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Information Technology services are essential to the success of every organization, large or small. With increasingly competitive business environments, CEOs and small business owners are under great pressure to maintain a highly qualified staff and to make sure their technology is obtaining a better ROI than their competitors’.

These goals are not easily achieved, particularly for young or small businesses with less financial resources and time available. Having your own successful information technology department can eat up too much of the company’s budget and time resources, and eventually cause a loss of its competitive edge. These disadvantages of maintaining an in-house IT department are why companies of all sizes have turned to using managed service providers to either assist their existing IT department or become their virtual IT department, handling all of the technology involved in keeping their businesses running at optimal levels.

The benefits of using a managed services solution are numerous, but the top 5 benefits of managed services for business include:

1. Benefit from the expertise of a specialist, without having to spend time and financial resources training your staff to become experts.
2. Decrease your technology risks. Your company doesn’t have to worry about losing and trying to replace trained staff members, or about repairing, implementing or replacing complex technology solutions.
3. Enjoy access to the most up-to-date, sophisticated technology solutions without having to invest in expensive equipment.
4. Experience ultimate control over your business technology without having to manage an information technology department. This gives you the time you need to focus on what you do best: your business functions.
5. Reduce stress and improve efficiency of your staff. When you make good use of managed service resources, your staff isn’t tied up with IT concerns and they have more time to focus on tasks that are productive for the business.

By J. Nicholas Hoover InformationWeek
May 5, 2010 02:47 PM

A few weeks ago, officials at Fairfax County Public Schools thought they had a hacker on their hands.

Someone was changing teacher passwords on the Falls Church, Virginia, school district’s Blackboard system, which is used to give teachers, students and parents a way to communicate and stay on top of homework assignments and class announcements over the Web.

Local police were called; they investigated and traced the incident to the home of a 9-year-old student at the school. Although police initially thought that the Blackboard system had been hacked, it turned out that a Fairfax student — who has not been identified — had simply taken a teacher’s password from a desk and used it to change enrollment lists and other teachers’ passwords.

“This was a case where an individual … got hold of a teacher’s password, and the passwords had administrative rights,” said Paul Regnier, a school board spokesman.

The student was able to enroll teachers in classes, and when he did so he could modify their passwords on the Blackboard system, but there wasn’t much more he could do, Blackboard representatives said. The intruder couldn’t, for example, change grades or access other machines on the school’s system.

That didn’t stop some local papers from reporting the incident as a computer intrusion, a characterization that both Regnier and Blackboard now dispute. “It was actually not a hack, unless you consider the fact that the 9-year-old took the teacher’s username and password from the desk a hack,” said Michael Stanton, Blackboard’s senior vice president of corporate affairs.

Although there will be no criminal charges filed against the perpetrator — citing school policy, Regnier wouldn’t confirm that it is a student — the Fairfax school board is taking the incident seriously, Regnier said. “Nothing bad happened this time, but we have to make sure that … it doesn’t happen again,” he said.

The key, he added, is keeping passwords safe from prying eyes.