Resource Center
When it comes to IT services, knowledge is power. The single most valuable thing we can pass along to our clients is our expertise.
The resources below are here for you. Please help yourself, absolutely no strings attached.
Whitepapers
Videos
Brochure
Ebooks
Info Sheets
Insider 94 Navigator 2023
Resources & Advisors for Buying & Selling a Business
Make sure to check out Page 28
Case Study – Healthcare – Skyway Behavioral Health
Start Up Requiring Robust Infrastructure – From Planning to Implementation
The 7 Irresistible Qualities of Cloud ERP
Learn why ERP tools are an critical component for many businesses.
Why a Business Continuity Plan is Essential
Learn why your company needs a business continuity plan.
Ransomware 101
If you’re looking for ways to stop ransomware dead in its tracks, the experts at CCS Technology are here to help.
How managed services make the difference
Learn more about the benefits of partnering with a managed services provider.
Cloud Services and the SMB Revolution
Learn more about how Cloud Services from CCS make your life easier.
Office 365 Migration Made Easy
Migrating over to Office 365 has never been easier with CCS Technology.
The Advantages of Working with I.T. Pros
Learn how working with a seasoned technology pro makes your work easier.
Closing Common Cybersecurity Holes
Learn several critical cybersecurity tips and tricks any SMB can use.
Providing technology support all around
Backup and Disaster Recovery
Cloud Services, to make your life easier
IT Consulting
Managed Services
Network Security
CCS Technologies company brochure
Learn more about the benefits of partnering with a managed services provider.
- Learn more about the benefits of partnering with a manged services provider.
- Learn more about the benefits of partnering with a manged services provider.
Our Services
We’re passionate about two things: keeping you ahead of the curve and delivering an unbelievable client experience. This is how we do it.
Don’t Let ERP Projects Turn into a War of Attrition
/in Blog, ERP Software /by Chris HigginsWhen you think of “classic war movies,” what comes to mind? Patton? The Great Escape? Saving Private Ryan? World War II made for a much better story than it’s predecessor. This isn’t to discount movies depicting World War I—All Quiet on the Western Front and 1917 were both incredible movies. But they don’t provide the same message as the action and intensity that went into storming the beaches or retaking Paris. Why? In a simple word—motion.
Cinema depicting World War II gave us a clearly defined good versus evil plotline, tales of heroism, a story that could be related to a parent or grandparent, and most importantly, action. World War I showed us how hellish and slow war could be.
It depicted a time between heroic cavalry charges and combined arms. A war known for trench warfare, everything about WWI was based on waiting. Every single charge was risky. But so was standing still. It was demoralizing and not at all glamorous.
So what does this have to do with an ERP deployment? A lot more than you’d think.
The Dangers of ERP Implementation Trench Warfare
ERP deployments have long been considered risky. Long and laborious, the process quite closely resembled trench warfare. People start out with high expectations and morale. Might even make it through a few phases. But then it comes to a grinding halt. A wrench in the system or a hiccup in one of the many phases resulted in deadlines moving back, costs edging up, and a little less motivation. Keep this up over the course of a few months with no end in sight and people start to get impatient.
But much like the time between WWI and WWII, technology has improved. Like the introduction of armored warfare and combined arms sped up battles, smarter deployment methodologies and the cloud have made it easier to tackle a deployment.
Rather than fighting a slow, risky, and inefficient battle that puts the morale of your employees at risk and the success of your project in jeopardy, companies like Acumatica have introduced fast yet thorough ways to get up and running with a powerful solution without the hurry up and wait mentality of the past.
Acumatica FastTrack: Into the Cloud in 90 Days or Less
Whether you’re in the distribution space or looking to get your finances in order, Acumatica has developed a new methodology built to help you get up and running without the slow “trench warfare” implementation process that traditional ERP was known for.
What Is the FastTrack Deployment Model?
By speeding up your ERP deployment timeline, you can experience faster time to productivity (and decreased time to value), higher customer satisfaction, and lower cost of entry. Recently introduced, the Acumatica FastTrack deployment allows you and other midmarket growth businesses to go-live in 90 days or less.
How Does FastTrack Work?
The Acumatica FastTrack Deployment methodology is a phased, in-the-box (ITB) approach using best practices-based templates and configuration checklists. Relying on standardized migration tools and fixed timelines, the process facilitates ERP deployment by simplifying phases.
Traditional ERP deployments begin with the Discovery phase before heading to Analyze, Build, Stabilize, with continuous Planning & Monitor phases. However, FastTrack connects the process, consisting of four well-researched phases: Initiation (Discovery and SOW); Adapt (Analyze, Design, Build, Stabilize); and Deploy (Go Live and Post Go Live). The final phase is Sustain, which involves continuous improvement and customer feedback.
Benefits of Getting on the FastTrack
Designed for midmarket growth businesses, Acumatica’s FastTrack Deployment provides a robust, scalable, and repeatable framework to deliver successful deployments.
Here are just a few benefits of the accelerated implementation program known as Acumatica FastTrack:
Get to know more about what goes into an Acumatica FastTrack deployment here.
True Security Doesn’t Mean Passing a Compliance Audit
/in Blog, Security /by Chris HigginsKeeping company IT resources secure is a critical goal. Meeting compliance standards supports that effort, but achieving compliance isn’t the same as achieving security.
Compliance vs. Security
Compliance is about taking the steps necessary to satisfy regulatory scrutiny. Typically, a business will need to meet a compliance standard based on its industry or the nature of the data it collects. The standards provide a checklist of measures that need to be implemented in order to be in compliance.
Security, on the other hand, is about taking steps to reduce the risks faced by business IT resources. This usually requires going beyond the baseline measures needed for compliance. There are a few reasons for this:
Security Counts
You may need to check off the boxes on a compliance questionnaire, but achieving security means going beyond that minimum. Businesses need to identify the real risks they face and focus their efforts on addressing those, not deciding “job well done” because they’ve passed an audit. You need to develop policies and processes that provide real security, and implement control that match the level of risk on an application-by-application basis.
This requires keeping up with current trends in threats, making sure necessary patches are deployed, giving users meaningful testing, and integrating technology that effectively detects and blocks intruders, even when it’s not required by any compliance standard. Complete security requires addressing risks in your network, on devices, in your applications, in your data, and in your users.
Security is harder than compliance, because it relies on your own understanding evaluate risks and your own assessment of what steps you need to take to protect yourself. CCS Technology can help you develop and implement a security solution that offers true protection. Contact us to learn how to move beyond compliance and effectively protect your critical IT resources.
Additional Security Resources
Discover the Dangers of the Dark Web
Create An Information Security Culture to Protect Your Data
6 Ways to Keep Your Cloud Secure
Cloud Migration Requires a New Monitoring Strategy
/in Blog, Cloud /by Chris HigginsMost businesses have a multi-cloud, hybrid IT environment. Whether according to a strategic plan, the result of individual department IT decisions, or shadow IT usage by their employees, they are using more than one cloud provider. In addition, they continue to have on-premises IT resources. This complex environment makes monitoring complex, as well. In many cases, businesses should build out a new monitoring solution more capable of monitoring their mix of technologies.
The Challenges of Monitoring Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Environments
The mixed environments businesses are supporting today are difficult to monitor. Every provider has their own tool that provides metrics for that environment only; there are also likely multiple tools monitoring resources within the data center. Yet despite the many tools collecting data, it’s difficult to obtain an overall, consolidated view of status. That lack of insight makes providing support and investigating issues challenging.
Cloud vendor’s monitoring tools may lack data to help the business assess the effectiveness of its cloud migration. Performance metrics may be collected or presented differently than metrics were in the data center, making it impossible to effectively compare performance across environments. The tools may also make it hard to understand utilization, and can lack historical data needed for analytics. Finally, the tools don’t effectively capture the user experience, as the user’s access to a business service may depend on multiple technologies that are deployed in multiple locations.
Another important concern is that simply knowing what needs to be monitored is difficult. The dynamic nature of cloud means services are continually being added and removed. Besides making it easy to overlook an important component, the steady change makes it harder to compare metrics over time, as they’re never looking at exactly the same thing.
Learn more in 5 Cloud Migration Mistakes to Avoid.
Build Monitoring into Your Migration Plan
Because of these challenges, succeeding at cloud can’t rely solely on the cloud provider’s monitoring tool; you also can’t rely on operations staff to monitor multiple dashboards for each cloud environment.
Instead, businesses will need to be proactive and plan for a new approach to monitoring as part of the migration planning. This will typically require evaluating various tools available that pull together data from multiple clouds, or even implementing your own tool to create a consolidated view customized to meet your needs. Making sure the selected or built tool captures the necessary data requires spending time to identify the metrics that matter most to your business. Gathering the data must be automated for the tool to be successful.
Creating an effective monitoring strategy is just one of the challenges of planning a cloud migration. Contact CCS Technology Group to learn how our cloud services help you succeed with your migration and ongoing cloud usage.