Questions About IT & Cybersecurity

We’re a friendly bunch who take pride in rapid response rates and geek-speak-free communication. We’re experts but we’ll never talk down to you, we simply do a good job every time. We’re consistent.

We worked with a Large Credit Union in Washington who really preferred us to their previous IT vendor, saying “We no longer feel like we just have to just accept and live with constant workarounds, it’s great!”.

Staff are incentivised to improve their knowledge through continuous education and to regularly acquire new certifications.

Our engineers meet bi-weekly to review trends and new technologies for increases in service quality and efficiency. This information feeds into our annual service offering audit which looks to ensure that we lead the way in new threat detection strategies, technologies and IT capabilities.

To be honest, neither us nor our managed services clients have been able to find any. In a small number of cases the up-front cost can be higher than when adopting a new on-premise solution but the long term cost savings make this a non-issue for forward thinking companies.

Although we’re based in Seattle, we work with customers all across the country. When one of customer who are not local to us was asked if not having local IT support impacted them negatively in any way they said:

“No, not at all. We believe being able to communicate primarily via email or phone has worked really well. For example, we have had a number of equipment updates over this past year but we were able to do them all very successfully on our own with Allixo’s top notch support, virtually.”

The largest scope of work usually revolves around the initial migration, there’s a lot of work to be done in learning about your current system, how your company interacts with it, planning solutions to age-old problems and replacing old or inefficient systems with new cloud solutions.

Additionally, you’ll have to consider app and system licensing, as well as third party vendor costs. Where possible we always give you a single all-in-one invoice to cover all of your IT needs. Simple.

Traditionally in dealing with scalability for on prem solutions you need to consider the application and data that you are currently working with and what that might look like down the road, 3, 5, 7 years and determine the resources you think you will need and buy that hardware upfront to avoid scaling issues.

An example would be an on premise remote desktop server. A smaller company might start with 2-3 users accessing applications and data on the server. As that company grows, soon 10-15 users might be accessing the same services and the server begins to bog down and become a headache for users.

As they continue to grow they now need to go replace that hardware and pay for what they think they will need over the coming few years, if they grow more and 30 users are accessing it the same issue arises. Not including the time lost for users running into performance issues slowing down their work. On the flip side, if the company shrinks, they still have the same expensive hardware and software licensing running for fewer users, losing some of the ROI of the on premise solution.

With a cloud solution the hardware solution for the most part can scale as you grow per user depending on the platform and technology used. In the reverse the cloud solution can scale down as your user base fluctuates, saving you money and increasing your ROI.

Experience and knowledge of the technologies used.

We’ve run into cases where we’ve on-boarded a new client from another MSP who lacked the experience with a platform like MS Office 365. Many MSP’s get the Microsoft tenant setup and working but fail to implement any policies or cybersecurity best practices for their clients, leaving them open to a range of threats.

When it comes to cybersecurity stance and implementation best practices there are some easy ways to tell the good MSP’s from the bad.

You should review their history in the news, have they had any recent breaches?

What certifications and audits do they run on their platform and how often?

Is the vendor or service provider experienced with the services or technologies they are providing and do any of their staff hold certifications on the platform or service?

How many clients do they have using the platform? Are they willing to extend a longer term demo for testing and validation that it will work for your company? Have they themselves undergone any third party audits to verify their claims or their solution?

Because of the cloud’s advanced and more modern infrastructure, the risk of service outages is practically non-existent, especially when compared to on-prem solutions, because in order for down-time to occur, multiple arrays of servers have to be taken offline at the same time. This rarely, if ever, happens.

In the off-chance that it does, all of our clients benefit from disaster recovery planning for the event of an extended outage which ensures business continuity no matter what.

We get this question a lot. Most cloud services are more reliable than your internet connection. In the years we’ve been working with cloud services such as Microsoft Azure or Google, we’ve not seen a significant outage. There can be hiccup’s or short outages, but generally these go unnoticed by users. Cloud vendors have worked very hard to provide near instantaneous failover services. This article by MS was written in 2019 Advancing Microsoft Azure reliability | Azure Blog | Microsoft Azure and is an example of the focused resources on reliability of their platform.

When 2020 hit there was a mass migration of services to the cloud and the MS Teams platform experienced explosive growth, growing from 20 million users in 2019 to 75 million by the end of 2020 It grew even more. Microsoft Teams usage jumps 50 percent to 115 million daily active users – The Verge. This growth affected the stability of the Teams application, but mainly the Teams calling function. The calling function got so bad that we stopped recommending it for nearly a year until Microsoft was able to get their infrastructure caught up to the massive demand. Post 2021, we rarely see issues with stability.