telanova Blog

telanova: the outsourced IT team that feels like your own

Providing advice, consultancy, helpdesk, monitoring and maintenance, updates, upgrades, security: all the things your in-house team would do, but better and at a fraction of the cost and hassle.

Benefit 5 of 8: IT maintenance

To keep your car running smoothly, you go to a reputable mechanic and get your car serviced. Well your IT systems need maintenance too.

Some of the ways in which we maintain our customers’ IT systems are

Patches and Updates

Although Microsoft Windows has a built-in update feature it doesn’t update all the software on a computer. Unpatched programs like the popular Adobe Reader can become the unlocked door for malicious actors to compromise a computer. Our remote management and monitoring software will automatically deploy patches as they become available to keep our customers’ computers updated.

Setting up new starters

When creating a new account it is important to give the user the correct permissions. If they are copied from an existing user it is possible that they may get access to data they shouldn’t have - you don’t want to give a probationer the keys to the kingdom! Start with the basic permissions and then add others as the person becomes more experienced, trained and trusted.

Closing down leavers’ accounts

This needs to be done promptly for security reasons. For instance, if the person has left under a cloud and their account is still accessible, they may be tempted to do something spiteful such as delete, corrupt or ransom data. As soon as we are given the date and time that a person’s employment is terminated, we reset the password to a complex randomly-generated one, and disable the account from signing in. Then after an interval determined by the needs of the customer, the account will be deleted. In many situations removing an account deletes all the data - mailboxes and files owned by that account, but for compliance situations, data may need to be retained for a number of years, so we work with our customers to ensure that data is retained when appropriate to do so, using either a data vault system or by transferring ownership to another member of staff.

Replacing parts

Parts wear out or get damaged. It’s a fact of life. Where a device is still under warranty we work with the vendor to get them replaced, saving the customer the hassle of dealing with the process. If the device isn’t under warranty or the damage has voided the warranty, it may be cheaper for one of our technicians to replace the component. Memory and Storage, screens, motherboards, laptop keyboards, trackpads and batteries, we have replaced all these.

It is not just laptops that have batteries! All computers have a small battery on board. This battery helps the computer keep the basic settings it uses when booting up the PC. These can fail, especially if the PC has been in service for longer than recommended. Our technicians replace the battery and give the PC a new lease of life.

Servers are normally attached to an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) so that in the event of a power cut the server can be closed down gracefully and avoid any data loss. These batteries should be replaced every three years or so. We monitor the health of the batteries in our customers' UPS systems and replace them before they fail.

Cleaning out cruft

Cruft is all the old junk files that build up in the background and fill up your hard drive. Hard drives seem to fill up quickly and this is a result of Microsoft Windows making backups of files before it applies updates, creating log files, and various system reports from those infamous “Blue Screens of Death”. We monitor the available space on our customers' computers and proactively clear out this cruft before it starts to impact performance.

Telanova maintain systems *every day*, not just once a year.

Benefit 4 of 8: Monitoring IT equipment 24/7

Benefit 4 of 8: Monitoring IT equipment 24/7. Monitoring tells us when something is wrong, or about to go wrong, so that we proactively fix lurking issues before they become major business problems. We tailor the precise monitoring checks to each customers’ environment. Some common ones are:

Backups

Was the backup successful? When you need to restore from backup you don’t want to find out they’ve been failing for months.

Physical Hard drive status

There are warning signs leading up to most hard drive failures. Replacing a drive before it fails completely results in less downtime and data loss. Servers usually have RAID to keep running even with a single disk failure, but if no one’s monitoring it, you won’t know to replace the failed disk before the next one fails.

Disk space

Running out leads to database errors, file system errors etc which are time consuming and problematic to resolve.

Anti-malware status

Is it running? Up to date? Scanned recently? Infected? A single infected device can lead to the whole organization being held to ransom.

Windows update and other patches

Are all recent updates installed? Have any failed? A single unpatched device can lead to the whole organization being held to ransom.

Hard drive encryption status

The GDPR is quite clear that laptop hard drives must be encrypted. If an unencrypted laptop is lost or stolen it could lead to data breach resulting in a fine.

Number of failed logins

Is a hacker attempting to brute force access the device? This could be a sign that something else on the network is compromised.

Windows services

Are critical services running? Such as for your line of business applications. No one wants to arrive in the morning to find out their critical application isn’t working.

You can’t rely on a staff member reporting these issues as they rarely do in a timely manner. The business then risks downtime, ransomware, GDPR breaches and fines.

Engage telanova as your IT team and we will monitor your IT equipment 24/7, minimizing your downtime, and increasing your profitability.

Benefit 2 of 8: access to our help desk

Benefit 2 of 8: access to our help desk based in Bracknell. Our helpdesk is staffed with real engineers, not robots reading from a script. Our customers’ staff can call our helpdesk for any IT difficulty.

Whether it's something simple like “How do I set an out of office?” or major like “I’ve accidentally deleted everything”, we connect remotely to their computer and help them sort it; and if possible we’ll teach them how to do it themselves in the future. You’ll be on first name terms with our engineers and feel like our helpdesk is part of your own team.

Wouldn’t you like an outsourced IT company that feels like your own? Contact us today!

Benefit 3 of 8: IT consultancy that’s real-world advice, not corporate buzzwords.

Benefit 3 of 8: Telanova provides IT consultancy that’s real-world advice, not corporate buzzwords.

We don’t waste time talking about synergy, blue skies, moving the needle or disruptive paradigm shifts. We speak the customer’s language, we design a solution and we implement it.

A customer asked us to speed up their business. Every time they got an order it was taking them ages to process. We identified multiple factors that we could target:

  • Their database was running on mechanical disks, not solid-state, which was impacting overall performance. We upgraded all servers to solid-state disks which gave everything a boost.
  • We optimised the way their virtual servers used the underlying hardware - high performance where it was needed.
  • Their SAP business software was opening a folder with 400,000 files in it. This is slow on any computer as the operating system tries to list all the files. Although nothing could be done about this folder, we stopped SAP users from opening it by default, resulting in improved performance

This resulted in a happy customer!.

We speak to the people using IT to find out what would make the most difference, as well as looking at the bigger picture.

The next time you hear someone befuddled by corporate IT speak, you know what to do: arrange for us to call them!

Benefit 1 of 8: general IT advice

Benefit 1 of 8: general IT advice. A recent example was when a customer asked us: “a client wants to connect with me over Slack. What is Slack? I have never heard of it, is it safe?”

We explained that Slack was a messaging and team collaboration tool, similar to Microsoft Teams, but a bit easier to use across multiple different companies. The usual caveats about only sharing with people you trust still apply.

Another customer wanted advice before purchasing a new laptop for a member of staff. They travelled extensively and therefore a very small and light laptop was the most important factor and outweighed the lower productivity from a small screen, performance, and battery life etc. We identified the best performing laptop within their budget, configured for the end user and delivered it.

Another example of the advice we give is preparing IT budgets. How to maximise the return on investment, e.g. which devices need urgently replacing, which can be deferred etc.

Wouldn’t you like an outsourced IT company that feels like your own? Contact us today!

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