Newmind Summer Party 2013

Thank you Laura for taking the time to craft these amazing
Minion cupcakes! 

Throughout the year Newmind Group brings together employees, family and friends for retreats to build friendship and community. Our time together is used to meet new friends, share stories, and recognize hard work.

This summer we gathered in Covert Park, MI and spent a weekend enjoying the Lake Michigan Beach!

For some of us, the retreat started with camping that included cooking over open fire, stories around a campfire, and a short midnight torrential downpour.

BYOD vs Standardization - Understanding Your Mobile Strategy Pt1

Mobile devices, collaboration & mobility, seem to be a hot topic recently. In just about everyone’s pocket is a device that gives them instant access to the Internet. A Nielsen study recently found that “66% of Americans 24-35 now own a smartphone.” With so many users owning their own mobile devices and bringing them to the workplace, its not surprising that IT departments and employees are clashing over ownership, data access and privacy.

Misconceptions

Employees aren’t waiting for IT & management approval to bring their devices to work. According to a CTIA study, “60 percent of IT professionals believe 25 percent or less of their employees are accessing work related information on their smartphone or tablet, while 57% of users said they access work related information on their smartphone or tablet at least once a week.” This may be why “smaller companies, with fewer than 500 employees, are less likely to communicate to their employees about BYOD and security.” Misconceptions about the workforce drive IT departments to prioritize the importance of strict mobile device policies, defaulting to device standardization. Standardization circumvents the grey areas of privacy and personal property, but comes with its own pitfalls.

Get Your IT Project Approved

At a tech event I attended recently I asked a room full of IT Directors if they would say that internally marketing and selling a technology project to their leadership was one of the main hurdles in keeping their company’s technology infrastructure healthy. The feedback was a unanimous yes.

This topic comes up over and over with IT Directors I come into contact with.

How does an IT Director go about getting a technology project approved by Operations and a budget allocated from Finance? And all within increasingly shorter time frames so that productivity gains can be made without falling significantly behind competitors who were quicker in snapping up [insert your favorite technology game-changer here]?

SMB Helpdesk Trends 2013 [Survey]

Data Backup & Business Continuity - June 2013 Survey Results

The infographic below illustrates the results of our June 2013 data backup & business continuity survey that we distributed to small- & mid-sized business IT professionals.

Learn More About Data Backup

Schedule a 1:1 consultation with Newmind Group and learn how we can help with:

• Reduced Downtime & Data Loss During a Disaster
• Data protection for multiple platforms and devices
• Application Aware backups

Schedule

Is Backup Killing Your Free Time?

This is a guest post by Daniel Kuperman and the team at Axcient.

There are three moments in an IT person’s work life that they typically dread.

• Setting up backup
• Testing the backup
• Restoring from backup

In each of those moments there is more at stake than you think.

If backup jobs are not setup correctly, the whole backup chain can break and all your efforts would have been for nothing. Testing a backup is not particularly a joyful activity because it requires a lot of time and effort to make sure that a) you had indeed setup backup jobs correctly, and that b) you can actually restore files if needed. And, of course, when disaster strikes, you always hope that you can actually restore files as your testing results implied.

Top Sources of Business Data Loss - No One Is Safe

Not too long ago we were contacted by the Macomb County Clerks office due to a fire that shut down the building for months, to help them get their operations up and running again as quickly as possible. The wiring, which connected the county network to the data was burned and the building sustained damaged. Since the fire, users had to do their best to carry on with paper documents, a frantic return to carbon copies and limited phone service.

When your entire staff works out of a single office and all of your data is stored on PCs, laptops, or a server housed in that office how do you carry on after a disaster? Are you able to return to paper documents? Will you be able to provide that same level of service and keep your clients and customers?