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What is IT Consulting Services.?

Setting up a small business is a challenging task. You are required to have knowledge on industrial, marketing, sales, web design, development and technology areas to run your business. It becomes very complex for a business owner to look after all these areas by itself. Nowadays, companies cannot run without proper technology implementation and systems. SMEs outsource their IT infrastructure to gain experienced insights and expert services. Hiring an IT consultant is preferable for SMEs to execute strategies and to grow their business.

IT consultants are technical professionals, who focus on implementing and integrating IT into businesses. They advice you to implement software, cloud environment, network infrastructure and IT solutions. They help an organization in efficient use of technology in line to their businesses to achieve their targets and objectives. They introduce latest technology trends, solutions and provide software to existing IT infrastructure, to boost profitability and optimize processes.

IT consultants play a strategic role for SMEs, they help you to boost organization’s performance and add value to the business.

Following are the ways IT Consultants helps SMEs:

IT consultants by communicating with their clients, understand and analyse their IT needs and requirements.

They consult you with suitable IT solutions for your IT infrastructure and networks.

They execute and implement new strategies, latest technology trends to your systems through understanding your requirements.

They manage, supervise the implemented processes and keep them upgraded.

They advice you to select and implement of new IT systems in line to your business.

They oversee any threats or risks to networks and provide you with solutions accordingly.

They backup data and keep your data secure from theft or disaster.

They continuously monitor business processes and assist you in renewing them integrating with technology.

They help organizations and their staff with the change management process.

Hiring an IT consultant for SMEs, is the best option, as it allows them to have expert skilled advice for their business. AA NetConsult is experienced to work with every size of organization. We deploy latest trends and technologies into your businesses and optimize organization’s performance.

Source: IT Consulting Services

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Internet Consulting

Counseling refers to intellectual services activities and is intended to provide advice or recommendations on what needs to be done. The consulting sector is a high value-added business service sector, strategic for the overall competitiveness of the economy due to its integration into production processes; this integration grows with the complexity of the solutions that exporting companies have to provide to an increasingly specific demand.

The board excludes here: computer consulting and advice to political groups. It should also be noted that sustainable development consulting is also part of the engineering sector, which contributes to the energy and environmental transition by carrying out numerous environmental and eco-design studies prior to project implementation.

The board includes here:

Strategy consulting: economic activity aimed at providing business executives (often large) with specialized advice for the definition of a business strategy. Companies use consulting firms, which then send consultants to the client company

Marketing consulting: a service activity that aims to improve the organization and performance, current or future, of a marketing department within a company. Marketing consulting is also used in support of a marketing department, when launching products, or by entities that do not have an internal marketing structure. With new technologies, and the Internet, appears marketing 2.0.

Management consulting: in the area of ​​management, the consultant is a person who has the qualifications and experience to solve a problem in the fields of marketing, production, logistics and transport, computer systems, human resources, finance and management. It is a professional who offers an objective consulting service on a subject of often complex nature in order to assist the managers and the personnel of the companies in the management of their operations.

Cost reduction consulting: a full consulting activity. It intervenes on all the functions of the company and on all the sectors. Its purpose is to reduce fixed and variable costs by finding alternative solutions. The ROI associated with cost reduction missions is frequently higher than 3. In France, this branch of the board is very small.

Sustainable development consulting: appeared since the beginning of the 2000s, with, in France, the legal obligations on corporate social responsibility contained in the law on new economic regulations.

Coaching: personalized professional support to obtain concrete and measurable results in professional and / or personal life. Through the coaching process, the coachee deepens his knowledge and improves his performance.

Source: IT Consulting Services

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Do businesses in Reunion acquire the necessary ICT resources?

The years go by and the technologies are progressing, all in a fierce race in search of the best productivity. We are victims of our knowledge and our society is a victim of its evolution. The cost of employment is very high, a reality affecting many Western countries, which encourages the search for better productivity assisted by technology.

In some cases, strategic choices are made to relieve the human of certain repetitive and low value-added tasks so that he can devote himself to other tasks requiring skills of judgment and contact that the machine cannot produce.

ICT has rapidly become a lever for increasing productivity, reliability, quality of service, in short, the competitiveness of companies in an increasingly competitive global environment.

Solution vendors and IT service providers are working to provide tools that can help organizations meet these competitive demands and provide solutions and services to help them succeed.

The management of ICT in companies has become an important challenge, the difficulty to follow developments, to manage the various tools that are now critical to the survival of the company are even more restrictive for SMEs / VSEs that do not necessarily have the financial opportunity to acquire qualified professionals able to protect and maintain their company at the forefront of technology. They are often content to have a technician able to manage (at best) the various failures and operational hazards having a role of "firefighter" without any anticipation or strategy.

Consulting firms and outsourcing services have been created by entrepreneurs who recognized this situation of increasing but punctual quality need. These advisers offer a variety of services ranging from simple technical assistance and park maintenance to consulting and strategic ICT / business alignment. The latter is promised by all but only the sharp and experienced consulting firms manage to achieve the expected results.

One main area of ​​improvement sought in this area remains the management of fleet deployment and maintenance in companies. Holder of a MSc in the field and having done a lot of research and a thesis on the management strategy of ICT in business, I am interested for years in this issue.

We end up with management rules that promote homogeneity and life cycles and economic conditions that make it more and more difficult.

Even an SME with a small computer footprint of less than 20 computers often must deal with heterogeneity with different types of equipment, several generations of operating systems and office suites of different versions. I am not going to dwell on the nightmare that business leaders, computer scientists and users experience. The professionals propose solutions in bulk, but are they adapted to all?

Some solutions come at the top of saviors, "cloud computing" and "virtualization" in all these forms but again, products offered in bulk to companies with commercial approaches to customers who do not control their needs and not therefore not able to provide a suitable specification or assess the adequacy of the solutions.

Source: IT Business Consultant

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Data Center Consulting

A data center is a place (and a service) comprising information system components of one or more companies (mainframes, servers, storage bays, equipment networks and telecommunications, etc.). It can be internal and / or external to the company, operated or not with the support of providers. It fulfills a critical mission related to computer science and telematics in controlled environment (air conditioning) and security (fire, theft and intrusion, etc.), with emergency and redundant power supply.

Environmental issues are linked on the one hand to their consumption of rare or precious metals and rare earths, and on the other hand to a growing electricity consumption of all data centers, and to their co-production heat recovery, dissipated by servers and storage systems in particular, but that can be a recovery energy.

Description and history

A data center is a secure building against intrusion and natural and technological hazards, housing various electronic equipment, computers, storage systems and telecommunications equipment. The center can occupy a room, a floor or large buildings.

There are 1U servers (nicknamed "pizza boxes") or more, "U" corresponding to a unit height of 4.445 cm stacked in bays, which are arranged to form single rows, which allows to easily circulate among servers, both front and back. Some devices, such as mainframes, are similar in size to these bays. They are often placed by their side.

Before the dot.com bubble, millions of square meters of such centers were built in the hope of seeing them occupied by waiters. Since then, the concentration of centers has continued, with the development of specialized centers for which the most important challenges are the control of air conditioning and especially of electricity consumption. This movement has been integrated into green computing and aims to lead to so-called ecological data processing centers for which specialized tools have emerged.

Source: Data Center Consulting

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What is the mission of the IT consultant?

The information systems of medium and large companies can be very complex because of the history of the versions, the mergers and acquisitions made. They therefore require the know-how of an IT expert. The consultant is the appropriate person who intervenes to set up and ensure the maintenance and the sharing of knowledge (knowledge) of these systems.

His job is precisely to design, install and improve the computing and data access of its customers with a consistent level of security.

He is also responsible for advising on the choice of tools and services, how to build the systems and how to use them, to govern them over time (access management, workflow, preventive maintenance, etc.).

It also trains staff on how to use tools and service technicians to maximize acculturation and knowledge sharing.

What profile and training to become a freelancer in computer science?

To fulfill its mission, the IT consultant must have completed training at a general or specialized engineering school and hold a 4th or 5th year university degree in computer science. Excellent technical and computer skills (application programming, web development, database management, network administration, etc.) will enable him to answer all the problems he will face. Targeted knowledge will be a significant advantage in the choice and implementation of business tools such as accounting software for example.

In addition to this qualification, he must demonstrate human qualities. A good relationship will be necessary in the collaboration teams and customers and for the respect of the deadlines. Good listening skills as well as a high sense of pedagogy will help her to better understand her clients and offer them solutions adapted to their needs..

Source: IT Consulting Services

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How to Protect Wi-fi

The protection tools of the Information Systems have evolved rapidly to face the various and varied attacks, as well in their technical modes as in their objectives: the industrial espionage, the unfair competition, the sabotage, the "challenge" of the young " hacker, "etc.

The computer security industry is flourishing, with a range of firewall, anti-virus, anti-spyware and other products that have evolved over time with intelligent integration of behavioral analysis, and the United Threat Management (UTM), Network Intrusion Prevention Systems (NIPS), Host Intrusion Prevention Systems (HIPS) and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), and many others. 

Effectively an implementation of all possible means of protection, especially for sensitive data is necessary.

Do you know what is the common and common vulnerability on which computer security specialists seem to agree? You! Yes, you, the user. 

Today's hackers, in front of the robust shields deployed to secure the IT infrastructure, have more and more difficult to pass and therefore need your help. Will you collaborate with them? Maybe you've done it already! 

In a recent attack from China targeting some of the big groups, the attackers tried to hack social network accounts of friends of certain employees in targeted groups to have a better chance that the recipients would click on the links supposedly sent by their friends.

Network Security(how to secure wifi)

Secure the administration interface of your wifi equipment

The majority of routers and wifi kiosks have an administration interface requiring authentication. Devices are often delivered without a password or with a simple default password (manufacturer's name, router brand, admin, etc.)  Change this password. As you may not use it often, write it in a corner because if you forget it, you will need to reset your hardware.

Hide your SSID

The majority of devices are configured by default for an automatic broadcast and continuous SSID (Service Set Identifier), ie the name of your wifi. This obviously facilitates the establishment of a wireless network but also increases the vulnerability. 

When you have finished installing your network, hide your SSID. Although your network can still be found by entering the exact name of the SSID or using specialized tools, this will be an additional challenge for an attacker.

Reduce the transmission power

Some equipment can adjust the transmission power. If your equipment allows it, reduce it so that the signal covers your premises but gets out as little as possible.

Enable WPA Encryption

Use WPA encryption rather than WEP. Wired Equivalency Privacy (WEP) has well-known weaknesses and can be easily hacked. WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) is more secure but also easier to use and allows passwords that are not limited to 0-9 and AF. 

That said, if your hardware does not support WPA, WEP will still be better than no protection!

Filter by MAC address

The MAC address is a unique identifier unique to each hardware. MAC address filtering allows you to allow access to your wireless network only to a list of addresses that matches your hardware. There are utilities that would allow a malicious person to simulate a MAC address, but again, this will require a lot more determination. The pirate will probably turn to more accessible prey.

Disable remote administration

You often have a remote administration option on routers and hotspots. This option, if allowed, provides access to the material from the Internet. It is best to disable it; if you really need it, your hardware probably allows you to limit remote administration to a specific IP address, so do not hesitate to use this option.

Source: Network Security Assessment

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How to Access Wi-fi

The equipment needed to set up a wireless network is available at lower and lower prices. It is possible today to set up a Wi-Fi network with a budget of less than 100 euros. 

In addition, the hardware (Wi-Fi routers, terminals, repeaters, etc.) is more and more simple to configure, often "plug and play" requiring very little or no configuration. Any user can now set up a wireless network without any special knowledge.

We often hear arguments from users who say they have no fear for various reasons (their computer is protected, they do not have sensitive data, their plan is unlimited, etc. ...).

In general, the security of the Wi-Fi network is treated as a protection against intrusion, a desire to secure privacy, data, the Internet package and overruns in downloads. 

Did you know that you are responsible for the security of your internet connection?

A malicious act from your network (cyber-crime) can indeed be a problem.Indeed, if the malicious person has used your network, the authorities will go up to you during their investigations via your ISP, the latter having as an obligation to keep a tractability of traffic from its subscribers. 

Various malicious acts, virus sending on the web, threatening messages, visits to sites pedophile or violent, can be attributed to you while you have nothing to do!

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Outsourcing

The term "outsourcing" is often confused with Réunion with computer maintenance. In fact, often SMEs that do not have an IT department call on an IT service provider who will take charge of their IT maintenance in the form of a flat-rate contract or an intervention billing. 

This type of service is not outsourcing. 

Computer maintenance or a one-time or fixed IT deployment will remain computer maintenance and IT deployment tasks. Outsourcing goes well beyond IT maintenance and the deployment of IT solutions.

The service provider becomes the computer service of the customer in the broad sense of the term. The outsourcing provider must perform the maintenance and deployment tasks, but also and above all, accompany his client in his IT strategy so that it is aligned with that of his business. The outsourcing provider must behave like the CIO of the client and must take care of these interests. 

By entrusting it IS to outsourcing to a competent company, the SME gives itself the means of a competent CIO at a fraction of the cost, not to mention that it can benefit from all the skills of the outsourced team, since the subcontractor will always assign the most appropriate resources to the situation.

In short, outsourcing needs to be framed and clear for the service provider and the customer, with clear results obligations and a partnership approach.

Source: IT Consulting Services

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Cloud Computing

Another modern word but what is virtualization? We can say a kind of "cloud", we return to our old modes of operation with a maximum of things on the server and a minimum on the local computer.

There are different types of virtualization that will, again, adapted to the needs of the company. Some forms of virtualization will be more dependent on server resources than others. The most server-dependent virtualization will only retrieve on the user's computer a display, this computer will often be a thin client or zero client (computer with little or no local resources). Other solutions will use a little more local resources and allow more customers per server. Here again, the choice of the solution will depend on the needs and the use made of it. These solutions will aim as well as the cloud to limit the critical of end-user computers and make servers reliable by making them secure.

In conclusion, your information systems have an increasingly crucial role, your core businesses are often dependent on them and big IT incidents are a real threat to business continuity. Some companies will never recover from a major breakdown or loss of some data. An appropriate strategy with a needs and risks assessment makes it possible to best meet the demands of our increasingly competitive world. This strategy also makes it possible to correctly measure risks and critical, and to avoid any unnecessary investment making your ICT tools a real competitive lever.

Lifecycle: The expected run time for hardware or software. After this period, it is more advantageous to replace it than to maintain it. Life cycles may vary depending on the environment or use.

Consumerization: New term from English. it is the fact of having the users pushing to the evolution of the information system of the company that they often find less powerful than that which they use in the private one.

ERP: "Enterprise Resource Planning", these are suites of software packages for the management of the company. They often include business management, CRM (Customer Relation Manager) and business management. ERPs often offer add-ons that enable inventory management, human resources, accounting, marketing, to name a few.

Source: Data Center Consulting

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Data Consulting Services Cloud Computing

Is this state-of-the-art technology phenomenon really one? Yes and no. The cloud is nothing new, we have been clouding since the rise of the internet in the mid-90s.You have made cloud-computing, you have used an email application that is not installed on your computer (like Outlook, Eudora, Intradomain or other). The "cloud" is therefore the use of an application that is not installed on your computer but on a remote server somewhere accessible via the Internet, or even on your private network (private cloud). Where is innovation?

Why is this a hot topic if this technology is so old? Innovation is the use we make of it. Networks have evolved in such a way in recent years that their use and their capacities have pushed the development of web-based applications (called cloud), without limitations of domain of activity or type of use. You will find word processors, ERP (3), drawing utilities, organization and other software that will be used without local installation (on the user's computer). This is the cloud revolution (for those with a network infrastructure to benefit from it). These applications can be paid, with or without advertising, with or without support, monthly, annual, among many other options.

Advantages? The flexibility of use, the "non-dependence" material of the computer of the end user, thus limiting the risk of interruption of service or loss of data in case of failure of it. In return, these solutions require a reliable and efficient network. A strategic study therefore allows, on a case-by-case basis, the value of using such solutions for all or part of its activity. Source By: Data Center Consulting