Once you reach 45 - 75 employees your costs for IT support will force you to consider hiring a full time IT employee. This can be a big success if done right, but keep in mind that the first employee in ANY department is usually a failure. Companies that have proprietary technology such as custom hardware (ie, kiosks), custom software (ie, accounting package), or manufacture/develop technology products will hire sooner and spend more on IT than their non-technical counterparts. Their IT spend...View full post

0 Comments  Author:  Joe Gleinser submitted 1 years 8 days ago

Most small and mid-sized businesses outsource some or all IT services. This is not a new trend. Years ago I would have confidently stated that companies between 5 and 25 employees rarely have enough demand for IT services to justify a full time employee. Though that is still true today, the size of companies forgoing internal IT staff is increasing. Windows 7 is far more reliable and requires less support than Windows XP. If you use Hosted Exchange you eliminated a few hours a month of work and...View full post

0 Comments  Author:  Joe Gleinser submitted 1 years 34 days ago

Today the new GCS' website is live! It also marks the end of our first blog and the beginning of a new one. Though the old blog saw more than 20,000 visitors last year, it was the most esoteric posts (longest tails) that saw the most traffic. These visitors were not our target market for IT Consulting, Managed Services, and Flex Services (Hourly Support). For the curious our new website is based on the DotNetNuke content management system. With the old website the only conduit for new content,...View full post

0 Comments  Author:  Joe Gleinser submitted 1 years 107 days ago

The FBI released this Fraud Alert back in April and the situation has only degraded since then. It has long been the case that viruses and trojans penetrate even advanced defenses with ease. When an accountant at a small businesses logs into the online banking system the username and password are compromised. Frequently even challenge questions ("What is your mother's maiden name?") can be recorded. The attacker then uses this information to move as much as $100k to an overseas account. Unlike...View full post

0 Comments  Author:  SuperUser Account submitted 1 years 117 days ago

The excessive tattoos, scars, or rap sheets won't be obvious, but bad cloud providers are out there! Recent experiences have confirmed my long held suspicions.A new GCS client was attempting to retrieve their 3TB of data and related applications from an Infrastruture-as-a-Service company. Slow performance and frequent outages had convinced our client that change was necessary. Though the cloud provider was very helpful when moving the data in, they presented a huge challenge in moving the data...View full post

0 Comments  Author:  submitted 1 years 273 days ago