We provide a fixed cost, long-term virtual IT department and CTO, handling exactly what you need and none of what you don’t.

Here are some of the things we do:

Desktop support and automation

Antivirus, backup, and system updates go without saying.

Datacenter guys have interesting ideas about how long it should take to fix something. When you have hundreds or thousands of servers, you can’t afford to be messing around with strange, one-time issues. We apply the same principles used in cloud computing to the desktop environment: Rather than leave an employee unable to work for a few hours while we mess around trying to fix it, we keep a spare computer on site. When they log in, it’s as though nothing has changed. All the applications, settings, and files are already in place, automatically. We then let our system reinstall, configure, and do a health check on the faulty system, ready for the next issue – or pull it back for hardware repair.

We can use this same system to help keep your business-specific applications up to date, and help contractors and vendors apply changes quickly – keeping external costs down as well.

Core Infrastructure

Core services should never be down. As the industry moves towards a more collaborative, centralized workflow, a system going offline means business halts. File access, e-mail, and user access/control systems need to be designed with availability as a primary feature.

Cloud services vanish with a faulty internet connection. Cloud companies go under, or are sold off. Price changes on a whim. A mistake in configuration takes an entire business suite offline.

Centralized business servers are often designed by well-meaning individuals who haven’t seen the cornucopia of failures we have. Redundant design isn’t really enough – being designed not to fail sounds excellent, until it fails. Your core has to be resilient – designed to continue operating through a myriad of failures.

We will build, deploy, and maintain the entire lifecycle of your core services and servers. We replace when necessary, with no downtime. This is part of our fixed price philosophy; you’re not going to hear us asking for more money to replace failing systems. We just do it.

Business Support

Our management team can work directly with your company’s point of responsibility to assess current needs and challenges, and to set an overall direction for the future role of IT within the company. We can help to inform the decision-making process and develop a reasonable plan for IT-related capital expenses and operating costs.

Network Support and Design

Firewalls, security, and make access seamless across offices. No request is too unusual, including store hotspots and handling on-site tenants. We work directly with your ISP on service issues and configuration so you don’t have to. Multiple sites, road warriors, cloud integration.

Storage Support and Design

This is a particular skill of ours. Different workloads impose different requirements on storage systems. We can help you develop your requirements, and buy the right amount of the right stuff to support you, small or large. This could be helping you navigate the myriad of vendor options, helping you move to hyperconverged virtualization, or hand-building you a cutting edge distributed storage cluster.

Virtualization

Still using physical servers for your IT needs? We can help you do the cost/benefit analysis, and then help you move if there’s a benefit – whether it’s an on-site virtualization solution, or out into the cloud. We’ll also let you know if you’ve got edge cases that are better suited to doing it the old way.

Backup

We manage site-wide backup, with multiple layers of redundancy. Need a file from four years ago? Somebody accidentally deleted a spreadsheet this morning? No problem. We’ll design the amount of redundancy you need, and explain the costs and benefits of different options. We don’t believe in hand-waving and declaring “the cloud will handle it.” We were part of “the cloud.” We know better.

Disaster recovery

Building catch fire? Roof cave in? Wild mongoose rampaging through the sales department? Our model of private cloud infrastructure gives you the same flexibility as larger providers, but with the customization to support your business’s requirements rather than conforming to someone else’s standards. Whether you’d like cold-recovery from backups, Amazon AWS, or failover from your business to our datacenter.

Call The NERDS Group at 301-622-7995 to see what IT product fits your needs best.
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