According to an article published today, a survey from CDW has revealed that one in four businesses has suffered a data loss in the past two years. Even worse, additional info from Symantec has shown that the industry with the highest rate of data breaches is the healthcare industry.

With so many processes being moved online, it’s absolutely critical that any organization that stores or maintains personally identifiable information (PII) protects themselves and their clients by securing their data. How can that be done?

• Managed Security – firewalls can prevent inbound attempts against the network, block services known to be used to intercept data, and help stop employees from visiting insecure sites that could host malware and trojans.
• Encrypted Email – in the event that information needs to be transmitted, encrypted email can help make sure that any mis-sent or intercepted messages cannot be read, and customer/client data isn’t exposed.
• Offsite Data Backups – when data IS lost, perhaps due to intrusion or something as “minor” as a hard drive failure, making sure client data is securely backed up offsite on a daily basis can help make sure a business is not brought to a standstill (not to mention helping avoid penalties and fines that come from a data loss, along with the PR hit).
• Internal Policies – as the article above mentioned, an employee used personal email to transmit thousands of secure client files. Every business should have their own security policies in place, along with Acceptable Use Policies, to make sure events like this don’t happen.
• Remote Site Security – many organizations share databases between multiple offices and employees who are on the road or telecommuting. It’s critical to make sure that any external access to your data is secure and encrypted, as well as logged in the event of a data loss or breach.

Please make sure your network, and your data, are protected. 

Have questions? We can help! Call us at 508-646-0030 or use our contact form to let us know your concerns about your data, and together we can make some recommendations to keep your company protected.

Severe weather is simply a fact of life here in the Northeast. In fact, a popular saying here when it comes to Mother Nature is “don’t like the weather? Wait two minutes!” At this time of year, though, the major factor when it comes to weather is hurricane season.

Last year Hurricane Irene strolled on through the East Coast and left over 1 million people without power just in New England alone. Thankfully, our core network and data centers maintained excellent uptime thanks to batteries, backup units, and generators, but unfortunately some of our clients didn’t fare so well. More than a few clients suffered power loss for over 3 days, putting their business at a standstill. It’s critical that at this time of the year, businesses think about communications and data continuity.

We all work in a global economy – the Internet has given us the ability to shop online 24×7, and eliminated geographic borders. When it comes to working, it’s more common than not nowadays to have telecommuters and employees working from remote locations. All of these reasons are why it’s critical to make sure your communications services are protected against weather failures.

UPS units are the best place to start. Any network servers and devices such as routers, switches, and phone hardware should be plugged into a UPS, not only for power surge protection, but to help stay up and running if there’s a power failure. While most UPS units won’t last for an outage that’s measured in days not hours, they will allow you to gracefully power down servers and appliances to make sure there are no failures/issues when power is restored. Having your own backup generator will go much further, but costs can be prohibitive for a smaller business.

If your business maintains servers in-house, it may be more of a long term benefit to consider housing them in a colocation facility. Not only will your uptime be guaranteed, your performance will most likely increase by providing more bandwidth to your servers at the colocation data center while actually decreasing your monthly costs when it comes to power and cooling you used to provide to the servers in your office. Businesses who rely on customers getting data from their servers, or having remote employees constantly accessing in-house data, are especially good candidates to consider colocation.

Cloud services are another great way to promote business continuity in the case of inclement weather and power loss. Hosted PBX services, for example, can still answer inbound calls, collect voicemails, or even direct calls to individual extensions to user cellphones. Your region may be nearly shut down due to a hurricane, but your best clients may be hundreds (if not thousands) of miles away and will need access to you and your services. Hosted email will allow you to stay in touch even if your office is left without power as well.

Power surges and power fluctuations due to storms can wreak havoc when it comes to servers and computers; there’s nothing worse than powering up your desktop after a storm to discover the hard drive was damaged due to a power issue. Businesses can use automatic online backup services to keep mission-critical data backed up securely offsite, ready to be restored in case a computer or a hard drive needs to be replaced.

We hope some of these ideas will help you be prepared this hurricane season. And hey – once you’re prepared for that, you should be all set for blizzard season just a few months later here in the Northeast!

If we can help you with any services or preparedness, just let us know. Feel free to call 508-646-0030, email our team at sales@meganet.net, or just fill out a contact form. We’ll be happy to hear about your current service setup, and make some recommendations on how we can keep you up and running through bad weather.

The telcom marketplace is always evolving. When we first started offering service in 1996, regional providers were “the way to go”, as service and support were highly valued by businesses who were just starting to see the potential of the Internet.

Then, the dotcom bubble burst, and many of those regional providers either went out of business, or were purchased and merged into a larger company. In many cases, services and support suffered as clients were no longer calling an office just a few miles away, and talking to the same person every time who knew their company, service history, and unique needs. Calls were being sent to call centers thousands of miles away, and customers became numbers instead of the people they once were.

We’ve always done our best to provide the most hands-on, personal support we can to our clients. Any customers who call in are, in most cases, talking to some of the same technicians and reps that they were a few years ago, and we like to make sure our staff knows the individual needs of as many of our customers as possible. We’ve been lucky enough to help countless businesses grow and prosper, simply by listening to their questions, and providing the services that fit their exact needs.

One thing we’ve always done here is provide proactive monitoring to dedicated services such as T1, wireless, T3, Metro Ethernet, and servers colocated in our data center. Many times, we’ve been able to alert our customers to a problem they were having even before they knew they were having it themselves!

Our approach was really highlighted last week, when a long-time client contact of ours emailed us his farewell as he was preparing for retirement. His role was to manage the IT services for a multi-site network we provided dedicated internet and private site-to-site connectivity to. In part of his email, he wrote the following (quoted with permission):

“I want you all to know that I consider my relationship with you and your company as one of the most satisfying relationships I’ve ever had in my working career. You all display an expertise and willingness to satisfy that is unmatchable and unheard of in your industry.

I sincerely thank you for all your help over the years and will look back at our relationship with nothing but good memories.”

Those three sentences wrapped up our philosophy on customer support in a much better manner than a blog post ever could. There are any number of carriers and providers a business can choose to work with, and we’ve always wanted to set ourselves apart with the level of client support we’ve provided over the years. Reading these words from a long time client was one of the most rewarding things our staff could have asked for.

Thanks for the kind words Dennis, and from all of us here at MegaNet, good luck in your retirement!

We’ve been lucky to have some great weather here in New England to kick off this summer, and who wouldn’t want to be able to take advantage of it?

Now, we’re not suggesting business employees play hooky and run to the beach with the kids… but we do offer services that can allow you to be productive while working remotely, such as our managed VPN and VoIP services.

VPN (Virtual Private Network) services allow employees and remote office locations to connect securely to business networks and servers, which allows them to connect to company resources to help work from various locations. This not only benefits employees who are on the road a lot as part of their job, but it can also offer flexibility to employees to work from home. In fact, a recent article from Businessweek noted that studies show telecommuters are actually slightly more productive than office bound coworkers. VPN services allow telecommuters to connect to company resources as if they were sitting right inside the office – a secure option that ensures data privacy (and a way to track employee resource usage).

VoIP services from MegaNet feature a number of options to help keep employees connected, no matter where they are. Find Me/Follow Me provides inbound call routing to a number of separate phone numbers, so if an office extension isn’t picked up, the call can then be routed to a home office, or even a cell phone – you never have to worry about missing that important call. Voicemail to Email provides instant notification when a voicemail is received, and you can choose to call into your voicemail or even listen to the message that’s attached directly to the email message. And much like VPN, our call panel within our hosted PBX VoIP service allows companies to see who’s on the phone and when, and detailed call reports provide insight into employee phone usage.

Many organizations recognize that work is no longer done on just a 9 to 5 basis, and provide tools to their employees to make sure they’re as productive as possible. If you’d like to look more into how our VPN and VoIP services can provide both flexibility and more productivity to your organization, let us know! Feel free to email sales@meganet.net or call us at 877-634-2638 for a free consultation today.

Lately we’ve been working with a number of clients with legacy phone systems who want to take advantage of digital voice, but aren’t sure what options might be best for them. Our Hosted PBX service is great for a small to mid-sized company that’s looking to keep phone system features but doesn’t have (or want) the hardware that goes along with it… but for a company with an existing PBX, our enhanced PRI and SIP trunk services make a great fit.

PRI services traditionally come in either 6 or 23 channel options, and have usually been delivered over a T1 line. They’re a better cost option for companies that have higher call volume than bringing in single phone lines, and many legacy PBX systems are designed to use a PRI to deliver dialtone.

What we’ve done is provide the same PRI technology and services to make transitions from another carrier easy, while at the same time keeping things flexible on our end – so if  a client wants a PRI but needs a number of channels somewhere in between 6 and 23, we can build a PRI fit to their exact needs. This way, they’re not overpaying for unused service, nor are they handcuffed with too few channels in busy call periods. We aim to offer the best fit possible for each client.

Newer phone systems that are designed to use digital voice/VoIP right out of the box are a perfect fit for our SIP trunk services. Businesses can pick a minute/seat package, we’ll provide them with access information to our voice network which they configure their PBX to use, and that’s it – their voice services are up and running. It really is as simple as that. SIP trunks provide excellent flexibility for businesses because it only uses bandwidth when the phones are in use; this frees up plenty of bandwidth for their network’s day to day use. There’s no concerns over having too little available bandwidth because unused voice channels are taking up space on their connection.

MegaNet PRI and SIP trunk services are carrier agnostic, so as long as a business has a reliable high-speed connection, they can take advantage of our voice services. Of course, we’ll be happy to provide a bundled package to provide an even better cost savings – PRI and SIP trunk services can be offered over T1, Metro Ethernet, Ethernet over Copper, as well as a number of other reliable broadband services. But if it’s voice only services that a company needs from us, we can definitely help.

Our PRI and SIP trunk services start at just $299 per month, and no matter what configuration you choose, inbound minutes are always unlimited. Toll free and international calling are all available as well.

Have questions on how we can help you? Let us know! You can email sales@meganet.net, use our quick contact form, or call us at 877-634-2638 and we’ll be happy to talk about your current phone setup, and how we might be able to provide you with a perfect fit voice package.

Yesterday’s Boston Globe reported that over the last 4 years, roughly 3.2 million Massachusetts consumers had their personal information compromised or stolen.

That’s over HALF of the residents of our entire state that have potentially been harmed due to businesses losing their personally identifiable information, in addition to financial info!

We’ve talked about the Massachusetts data laws now in place after the TJX data loss a few years back; in fact, we set up a website to specifically help clients out with services to protect them under the new MA 201 CMR 17 laws that call for fine of $5000 PER RECORD that’s stolen or compromised.

These numbers are staggering – it’s a huge loss for both the consumers, and the businesses who take a huge hit when a data breach occurs.

We have a number of services to help businesses avoid these very situations – managed firewall and VPN services, encrypted email, and secure automatic offsite data backup are just a few services that we can provide to any size business. And to be honest, a data breach can happen to any company, no matter if you have 1 employee or over 1000.

If you’re a business that maintains personally identifiable information, or financial data, on a Massachusetts resident and you are not sure if you are adequately protected, please contact us today. We’ve been helping businesses of all sizes since 1996 with their Internet and data needs, including security.

Help protect your customer data, and help protect your company as well – contact us for a free consultation on your current services, and how we might be able to help

Are you aware of what day it is today? It’s the day before World Backup Day!

We encourage all of our home and business users to make sure that all of their vital documents are backed up. If you’re at home, maybe it’s your personal financial documents and priceless pictures of family moments. For our business clients, it could be your customer database, your company proposals and contracts, or perhaps your own time tracking sheets.

It’s critical that everyone make sure their data is both protected and backed up, not only here in Massachusetts with the MA 201 CMR 17 data laws, but worldwide – any unrecoverable data loss could affect you personally AND professionally.

We offer a wide range of backup services for our customers, ranging from the small single-PC home user all the way through large corporate environments. Even better, ALL of these services provide for automatic backups. You don’t need to remember to dig out that USB drive, plug it in, highlight all your folders… as long as your computer (or even server) has an active Internet connection, our backup services will automatically protect your data by backing it up to our servers.

Nearly 1 in 4 computer users will suffer data loss this year – contact us today to see how we can help you stay protected, and keep your data backed up.

There are quite literally hundreds (if not thousands) of web-based providers when it comes to hosted services such as email, websites, and storage. A simple Google search returns pages of responses, all companies that promise to have you up and running with a credit card and a few quick keystrokes.

In most instances, these companies tout the convenience of using them as your web/email/storage provider, along with their attractive prices. When you’re in a bind and looking for someone to quickly set up your new services or migrate existing services to, often times these providers seem like the best choice.

Once you’re up and running, however, the convenience of having the “all in one do it yourself” panel can have some drawbacks, usually related to service and support. Many online-based providers that offer those solutions neglect to offer something that can be critical – real time, live support.

As a managed services provider, we’ve had calls and emails from customers who are at their wit’s end trying to get something accomplished with another provider with no success. Some times it’s a domain name move or change, perhaps it’s figuring out how to get to their email that they’ve been locked out of, or in a worst case scenario, dealing with an unauthorized domain name move. In almost every instance, the customer’s been directed to a support form, or online FAQ, with no way to call someone to get the problem resolved quickly and easily.

MegaNet clients have always enjoyed the convenience of picking up the phone and giving us a call if they have a problem, and we do our best to address those problems as fast as we can. Email and online-based contacts are great for users on the go, however sometimes a quick call is all that’s needed. And if we can’t answer a question right away, our clients know they can count on us to reach back out to them as soon as we can.

Don’t let the convenience and low costs of some online-only based providers stand in the way of having reliable service – with a valued partner like MegaNet, we can help out in many different ways, with multiple ways for you to contact us. We’re here to help keep you up and running, while YOU run your business.

Have questions? Like we said, give us a call! You can reach us at 508-646-0030 or toll free 877-634-2638; if email’s your preference, sales@meganet.net is the way to go.

How can we help you? Let us know!

Email has become such a critical communication tool for businesses. Recently, with the rise of smartphone use, we’re seeing a trend moving away from locally hosted email servers and back towards cloud-based email services. Different businesses of course have different needs, and to help fill those needs we have a number of different email services available.

MEGAMAIL – Our tried and tested MegaMail service is based on the IMAIL platform, and is one of the most robust email services we’ve ever offered. It’s perfect for companies that don’t need collaboration, and have users that prefer both local email clients as well as using web browsers to read their mail. It also offers self-administration, so each company can have one user who can add, remove, and change users whenever the need arises.

HOSTED EXCHANGE – Companies in the past that were running their own local Exchange server love our Hosted Exchange service. It’s built on the Exchange 2010 platform and is optimized for web user access. All the great features of Exchange are included – shared calendars, address books, and file sharing. Do you know what’s not included? High costs and constant server maintenance! That’s right, our customers pay only the monthly users fees for their inboxes (with availability of up to 100GB plus archiving) and that’s it. Smartphones are easy to use, and Blackberry users can choose to add sync for a small additional monthly fee.

MANAGED EMAIL SERVER – Businesses with a large user count will benefit from using a MegaNet managed email server – one monthly fee, full user administration, and hands-on support all help to make this an attractive offering. We work directly with customers to get their requirements, and help build and implement a solution for them. Managed servers are located in our lights out data centers to provide the maximum in uptime and security. Companies that need to adhere to strict compliance guidelines can rest assured that we can help them meet and exceed their guidelines.

GOOGLE APPS – In 2011 MegaNet became an authorized Google Apps partner, and we now can offer fully managed Google Apps to our clients. Google Apps is platform independent, all

Of course, with all of these services, we offer our Fight My Spam service as an add-on so users can view quarantined email, and help stop spam while letting legit email flow through quickly to their users.

If your business is looking to update and upgrade their email platform, before you spend thousands of dollars on hardware and licensing, give us a call. We’ll be glad to discuss your needs and figure out which platform will be the best fit for you.

Contact us today!