Regular onsite visits with IT engineer
Regular onsite visits allows us to provide our clients with a proactive and hands-on approach to technology management. Each month, a local networking expert dedicated to your account will visit your office to physically inspect all of your hardware as well as to troubleshoot any issues that have accumulated since our last visit. By signing up for regular onsite visits, our clients not only receive valuable face time with their engineer, but also receive a style of support that can allow our professionals to identify and troubleshoot issues before they become disruptive to your business.

Business Case for Regular Onsite Visits
Our regular onsite visits are offered as part of a more comprehensive, proactive support plan that is priced at a monthly flat fee. As with any flat fee arrangement, the cost to maintain your technology infrastructure is known, agreed upon and fixed. As a result, clients who receive this level of proactive support are also in a position to more accurately budget and forecast for other activities.

As needed remote and onsite support
As-needed support provides timely reactive troubleshooting for your office’s unforeseen technology challenges and this type of support can be made available as either a standalone service or included as part of a more proactive and regular maintenance program. As a standalone service, our As-Needed support comes with no retainer fees or hidden costs. Simply put, we only bill once our services have been engaged.

Business Case for As Needed Support
As a standalone service, this type of support is probably best suited for organizations that already have an in-house technology manager who, from time to time, may need to escalate certain issues where they lack training or experience. This plan may also be suitable for the office or user that has a fairly uncomplicated network environment and who feels that they will rarely require professional support. In short, if you are confident that your organization will require infrequent support, this brand of reactive support can help reduce your overall maintenance costs over time.

24x7 Network Monitoring
Remote Monitoring (or ‘RMON’) is an important component of Ravid IT’s proactive management system. Software agents are deployed on your internet-facing network devices (such as servers, routers and firewalls) and provide our engineers with real-time insight into the health and stability of your local network. This, in turn, allows our engineers to preemptively identify and troubleshoot issues before they have a chance to impact your business’ workflow and data integrity. Among the items that RMON can detect:

Business Case for Remote Monitoring
Ravid’s RMON services allow you to know when you have a system outage before your employees and customers do and real-time insight into your network means that potential issues can often be identified and resolved before they have a chance to cause your office costly downtime. Even in a stable environment, as your company grows, so too does your data and storage requirements. With Ravid IT’s RMON services, our engineers are able to monitor your company’s data growth and help you to intelligently plan for the next phase of your network’s development.

Remote Server Maintenance
As with most of Ravid IT’s offerings, this service can be provided as either a standalone program or part of a more comprehensive service plan. As a standalone offering, this service is perfect for the small business with 1 or 2 servers running critical applications and services as it provides an affordable, proactive troubleshooting program aimed at keeping your server environment stable and secure. Each month our engineers remotely access your environment and carry out a comprehensive, 30-point inspection and remediation checklist which includes, among other things, the application of the latest security updates and patches.

Business Case for Remote Server Maintenance
Buying and configuring a server will likely be the single most expensive technology investment your small business will make. Your server, however, is not a static piece of hardware. New information and services will become added to this device from day 1 and novel security threats are, unfortunately, commonplace. As a result, continual updates are required to ensure that your asset is providing the sort of return and functionality that you originally expected of it. Without regular server maintenance, your business is exposed to the possibility of eventual server failure which – between downtime, data lose and the labor to repair or replace the device – can be far more expensive than the cost of properly maintaining this business critical asset.

Email Protection
Ravid’s Email Protection Program screens all incoming messages and filters out threats such as spam and viruses before they ever have a chance to reach your network or hit your inbox. As a secure hosted solution, there are no hardware or software installations required and Ravid IT will actively manage all updates and security policies to help keep your network safe and complaint.

Business Case for Email Protection Program
Information Week recently reported that a typical corporate email user lacking a proper Email Protection Program would spend, on average, 3.5 hours to manually filter out spam per every 1000 emails they received. That figure alone is staggering. There are, however, more ways in which spam can adversely affect your business. Spam, just like legitimate email messages, requires both internet bandwidth and disk storage space in order to be received – regardless of whether or not these messages are ever even opened. If Spam messages were allowed to freely enter your network, your internet browsing and bandwidth speed would become significantly slower and further impact your office’s productivity.

Offsite Backups
Ravid IT offers a variety of offsite backup solutions, each of which provides automatic and continuous transmission of selected information to a secure offsite data vault. The data vault itself is a fully managed backup solution with professional 24x7 monitoring and proactive troubleshooting when issues arise. Accessible online, our offsite backup program allows your company to quickly recover all of your current and historic information within a 90 day period.

Business Case for Offsite Backups
Consider the value of your company’s information – your client, accounting and operational information, past and present projects, portfolios, deliverables and systems providing you with critical business intelligence. For many, such information is of equal or greater value than the company’s physical assets. As a result, a reliable and secure backup strategy usually tops the list of technology priorities for any business. As an integral part of a larger disaster recovery plan, Ravid IT’s offsite backups can allow your company to quickly and securely restore lost information.

Asset & License Management
You’ve made the decision to invest your hard-earned capital in the hardware and software that drives your small business and, now, it’s only prudent to have these investments thoroughly documented and accessible. To that end, Ravid IT maintains an offsite, up-to-date documentation of your company’s technology assets with updates being made to this listing every month.

Business Case for Asset Management Services
Should a natural or human-induced disaster hit your business, Ravid IT’s offsite record of your company’s assets provides valuable licensing information that, if lost, would require expensive repurchase. Similarly, these records can also be used to provide supporting documentation for any claims made to insurance companies or financing institutions. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, our network documentation which contains important configuration information will help save you both time and money when rebuilding your environment.

Project Planning and Implementation
One of the commitments that we make to our clients is to provide the small business owner, in plain language, with all of the relevant information necessary in order to make an informed business decision regarding new technologies. We don’t hype ‘Gee-Whiz’ technology and we don’t recommend costly solutions that we feel will not offer a real return on your investment. Instead, a project manager and network engineer will meet with you in order to clearly understand your functional expectations and needs. With this input, we then provide you with a proposal for a premium solution that addresses these needs and go on to make adjustments in order best align your priorities with your budget. In short, during the whole planning process, our engineers and project managers will make you aware of how the different options being discussed will differ in terms of cost and functionality.

Among the types of projects that Ravid IT can carry out are:

Business Case for Project Planning and Implementation
By engaging Ravid IT for your next technology project, you will be allowing a professional and experienced consultancy manage the risk that is inherent in any business investment. After the project planning phase has been completed and your risk thoroughly assessed, our engineers and project managers will be able to deploy your project much more quickly than most small businesses could by carrying out the work in-house. Lastly, by outsourcing your technology projects to trained field professionals, you can then focus your in-house personnel on other activities important to your business.