Major disasters aren’t the only way your company can lose money. More commonly, it’s the steady drip-drip-drip of lost revenue that comes with occasional server downtime, the ten minutes you lose trying to re-install a misconfigured printer driver, the couple of seconds it takes to delete a spam email, and the time you spend waiting for large files to load. It all adds up.

And if you translate the time you’re wasting on IT problems into the cost to your business, you might be shocked.

Here are stories from CMIT clients who had no idea how much they were spending — or, more accurately, how much they were losing — dealing with IT challenges before we came along.

Wright Water Engineers use large aerial imagery files to plan water and wastewater systems for everyone from ski areas to municipalities. But these large graphic files — sometimes 30 to 40 GB in size — were taking forever to load. Geographic information systems analyst Erik Baros estimates that it could take 30 seconds to a minute and a half for each image to appear. Working on a dozen to a couple dozen maps a day, he was spending 25 minutes a day, or over 100 hours a year, just waiting for maps to load., and he has four co-workers who do the same job. All told, Wright Water Engineers was probably losing upwards of $15,000 a year due to its slow network.

53.15 weeks — that’s how much time employees at Loesel-Schaaf Insurance were wasting every year just deleting spam! With 34 employees spending about 15 minutes a day, that was 510 minutes a day total. Multiply that by 250 working days a year and you’ve got 127,500 minutes. That’s 2,125 hours — more than a full employee work-year, spent deleting spam.

But now with CMIT Anti-Spam, they’ve got all those hours back — as well as extra protection from email-transmitted viruses, phishing attempts, and more.

Rona Reznick, the president and CEO of Summit Management Specialists, was spending TWO HOURS A DAY wading through spam emails making sure that she didn’t miss any vital client communications buried within all the spam. Between her own spam and those of her employees, she estimates they were losing upward of six personnel-hours a day. That’s 1,500 hours, or about 75 percent of an average worker’s year. At an average salary of $40,000, that’s $30,000 a year that Summit Management was losing to spam.

Darwin Smith, General Manager of the Lake Stevens Sewer District, says that switching to CMIT’s proactive IT services has saved a huge amount for taxpayers in his municipality. Instead of rotating through a constantly changing staff of temporary contractors, he gets CMIT services for a low, flat monthly fee. “Now I’ve got this triply more efficient system with backups and much more versatility and protection, and I’m only paying 30 percent of what I was originally paying,” he says.

When an upper-level executive has to perform both management duties and the job of in-house IT guru, you’re not just wasting that person’s time, you could be costing your business a whole lot of money! Trenton Harris, CEO of VIA Seating, decided to outsource his IT work when he realized how much the company was losing by relying on an executive to do simple IT tasks. “When you’re dealing with a high level of executive, you’re talking a six-figure salary. When you have any amount of time, especially at this substantial level, you’re probably overpaying for the resource that’s necessary to support that infrastructure and environment, as well as creating a major distraction on that team member’s real priorities. All told, between infrastructure and other technology, I would say at least $50,000 to $60,000 a year of this person’s salary was spent on technology support.”

This one is truly shocking. Terrace Supply Company provides industrial gas, welding supplies, and automotive refinish supplies to about 5,000 customers, and they offer customized pricing to each individual customer. If their backups failed and they lost their customers’ many years of sales records, they’d have to do pricing calculations by rebuilding each customers’ old invoices from scratch — a task that could easily take a staff member one day per customer. That’s 5,000 days, or, assuming 250 working days per year, 20 years before they rebuilt all their data.

The Space Coast Endoscopy Center used two computer programs to manage pathology requests and insurance information, but if either of the programs failed, staff would have to perform a complicated series of measures to keep all the records correlated – taking charts apart, making photocopies, and then reassembling charts. Each request only took 5 minutes to process by hand. But if they handled upward of 40 patients a day, they were losing over three hours. Multiply that by about 10 days of program failures every year, and they lost nearly a full workweek of productivity to a problem that CMIT solved through proper networking and system configuration.

David Hurst, an agent with Farmers Insurance Group Company, was running himself ragged trying to solve the problems a technical expert could have fixed in minutes. He was spending an average of 6 hours a week working on networking, maintenance, connectivity, and software issues when he could have been developing new customer relationships and delivering great service to existing clients. That translated to over 300 lost hours per year – nearly eight weeks of work -- when he could have been selling! “Not to mention the frustration and headaches and everything that goes along with it. It was just too much,” he recalls.

The Brown Orthopaedic Surgery and Sports Medicine Center had always had a full-time IT staffer. So when their employee left the company and they started looking for a replacement, they didn’t even want to think about using an outsourced IT service like CMIT Solutions. But now that they’re using CMIT, they’re thrilled not only with the level of support but with the money they’re saving. “We’ve saved around $10,000 a year,” says CEO Jacob Rodman, “but if you account for employees’ time and lost revenue for going down and all those things, that would add a tremendous amount.”

In many of these situations, business owners had absolutely no idea how much money they were flushing down the drain due to slow computers, unreliable backups, systems that didn’t work well together, or unmanageable volumes of spam. And that’s understandable — after all, they were busy running a company!
But once you KNOW how much you’re wasting by putting off maintenance, failing to keep on top of simple tasks like updating antivirus definitions, or taking hours to resolve technical issues that could be fixed by an IT professional in a matter of minutes, you’ve got no excuse.

DO THE MATH. Engaging an outsourced IT provider like CMIT Solutions can justify its cost very, very quickly. And with our flat-rate monthly services, we can help make IT expenses more predictable so that you’re never left wondering how you’re going to pay for a multi-thousand-dollar technical calamity. With CMIT Solutions, those calamities never happen in the first place.

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What’s Inside…

Take Your Computer Back to School

Is Your Slow PC an Ancient Relic … or a Ticking Time Bomb?

How Does Your Computer Guy Stack Up?

Claim Your Copy!

Loudmouths Wanted

Get a 2 Gig Flash Drive Free

Take Your Computer Back to School

Whether you’re looking to extend the life of an old computer or find some nifty way to enhance your new one, there’s plenty out there that can help you do more with what you’ve got. As you get ready for a busy fall, here are some steps you can take to make sure you’re efficient, productive, and secure at work.

1. Add memory. If you’ve recently installed some video games (which you shouldn’t do anyway on your work computer!) or added memory-intensive software like sound or photo editing, you might notice your computer’s processing slowing precipitously. Boost it back up again by installing more memory.

2. Get speakers for your desktop computer. If your job requires you to listen to a lot of recordings — and these days, the number of instructional YouTube videos or saved online conferences out there is pretty staggering — then it’s worth it to get a decent set of speakers rather than spend all your time craning your head to un-derstand the crackles coming out of your desktop unit.

3. Back it up. We’ve said it a thousand times, but we can’t say it often enough: a backup only works if you use it. Make it easy on yourself by using an automated online backup service in addition to whatever physical backups you want to make on site. If you sign up for CMIT Guardian, backups will run automatically, every day, so you never have to worry about losing all of your information assets all at once.

4. Buy a wireless mouse. If you have a relatively limited work space or travel often with a laptop, you will be shocked to find out what one less wire can do for your quality of life. And if you’re using a Bluetooth-enabled mouse to connect to a Bluetooth note-book PC, you won’t even need a USB transceiver.

5. Run a defrag and a full system scan. You should periodically defragment your computer. While you’re at it, why not make sure you’ve done a full scan for viruses and malware? Get into the habit of doing both these tasks regularly — or use CMIT Marathon, our proactive maintenance and monitoring service, and know that a professional is taking care of this for you.
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That Recurring “Glitch” Could be a Sign of a Much Deeper Problem . ..

Slow computer performance or other strange behavior could be a sign of a much deeper problem. That’s why we offer this FREE Business Technology & Security Assessment to all new clients. In no time at all we can assess your network – while you watch – and show you what's really going on, "under the hood" so you can take appropriate action to protect yourself.

When you call us for a FREE Business Technology & Security Assessment, we will:

• Look for incorrect network configurations
• Assess your current security against data corruption, theft, hardware failures,
• power outages, computer vi-ruses, worms, spam, and even employee sabotage
• Scan for spyware
• Check your data backup system to ensure it is working properly
• Diagnose slow, unstable PCs

CALL (203) 595-9091 NOW
FOR YOUR FREE BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY AND SECURITY ASSESSMENT! or visit http://www.cmitsolutions.com/stamford

Loudmouths Wanted

Is there a topic you’re dying to have covered in The CMIT Solution?

Do you have BURNING QUESTIONS that need answers ...

COMPUTER HORROR STORIES you want to share ...

TALES OF TRIUMPH over IT disaster?

Send suggestions, feedback, crazy tales, words of praise, and bad jokes to: monthlynews@cmitsolutions.com.

You might see yourself featured in our next issue!
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How Does Your Computer Support Guy Stack Up?

Take the Quiz,
Enter Your Results at http://www.cmitstamford.com/win.html,
Get a FREE Business Technology & Security Audit!

_______ Do they respond to emergencies in 1 hour or less?
_______ Do they completely resolve issues for you or do they leave you                hanging with unresolved problems and follow-up items you have to do?
_______ Are they easy to reach and responsive when you need them for            
               non-emergencies?
_______ Do they offer a flat-rate, proactive maintenance program to keep                critical security settings and patches up-to-date?
_______ Do they offer a monitoring system to watch over your network 24/7
               for developing problems?
_______ Do they proactively offer new ways to improve your network's                performance, or do they wait until you have a problem to make                recommendations?
_______ Do they provide detailed invoices that clearly explain what you are                paying for and fixed-priced quotes to avoid scope creep?
_______ Do they explain what they are doing and answer your questions in
               terms that you can understand?
_______ Have they provided you with all comprehensive IT documentation, Ids,
               and passwords, so that your not being held hostage by them?
_______ Do they arrive on time and dress professionally?
_______ Do they have other technicians on staff who are familiar with your                network in case your regular team members are unavailable when you                need them?
_______ Do their technicians maintain current certifications and participate in                on-going training?
_______ Do they take calls from other clients while working on your network                (and on your dime)?

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Back to School Special!

Let us give you a FREE Business Technology and Security Assessment Worth $347

Gear up for a busy fall and winter by making sure your systems are in tip-top shape

Dear Colleague,

This fall I’m offering a FREE Assessment as a “get acquainted” offer to a select group of people.

As a special “Thank You” for responding to our offer, we will give you a

FREE 2GB USB DRIVE

if you enter in by September 30, 2009.

But Please Register Now Because This Offer Expires At The End Of The Month!

All you have to do now is take 60 seconds to go to www.cmitsolutions.com/stamford/ and sign up there. There are no strings attached to this offer and you are not obligated to ever use our services again. We don’t expect everyone to become a client but we suspect you’ll be impressed once you see how we can help your business save thousands of dollars, work smarter and faster, AND get your technology budget under control!

Here’s How This Works ...
Just fill out the form on www.cmitsolutions.com/stamford, and we’ll schedule a FREE Business Technology and Security Assessment for you — a $347 value.

Hurry! You Must Activate Your Voucher Before 09/30/09 Or We’ll Have To Enter Someone Else.