“Many people look forward to the New Year for a
new start on old habits.”

- Author Unknown

In the 1987 classic movie Spaceballs, when Lord Dark Helmet discovers King Roland's insecure password he screams, “The combination is 12345! That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life!”   Fast forward 25 plus years.

At IT Radix, we enjoy helping our clients achieve their business goals through the use of technology. Many of our clients do not have the benefit of in-house IT support and we love providing these services for them. However, quite a few of our clients are fortunate to have quality members on their team to provide in-house technical support and expertise.

A high performing football team typically has a lot of talent, but they also have the best equipment to facilitate their achievements. In the same way, talented folks in organizations perform at their highest when provided with the right equipment and tools.

Sony, Home Depot, Target.    All are big companies with huge market value, large customer databases, strong brand names and plenty of budget to spend on data security.  The same cannot be said for organizations in the small business community.   But are there lessons from these breaches that can provide learning to the owner or manager of a small business?  Yes, there certainly are.

When you work with meeting and event professionals, you expect them do a lot of communicating with you, often via email, as you plan the big show.  There are a host of documents, agendas, menus, speaker bios, hotel rates, scripts and contracts to be shared, let alone the simple, run of the mill emails.

Recently, we visited a new prospect who was interested in our services. We spent a few minutes with the controller discussing the issues and opportunities he was facing with their computer network. We identified and discussed a number of issues: network speed, age of equipment, problems with emails, printers/scanners not working, the server going down on occasion and finally the poor support they received from the existing outside IT support firm.

You would have to have not been exposed to any news media recently to not have heard about the large data breaches at Home Depot and Target.  Reports indicated that over 100 million customer credit and debit card numbers have been compromised by the hackers behind these breaches.

Kevin Cordell, CEO and Owner of Madison Management Services, LLC is an adept and skilled business manager with a track record of success and a host of experience in a variety of industries and roles.  However, Kevin will tell you that networking technology is not one of them and when he needs guidance, he seeks the highest level of outside expertise.

IT Radix is pleased to welcome Windsor Strategy Partners to its growing list of happy and satisfied clients.   This unique company provides a range of actuarial analysis and consulting as well as software products and services with a focus in the healthcare cost management arena.

Many business leaders look at IT Support as a cost.  They can easily look at their P&L statement at the end of a month or a year and see the dollars spent in that area.    Unfortunately, the biggest cost of a computer network is not seen on any such business document and that is the cost of downtime.