IT Management

When you subscribe to our Managed IT Services, we're your IT Department (but without the headaches or expense of managing a whole other department for your business). Our clients include the individual running their home-based business to a company with over 100 employees expanding across multiple states. We have experience providing services for our clients across a variety of industries, such as:

• Law Firms
• Accountants
• Hotels
• Medical Practices
• Architectural Firms
• Apartment Complexes & Management Companies
• Car Rental Facilities
• Manufacturing

We want to free up your time to do what you're good at, by letting us take care of your technology and doing what we're good at.

If you have an existing network that either someone else was managing, or (as is often the case) no one is managing, we like to begin the onboarding process with a bit of discovery to learn about your network, document it, and learn about any areas that need immediate attention so we can priotize the tasks most important to you.

Managed Network Services

On a subscription basis, we provide managed network services. This service is for clients that recognize the benefits of their networks being proactively managed, rather than in a reactive way just waiting for something to break. Our Managed Network Services include:

• Maintenance performed on all of your computers every month to make sure they are virus- and malware-free, and check their basic vitals to plan for future changes.
• Free Helpdesk support.
• Discounted hourly service rates for any non-Helpdesk items.
• Perpetual warranty on all Hyperion Works workstations and servers.

Consulting

The most difficult challenge in maintaining a network and planning for the future isn't configuring servers or custom IP routes, but being able to understand where the company owners want to take their business, and understand how to translate that into a technological solution.

In its simplest form, a client says "I want to do X with my business -- What do I need in the way of technology in order to make that happen?" It's our job to answer that question, and every business is different. Often times, the answer is a mix of off-the-shelf solutions combined with some customized software to glue the entire solution into a well-oiled machine. At HYPERION WORKS, we have years of experience identifying and solving inefficiences in business processes, and our staff receives ongoing training to keep up with changing trends given new technological advances.

Installation

Once we've formulated a game plan, we can handle the entire installation process. This could be as simple as installing a new printer on a workstation, or an entire office network build-out, including coordination with other vendors (like your Internet Service Provider). We can install and configure most anything you'd need on your network:

• Servers & Workstations
• Printers, Scanners, & Copiers
• Firewalls, Switches, and Wireless Access Points
• Ethernet Cabling & Server Racks/Cabinets
• Software Applications
• Video Surveillance Systems

Repairs

This is pretty self-explanatory, right? Something breaks, and you want it fixed. Every computer company does this, so do we. Nothing special here.

The goal here, however, is not to let everything just chug along without any oversight waiting for something to break, and then panicking when it does. The goal of having your network managed and overseen is to work to prevent these issues. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" couldn't be any more true than in IT. Here are some parallels that we all understand as responsible adults:

• If your car breaks, you take it to your mechanic. But you also take your car to your mechanic for regular maintenance in order to prevent it from breaking as much as possible.
• If you're not feeling well, you go to your doctor. But you also visit your doctor regularly for checkups to try and head off anything before it becomes a problem.

We are a 24/7 IT services company, and so when emergencies happen, we're there for you! But you also don't want to run your business with the idea "I'm not going to take any preventative actions, I'll just scurry to call someone when something breaks."

Network Security

Security is a challenging topic, because it must be properly balanced with usability. If you had to engage in a retinal scan followed by keying in your DNA sequence for your height every time you wanted to check or send an email, then you could almost be guaranteed that no one would be able to hack your email. But then the usability would be so low that you'd never actually use your email.

A major rule to security is that only those that need access shall have access. You might trust someone on your staff with access to certain data. But if they don't need that access, they shouldn't have that access. One of the biggest security holes with computers are not the computers themselves, but rather with people, and the way people can make mistakes, or be fooled into handing over something that they should't. Someone on your staff might write their password down on a sticky note and attach it to their monitor for "easy access". Now anyone that walks by their desk can access whatever they can. Or they might click on something in an email that they shouldn't have, accidentally infect their computer, and now that infection can access whatever they can.

Understanding how to create organized, hierarchical groups of access can be a complicated task, and it's something that we do very well.

Once you know how your access rights and restrictions need to be organized, then we create a plan for implementing those details through proper passwords, procedures, specialized hardware -- Whatever your specific situation may call for.

Cable Installation

The physical act of running cable through ceilings and walls isn't particularly complex. But determining how best to plan for cabling needs can be.

Network cabling is something that you don't change out very often. Normally you install it, and then use it for years, perhaps even decades. This is why it's important to know the trends of what's being used, and what will be used years later, so that you're not redoing this task unnecessarily in a few years. For instance, we began installing CAT6 cabling for ethernet networks as our standard back in 2012 when most eveyrone else was still installing CAT5e. The benefit of CAT6 back then was nothing, and that's still mostly true today. Plus, it costs about a penny more per foot. So why is this a good thing?

CAT5e maxes out at 1Gbps (one gigabit per second). That was the standard for network speeds in 2012, and it's still the standard now. But CAT6 will handle up to 10Gbps, ten times the speed. For about a 2% increase in cost for the overall installation, we've future-proofed our clients' networks so that when 10Gbps becomes the standard, no new cabling will need to be installed. Others will be redoing their entire cabling infrastructure from scratch in order to upgrade.

When installing cabling, we almost always double-up our drops. Wherever a single cable is requested, we install two. Most people recognize that the workstation needs a cable, but they don't consider future expansion. What about the printer, desk phone, postage machine, credit card machine, or a variety of other devices that may share the desk with that workstation and need its own cable? It's only marginally more expensive to install a second cable while the initial job is being completed, but relatively much more time-consuming and expensive to add it in later.

Wireless Bridges

A wireless bridge is a point-to-point connection that functions like a very long cable to connect two locations to each other and function as if those two buildings were on a single network. A wireless bridge is best suited for buildings that are either near each other (i.e. contained with the same parking lot) or are tall enough to have line-of-sight of each other and are up to 20 miles apart.

There are two common alternatives to wireless bridges for this purpose:

• Leasing a line from the local phone company. This is usually slower than a wireless bridge, very expensve, and involves a recurring cost.
• Setting up a VPN over the internet. This is generally less expensive than a leased line, is likely to be slower, and because it goes over the public internet, is more susceptible to performance fluctuations.

If possible, using a wireless bridge is the best way to go. It provides for the fastest performance, and is the least expensive option (involving only a one-time installation cost rather than a monthly subscription).