierge client for a minimum of 30 days and order 2 ink supplies through the program. After doing this you get a free extended warranty on the device that is good for as long as you continue using eConcierge. Being that you will have to order ink no matter how you look at it and Xerox has made sure to have competitive pricing for their ink, it makes sense for any SMB to get a free extended warranty on their expensive hardware, while at the same time saving time and money utilizing Xerox’s free software. Of course there are no obligations to continue using eConcierge program and you can uninstall it at any point. So check out eConcierge powered by Xerox and see how you can get a free $300 extended warranty for buying products that you use every day.

Electronics are an integral part of every business’s life and as we all know they have a habit of breaking from time to time. Many of the components needed in business carry a high price tag and having them break unexpectedly can leave any SMB scrambling to find the funds to replace their equipment. Having them under a warranty program gives owners peace of mind that they won’t be receiving any unexpected costs and can ensure that they can utilize the device until they are ready to upgrade down the road. What many SMB’s choose to use is the manufacture’s warranty program, without realizing the hidden benefits of utilizing a third-party maintenance contract.

Are your backups taking too long? How often do you test them, and are you sure they would restore properly when you need them? The problem with most disaster recovery solutions is there is no middle ground for SMB’s (Small Medium Businesses). Large corporations can invest in complex virtualization strategies using technology from VMware, this is a great option, but companies with limited IT support or who don’t have the funds to invest in virtualizing their servers are stuck with strategies that don’t give them the support they need. Many are forced to continue using Tape as a backup solution, which has a notorious reputation of not being able to restore. Others rely on having a RAID array, giving them the benefit of allowing a hard drive to crash without losing data, which does give them some security, but only in that one respect. If the server were to die the data would be fine but wouldn’t be assessable until the server was back up and running. This leaves SMB’s with old outdated and extremely limited Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans that don’t even come close to the benefits that virtualization gives the larger corporations.

NSI’s main target audience has always SMB’s and having seen the gap in technology brought its technicians together to create the ZoomBox. The ZoomBox is an NSI ran and owned product that gives SMB’s the virtualization protection that their business needs without having to change their entire network. What happens is NSI installs a client on any Windows machine that the customer wants to ensure up time and data protection. The ZoomBox then creates virtual images of each server/desktop 1-3 times a day, this image is then backed up to the cloud for extra protection, ensuring that all your data is perfectly safe regardless of what might happen to your business environment.

Our last article, 5 Different Managed Service Provider (MSP) price models, how to choose the best one for your SMB, focused on the pricing models of different MSPs and how that would relate to your own business. This article focuses on what they actually cover and what to look for in the contract itself. Here are 7 topic areas that you should ask your MSP before signing the contract: