The Michigan IT Experts

Storage (Typically) Isn’t a Concern Anymore

For most users, the PC or laptop they’ll purchase will have a decent capacity in its storage drives, for a very simple reason: it costs the factory about the same amount to produce hard drives that hold 256GB, as it does to produce 512GB drives. In this situation, providing more storage just makes more sense… especially once you factor in the exponential increase in demand for storage.

The sheer amount of data that the human race produces is staggering. Estimates say that, as of 2020, each human being on Earth is creating 1.7MB each second. Remember the 3.5-inch floppy disks? One of those could hold about 1.4MB. So, crunching the numbers, humanity is filling the equivalent of eight billion of them every second.

So, how is it that storage isn’t the issue? Simple—we’ve moved beyond these kinds of storage solutions.

Modern drives can now hold exponentially more data and run faster and more efficiently to a similar scale. Taking an average new PC off the shelf, its built-in storage capacity would exceed that of around 750,000 floppy disks. Besides, most data storage happening nowadays takes place in the cloud. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and countless web hosts, businesses, and others now collect and store it on the user’s behalf.

To come back to our point, with all of this taken into consideration, the 1TB drive that was built into your PC really is a lot. Unless you’re using it for specific things—photography, video editing, 3D modeling, or gaming—you’re likely not going to need any more.

If a PC is in the office, this is even more the case. All a workstation’s data should really be stored in a centralized location, whether that’s a server on your network, or in the cloud. Your business’ purposes will dictate which is the better option for you—give us a call at 810-230-9455 to work that out with us.

The point remains: capacity shouldn’t be your final metric for determining the PC you’ll use, unless you know for a fact you’re going to need a lot.

Performance Matters

At the end of the day, your hard drive’s efficiency is really the defining factor. Modern PCs have considerable processing power, with 8-to-16 gigs of RAM being pretty standard. This leaves plenty to run office applications and other daily software titles. As a result, the speed of your hard drive could easily cause the biggest bottleneck in your operations.

For our purposes, there are two different kinds of hard drives.

Hard Disk Drive (HDDs)

Also known as mechanical hard drives, HDDs contain an array of shiny, spinning magnetic platters that are used to store your data. Seen as the standard for decades now, they are generally the most affordable option when comparing price by storage capacity. Capable of storing high capacities of data, they are often used in servers or backup devices nowadays.

Solid State Drives (SSDs)

SSDs use electronic data storage to work, and therefore have no moving parts. Reading and writing this data is much faster as a result, an outcome that impacts all a computer’s processes. These drives are expensive, but as prices have decreased they have become a much more reasonable purchase… especially when you consider the performance, reliability, and stability benefits you see from them.

We always recommend that any new workstation purchased should rely on an SSD as its main hard drive. Most desktops can have secondary drives added after the fact, and centralized storage and/or the cloud can also be considered viable solutions.

If you need more assistance in choosing the technology right for your business and its needs, give NuTech Services a call at 810-230-9455. We’ll help you make the best choice.

A Couple Reasons to Go Paperless

Obviously, if your business is looking to cut out its printing costs, you’ve identified printing as being prohibitive to your business’ operational budget in some way. It’s true that your average employee doesn’t consider your business’ paper, ink, and printing costs when they print off every document they work on; or worse yet, three-dozen NCAA brackets. They just figure that you’ve got it worked out. So one reason is to obviously cut costs. 

Another reason is that it’s basically unnecessary. Today, most employees, customers, vendors, etc. have access to machines that can function better (and faster) than traditional business document filing strategies. Smartphones, laptops, and other mobile devices all can access databases filled with content much faster and more efficiently than the fastest file clerk can deliver it. While this also cuts costs, relying on always-available digital systems just makes sense in today’s business climate. 

What is a DMS?

A DMS, or Document Management System, is effectively a digital database of all the paper files your employees would ever need, and it is how businesses cut costs from traditional methods of paper-filing and retrieval. With a DMS, your paper documents are scanned and digitized. They are then filed away in a computer database that can be accessed around the clock so that the people that need access to that information, have it on demand.

Many people may not understand just how expensive filing can be for a business. Not only do you have to pay an entire staff of people to constantly file and retrieve paper files, you also need to have a filing system in place that is secure and makes files readily available. Industry averages are about 7-to-12 cents per page to scan and upload to a DMS. This is substantially lower than the printing, payroll, and storage costs of keeping an onsite paper-filing system. 

So while there are still costs involved, they don’t recur at the same rate once the file is scanned and stored inside the DMS. Anyone with access to the database will be able to access the file. Best yet, securing the file is as simple as managing user account access; something that most businesses already do with their digital resources. 

So, How Does DMS Save My Business Money?

It’s simple. Once your files are stored in the DMS, you never have to worry about paying people to physically find a file. All they need to do is search the DMS and the document in question is available almost immediately. Not only that, file redundancy is there. The system comes with a comprehensive backup. Studies have shown that large organizations basically lose a file every six seconds, a problem you will avoid with a properly-functioning DMS. 

To talk to one of our experts about the possibility of managing your printing costs, and how a document management system helps in keeping those costs down, give our IT professionals a call today at 810-230-9455. 

Reconsidering Where Work is Done

Before the events of 2020, the approach that businesses took to remote work (if any) effectively boiled down to enable 20 percent or so of their workforce being capable of working out-of-office while the remaining 80 percent stayed in the office. Once the various issues and events of 2020 came about, however, these trends effectively flipped for many—if not transitioning to remote entirely.

As a result, companies have needed to make various changes to not only enable their team members to work productively from home, but also to do so safely… a need that will not go away throughout 2021.

Depending on the device that a user is working on—and more specifically, who owns the device in question—different security protocols and processes need to be put in place. Remote monitoring and management will be crucial to continue, especially if remote work of any scale remains once the pressing need to work remotely passes.

Ensuring Uptime and Resisting Burnout

Taking the surge in remote work strategies into consideration, the matter of preserving productivity becomes another particularly pertinent topic to discuss. Uptime becomes the key word, as anything less than 100 percent is seen as a shortcoming… after all, if a business can’t provide that for its clients and customers, the trust that they’ve built up is going to diminish considerably. By maintaining their uptime, the business can instead take advantage of that trust in different ways that advance its operations.

With such an uncertain year just behind us, businesses will need to ensure that these clients can trust in their services.

Furthermore, to accomplish this fully, a business also must ensure that its team members are prepared to deliver these services as needed. This makes work fatigue and burnout a serious threat. To help minimize the potential for this outcome as employees are working from home, the solutions that they’re using must be reliable enough to avoid the chance of exacerbating employee frustration.

Reexamining Budget Allocation

Finally, with business finances in flux after the last year, the investments that businesses make into their tools will need to be reconsidered and adjusted to optimize them. This will require an examination of each solution’s return on investment and how well it serves its intended purpose.

This means that 2021 will likely see some shifts in how businesses invest in cloud-based services as compared to locally hosted solutions, and what level of priority is given to advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and other similar solutions.

From where we stand now, 2021 stands to be a year of shifts and shakeups—make sure that your business has the support it needs to make it through. NuTech Services can help. Find out what we can do to assist your operations by calling 810-230-9455.