External IT

It is clear that today’s small to midsize business must do more with fewer resources while still providing exceptional products, services and value to their clients, partners and staff. However, it doesn’t stop there. Regulatory agencies, industry groups and even your own clients are requiring higher levels of accountability than ever before.

"We needed a system that made our information safer.We knew that this was the best solution for us."

Companies, agencies and sole proprietors across virtually every key industry sector are faced with IT and compliance overload. If you’re not snowed under yet, just wait. Every year, American businesses have to work through increasing truckloads of paperwork.

Consequently, the need for up-to-date, well-managed IT infrastructure is not just a business imperative, in many cases, it’s a legal necessity.

In talking with our clients, law firms are seeing rising costs and shrinking revenue. To maintain a competitive staff, they’re finding ways to work smarter, organize better, and service clients faster. (Yes, this is actually happening.)

The overall objective is to provide more effective legal services through improved operational efficiencies. Easier said than done? Actually, if you’re a small to midsize firm, it’s just as easily done as said. Or nearly. (We insert that legal caveat.)

We know our client's challenges well, and they no doubt look a lot like yours:

Security. Your data can’t merely be fairly secure. Everything is confidential. By default it must be protected and secured from unauthorized third parties and from actual loss.

Compliance. As with most professional services firms, you have to comply with Sarbanes Oxley guidelines. This is time consuming, and potentially troublesome from a legal point of view.

High availability. The wheels of justice do not stop spinning simply because your server is down. Continuous, instant access to all your IT resources and case information isn’t an option, it’s a must. And this is true regardless of where you are, or which computer you’re in front of.

They also need to have a consistent (yet customizable) user experience regardless of the where they’re working.

All of the above is possible, and are benefits enjoyed by our legal clients every day. expenditures, and significantly cut your operational costs.

Factor in both security and performance enhancements, and it’s hard to argue against partnering with External IT.

Disaster recovery and business continuity. "Fast" just isn't fast enough. Extended downtime is not an option. To ensure against every imaginable disaster, large or small, effective failover systems must be in place. Only in this way will your hardware, applications, and data remain available to everyone who needs these resources, and your operations resume as quickly as possible in the wake of a catastrophic event.

Affordability. Law firms are being seriously challenged to control costs. Happily, this is one of the great advantages of cloud computing, particularly with the OS33 Portal. Until now, reducing or eliminating capital expenditures for new hardware and software was only a dream. Waking up in the morning to fixed, monthly IT costs, was rarely more than a fantasy. Not any more.

Secure. Reliable. Efficient. Cost-effective. Future-facing. To us, not just words, standards. In brief, here are the ways in which we make them a reality for small and midsize law firms:

Security. External IT protects clients with data centers and IT infrastructure that are, without question, among the safest in the nation. Twenty-four hour guards are supported by state-of-the-art biometric scanners and card readers. Our facilities themselves are secure against floods, fires, even earthquakes.

The OS33 Portal Desktop platform also makes it very easy for administrators to manage permissions. It’s the only platform with a self-service administration console to remotely manage all IT resources for every user.

The console gives you policy-based application access control to manage users, groups, applications, permissions, profiles, security and folder access rights.

Regulatory Compliance. The legal firms we serve work with clients across a broad spectrum of industries, and span the range of practice areas. They cover everything from healthcare to manufacturing. From personal injury to finance matters.

To help them focus on these important matters, we simplify compliance, whether it’s addressing Sarbanes-Oxley or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. We also offer ISO compliance for securing confidential data.

To further help our OS33™ Portal includes a security tool that allows IT managers or External IT support staff to enable, disable, and manage a set of simple, tightly integrated services for email management and on-line and off-line storage (including multi-year archiving solutions).

External IT is the only company to provide a unique self-service administration console to remotely manage all IT resources for each and every user.

The console is included in the OS33™ Portal, providing policy-based application access control to manage users, groups, applications, permissions, profiles, security and folder access rights.

Are we as reliable as the sun coming up? We give it a run for its money.

Your applications, files, e-mail, contacts and calendar information via OS33™. And our Managed Hybrid Cloud services allow you to tap into additional IT resources like Amazon EC2™ and Microsoft Azure™.

Anywhere, anytime access is what every legal services company needs. With External IT, that’s never a problem. All that’s required is a computer with Internet access.

Whether you’re working from headquarters, a remote office, at home or on the road, our clients will attest that we’ll keep you connected.

High Availability. If you’re not up, you’re not in business. It’s no different for us. Small and midsize companies need IT that’s every bit as reliable as that empowering a global firm, and that’s exactly what we deliver to our clients.

External IT delivers ready access to the same set of applications, communication tools and data, regardless of where you or your staff are working, and regardless of which computer or computing device they’re working with.

If a local failure occurs, you can log into the system from a different computer or different location. All you need is an Internet browser and you’re back in business. You can go right back to the same point in your work process, without any loss of data.

We offer fault tolerant network infrastructure with synchronous mirroring, and continuous data protection for servers with 24 hour rollback. You have your choice of high availability SQL and Exchange deployments.

Anywhere, anytime access is our most fundamental benefit. Whether you’re at headquarters, a remote office, at home or on the road, our clients will attest that we’ll keep you connected. Our facilities boast an uptime of up to five nines (99.999). Less than perfect? Nobody is closer.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity. In the event of a Data Center failure, our system can redirect everyone to a pre-determined failover site. It’s business as usual with little to zero downtime. And we incorporate a more flexible and reliable technology than you would have with Hosted Desktop.

Hosted Desktop relies on a network router. Unlike the name might imply, a router alone is not very good at redirecting users to specific resources based on the application they request, their permissions, location and other circumstances. A Portal Desktop, like OS33, occupies the perfect space—between your staff and your servers. This makes it far more adept at handling these challenges.

We take backups, at minimum, once a day, and can have them run at whatever intervals you request including continuous replication.

Productivity. You many not be able to personally work any harder, but the law firms we serve will tell you that your IT can. You’ll be able to wield a rich set of IT services and capabilities that streamline work processes and maximize billable hours.

You’ll acquire the ability to seamlessly share information among attorneys, paralegals, support staff and clients—and collaborate on projects in new ways.

The External IT enterprise-wide virtual workplace is powered by state-of-the-art infrastructure located in our Data Centers, employing the very latest in network equipment and software, application and web servers, and robust internet connectivity.

We can save your company many hours a year, otherwise spent logging in, with our single sign on alone.

Your staff will have seamless access to personalized Web resources, Windows applications and services like Microsoft Office™, Exchange™, SharePoint™, Active Directory™, and SaaS. They can work with your custom business software as well as software-as-a-service applications.

As for even more exclusive capabilities, our mirroring feature allows multiple users to view and edit the same spreadsheet, document, presentation or file while being in different physical locations. And they can do it in real-time, allowing everyone to work through time-sensitive projects faster than ever before.

They can post announcements, leverage company-wide information assets and communicate seamlessly via email and integrated IM. And, they can do it all anywhere, anytime, on any computer.

If you have an overactive conscience, this competitive advantage might feel unfair. Don't be concerned. In time, most of our clients actually come to enjoy this feeling.

While cloud computing has only become a major new IT management tool over the last few years, we’ve been providing these services to companies across the country, and overseas, for nearly ten.

This means that our team of account managers, technical specialists, and operations staff have already worked with hundreds of clients to cut their costs and give them a tangible competitive edge through IT.

It also means that we understand business processes across numerous industries. When we talk with you, we not only want to address your basic IT requirements, but discuss how we can give you an industry-specific advantage. That’s really the heart of what External IT cloud computing is about.

To discuss how we may be able to give you a competitive advantage, click a link to the left or visit the heading above Get Started