The New Year is a great time to revisit your technology strategy. IT Strategy is getting more and more important every year - whether you are a software company who makes a living with technology or someone running a law firm or other small business - technology should be making you better.  Far too often, however, we lose sight of our strategy dealing with the day-to-day bustle of running our business while keeping older systems running.  The New Year is a great time to step back and revisit the key components of your IT strategy.  Here are five strategic IT investments every company should be making in 2018:

There are many benefits to "moving to the Cloud," or adopting "Cloud Courage" as we at Systems Engineering (SE), like to put it. In addition to keeping up with the way in which technology is moving, it's also important to look at benefits such as CSP billing. Throughout this article, I will discuss what CSP billing is, how it works, and the various benefits involved. 

SE Help Desk is here to support the daily needs of our clients and it is no small task.  Our team services 121 businesses with approximately 3,850 (+/-) end-users.  Each day they work hard to deliver engineering excellence and superior customer service. To achieve this, they focus on providing a high level of service that delivers value in every interaction and results in a positive outcome for the client. To accomplish this outcome, we have outlined some of the SE Help Desk metrics that demonstrate their commitment to improving the end-user experience.

Systems Engineering (SE) announced today that it has achieved Microsoft Gold Competency for Cloud Solutions, specifically for small and midmarket-sized businesses. The certification demonstrates the company’s expertise in deploying innovative, cloud-based solutions using the Microsoft Azure platform and Microsoft Office 365. Systems Engineering has been a Microsoft Partner since 2003. Attaining Gold Competency is the highest certification level a Microsoft Partner can receive in a specific technology area.

On Friday, October 27, Systems Engineering's (SE) President, Matt McGrath, and Director of Engineering, John Sterling, presented University of Southern Maine (USM) student, Brennan Harvey,  with the Systems Engineering Scholarship. Brennan is currently a Junior at USM majoring in Computer Science. 

It is reported that around 269 billion emails are sent worldwide each day with 150(+/-) of those being delivered straight to each of your employee's Inboxes. According to Symantec’s 2017 Internet Security Threat Report, one in 131 emails contains malware. This means that on a daily basis every one of your employees is faced with emails that threaten the security of your organization’s data.

This blog post will review the systematic approach to trace back to the beginning of an issue or problem when quality breaks down within your IT environment. This process is known as a Root Cause Analysis, or RCA, and is an approach used to figure out how, where, and why an issued occurred. The best RCA will also answer the question of how to prevent the issue in the future.