Network Support for Small Companies

Progent can provide the services of a veteran IT professional with decades of experience in technology management, development, operations management, and business consulting for organizations ranging from Big 4 firms to dot-com startups to state government agencies. These senior consultants can provide key services for small business or enterprise clients.

Most small businesses cannot afford to maintain an experienced full-time CIO with the big-picture perspective needed to align IT spending with strategic goals. To help clients leverage their IT investment, Progent offers part-time CIO services for assistance with:

• Strategic planning. Create and implement a comprehensive growth strategy that leverages technology to help your company become a high-performance business. Develop a big picture that realistically defines your information network as a strategic business tool to give your organization a competitive advantage.
• Rationalizing and managing your IT budget. Understand which IT investments make business sense. Create models for Total Cost of Ownership, Return on Investment and Risk Management that relate to your short-term and long-term business strategy. Define an IT budget that supports business growth, and manage the budget in step with actual business results and perceived opportunities.
• Business process improvement and reengineering. Analyze current workflows and processes within your business and between your business and outside organizations. Use information technology to help you improve or redesign business processes in order to enhance collaboration with suppliers, partners and customers to maximize performance and achieve your business goals more quickly.
• Contract and vendor negotiations. Qualify vendors and evaluate products and services that support your business objectives and are in line with your IT budget. Negotiate contracts to maximize the business impact of your budgeted IT investments and to meet cash flow requirements. Monitor product performance guarantees, service level agreements, and special upgrade opportunities.
• IT security. Define a complete security strategy that covers security policies and procedures, a secure IT infrastructure, security monitoring and virus protection software for local and remote users, regular security patches, and emergency response plans for security breaches.
• Data center management. Set up and manage a robust data center for web-based e-commerce, management information, corporate intranets, or mission-critical application servers. Implement application server monitoring to detect potential problems proactively and reduce avoidable downtime. Establish procedures to keep critical applications current and deploy software that reduces costs by automating management tasks and consolidating information. Define and enforce backup and restore procedures.
• Network management. Design and manage secure, cost-effective network framework that provides the performance, availability and expandability required to support your business objectives. Provide telecommuters and mobile workers with fast, reliable and secure connections. Use appropriate network monitoring software to anticipate problems, identify bottlenecks, and track usage.
• Desktop management. Develop and implement a comprehensive plan for desktop management that includes procedures for adding, moving and changing computers, help desk services, asset tracking, software revision control, configuration standards, automated management software, and support for mobile devices such as notebooks, PDAs and wireless products.
• Disaster recovery. Create and test a disaster recovery plan that includes analyzing the vulnerability of your network infrastructure and critical data, addresses disaster scenarios such as hardware failure, natural catastrophes or hacker attacks, defines backup procedures and backup system validation, describes an effective and affordable power backup system, specifies virus protection software, incorporates an appropriate level of system redundancy, and proposes off-site backup and recovery procedures.

Read Progent's White Paper: Advantages of IT Outsourcing Services
For a discussion of how Progent's IT outsourcing and co-sourcing services can benefit companies of all sizes, see Progent's IT Outsourcing white paper.

Contact Progent for Part-time CIO Consulting Services
Progent can provide companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, Northern California, and major cities throughout the United States a professional consultant to act as a part-time CIO so that your business can develop and implement a well conceived IT strategy without incurring the cost of a full-time senior IT executive.

If you are looking for a part-time CIO, call Progent at 800-993-9400 or send email to network-support-help@progent.com.