What is a vCIO?

A vCIO is essentially a contractor or a service that offers high-level IT strategy and consulting services remotely. Acting as an outsourced Chief Information Officer, a vCIO collaborates with businesses to develop and implement comprehensive IT strategies that align with business goals. This includes overseeing technology deployments, managing IT budgets, ensuring cybersecurity measures are up to date and guiding technology-related decisions. Unlike a traditional CIO, who is a full-time executive within a company, a vCIO allows businesses, especially small to medium-sized ones lacking the resources for an in-house CIO, to access expert IT leadership and advice on demand. This role is pivotal in helping businesses navigate the complexities of technology infrastructure, software integration, data management and the ever-evolving cybersecurity landscape, ensuring that IT systems support and drive business objectives efficiently.

What is the difference between a vCIO and a CIO? 

While both vCIOs and CIOs aim to align IT strategies with business goals, the traditional CIO is a full-time executive position, focusing on internal IT management and strategy. In contrast, a vCIO offers flexible, external expertise, providing strategic planning and consulting to optimize IT performance and investment.

What does a vCIO do?

A vCIO provides valuable IT services to businesses they work with. These services often include the following: 

• Technology roadmapping: A vCIO plays a crucial role in guiding the strategic direction of your business’s technology. They conduct thorough evaluations of the IT department to identify any deficiencies and implement solutions that not only address these issues but also support the broader objectives of your business. The outcome is a technology roadmap tailored to your company’s needs, designed to keep your IT infrastructure modern, secure and aligned with industry innovations. This approach not only ensures that your business stays competitive but also prepares your team for the integration and use of new technologies, enhancing overall productivity. With the majority of top global companies outsourcing their technology planning, leveraging a vCIO’s expertise is a strategic move to maintain a cutting-edge IT environment.
• Vendor relationship management: The vCIO role extends beyond internal strategy to encompass vendor relationship management, building and maintaining strategic partnerships with key technology providers. This ensures not only the seamless integration of services but also that your business’s interests are protected. The vCIO’s expertise in negotiating and managing these relationships means your business benefits from smooth, reliable service delivery, enhancing your technology stack’s efficacy and efficiency.
• Risk management and business continuity planning: A vCIO’s role in risk management is critical. By assessing potential vulnerabilities and formulating robust defense strategies, a vCIO protects your business’s online assets and confidential data. Their strategic approach to disaster recovery planning ensures that, even in the face of IT interruptions or data breaches, your business operations can continue with minimal disruption. This proactive approach to cybersecurity, combined with their expertise in modern security practices, protects your business from the wide range of risks present today.
• Resource optimization: Optimizing your current technology infrastructure for maximum efficiency and effectiveness is a key responsibility of a vCIO. Through thorough assessment, they pinpoint areas for improvement, suggesting solutions that not only enhance efficiency but also drive growth and profitability. By identifying and eliminating redundant or outdated software and replacing it with cutting-edge applications, a vCIO ensures your technology infrastructure is lean, agile and perfectly aligned with your business objectives.
• Senior management consulting: A vCIO works closely with your company’s senior management, offering regular insights and recommendations that keep them informed and engaged with the IT evolution as your company grows. This includes providing solutions to emerging IT challenges, advising on compliance with fluctuating industry regulations and ensuring that your business remains at the forefront of technological advancements. Their strategic input helps shape the future direction of your business, ensuring IT initiatives are always aligned with your goals. 

Benefits of using vCIO services

Organizations choosing to use vCIO services often gain the following advantages and benefits:  

• Strategic alignment: With a vCIO, your IT initiatives become a catalyst for growth, driving efficiency and ensuring your investments in technology deliver real, tangible business value. This strategic alignment between IT and business goals is a key element of the value a vCIO brings to the table.
• Enhanced cybersecurity: The expertise a vCIO brings to your cybersecurity efforts cannot be understated. Designing comprehensive security strategies, they ensure your data is protected and your business complies with relevant regulations, protecting your business against the landscape of cyberthreats.
• Improved IT efficiency: A vCIO’s ability to review and optimize IT processes eliminates inefficiencies, automates routine tasks and ensures your IT resources are effectively utilized. This not only improves your overall IT efficiency but also frees up your team to focus on more strategic initiatives.
• Cost-effectiveness: Choosing a vCIO offers high-level IT expertise without the financial burden of a full-time executive salary and benefits. This cost-effective solution allows businesses to leverage strategic IT guidance and support, optimizing their technology investment and driving their business forward. 

What is the difference between a vCIO and a MSP?

While MSPs offer tactical IT support and management, a vCIO provides strategic guidance, helping businesses navigate the big picture of their IT landscape. This distinction highlights the vCIO’s role in ensuring IT strategies are not just about maintenance but about driving business forward. Read more about the differences between a vCIO and an MSP in this blog post.

Deliver vCIO services with myITprocess

In conclusion, a vCIO brings significant strategic value to IT professionals. For MSPs aiming to provide vCIO services, IT Glue’s myITprocess is essential. This tool simplifies the IT strategic planning process by ensuring that all crucial information is readily accessible, thereby improving decision-making.

Here are some ways myITprocess helps MSPs with IT strategic planning:

• Utilizes a structured framework: The tool employs a standardized, industry-proven IT strategic planning framework to ensure consistent results across all clients.
• Uncovers technology gaps: myITprocess proactively uncovers technology gaps and address risks before they escalate to maintain client satisfaction and continue driving profit.
• Streamlines QBR management: The platform simplifies quarterly business reviews from agenda setting to post-meeting summaries.
• Delivers simplified client presentations: myITprocess presents IT roadmaps in an easy-to-understand format, enabling real-time client feedback.
• Organizes prioritized IT roadmaps: The software integrates IT risks into a clear, client-facing roadmap, organized by priority, timeline and budget to secure early commitments.
• Generates custom reports: Our system produces automated, customizable reports that illustrate the current state of client IT infrastructure, completed work and future opportunities.

With the support of IT Glue’s myITprocess, MSPs can enhance their IT strategic planning and drive real business results.

Ready to transform your IT strategy? Schedule a myITprocess demo today.

The post What is a Virtual CIO (vCIO)? A Guide to vCIO Services appeared first on IT Glue.

Stale data is a scourge, one that must be purged.

Too much of anything is too much (if it’s inaccurate)

Documentation can be incredibly powerful, especially for your techs. The more they document, the more information they have at their fingertips to help them solve your clients’ problems. We encourage every MSP to document as much as they can about their clients’ tools and environments.

That said, documentation that is inaccurate might actually be worse than having no documentation at all. If you have zero documentation, at least you know that you need to find things out the hard way. You can build that into your processes. Those processes will be clunky, but at least you’re working within known limitations.

When you have stale data, you look at it and think you have good data. When you try to rely on that data, you find that you cannot. It’s like you build up all your hopes and dreams, and then have them crash right in front of you. Ok, that might be a bit hyperbolic, but it really sucks when you think you have the right password logged, only to find out that you actually don’t. Not only are you right back where you started, but you wasted time and maybe got a little frustrated along the way.

So how does one deal with the scourge of stale data?

There’s a couple of approaches. First, it pays to have a rhythm for reviewing your critical documentation. Use checklists, flags, and workflows to help build up this rhythm. Assign sections to different people to create accountability – remember if it’s everybody’s job then it’s nobody’s job, so create clear pathways for accountability by assigning specific tasks to specific people and holding them accountable.

Second, remember that time is money. Only assign tasks to actual people when a script can’t do the job. Leave no stone unturned for automating regular updates. Use PSA and RMM software that integrates into IT Glue, to ensure that your documentation is as up to date as possible. Manually updating documentation is a pain, so the more you can automate the better off you’ll be.

Third, build out an archiving system. Having a clear means by which you can distinguish between data that is up to date and data that is out of date will help you prioritize your efforts, and keep outdated information (otherwise known as noise) from cluttering your IT Glue account.

Our advice is to automate as much as possible, target high-value SOPs for periodic evaluation, and archive anything that’s out of date. Do so, and you just might end the scourge of stale data once and for all.

Ready to keep your data fresh? Network Glue can help. Learn more below.

Yes, I want to learn more about Network Glue!

What thousands of MSPs have come to discover is that IT Glue can act as a central hub for all of the information they need in order to better serve their clients and staff. IT Glue also allows businesses to get the information out of their team’s heads and store it in a place where everyone in the organization can easily access it. We are a proven, best practices-driven IT documentation platform packed with features designed to help you maximize efficiency.

The post The Scourge of Stale Data appeared first on IT Glue.

Establish basic rules

You need two things to properly archive documentation. First, you need a methodology for determining what needs to be archived. In IT Glue, version histories are available, so a lot of documentation can be overwritten or updated, rather than archived. But some assets and SOPs have a shelf life, and when they become obsolete you’ll want to have a system in place to know when to archive them, lest they become clutter.

So start with some basic rules about when something needs to be archived. Each business will be a little bit different, so the most important thing is you have established rules and follow them, whatever those rules happen to be. Then, you need a schedule for going through your documentation periodically, especially for things like SOPs that need occasional updating anyway.

If your team needs encouraging to find a few minutes to make sure the documentation is up-to-date, you can gamify it using our in-app engagement dashboard or the integration that CrewHu built with IT Glue.

Then you have to choose how you want to archive old documentation. There’s a few different options: file, delete, or export.

Filing

The file approach is dead simple. You set up a folder for archived documents and more your obsolete documentation there. How you wish to structure these will depend on your needs. At the minimum, each organization would have an Archive folder, but you might want an Archive folder for each asset type. Whatever works best for you.

Deletion

You can also delete documents, if you want. If a an asset is deleted by a user action, it is hidden from all views for everyone, and can be restored by admins from activity log using the rapid restore feature.

Export

You can export data from IT Glue several different ways. For partners on the current Enterprise plan, you may export via the Runbooks feature, creating a batch of PDF documents. For all partners, any individual asset can be printed or saved to PDF. You may also export your data into a .csv file, which might be the most convenient for archived documents you do not expect to have to reference again. Once the files are exported, you can file or delete to your heart’s content.

Archiving documents in IT Glue probably isn’t top of mind, but eventually it will be. Keeping your documentation clean and tidy might seem like a chore, but with a proper strategy you keep the active documents at your fingertips, and your stale-dated document segregated in a safe but out-of-the-way space. You can learn more about performing content audits in a handy post from our information architecture pro, Renee.

Yes, sign me up for a demo!

IT Glue is an information management platform that allows for efficient storage and retrieval of all the documentation you need to help your MSP run better. By integrating PSA and RMM data, we can help increase your efficiency, and reduce onboarding times by even more. By eliminating wasted time from your business, IT Glue gives you more time to focus on what matters – growing your business.

The post Archiving and Retention Policy appeared first on IT Glue.

Trust is one of our core values, and we know that data resilience and continuity is of utmost importance to our partners. With that in mind, we wanted to give a refresher about our infrastructure, so that you can get a better sense of the steps we take to ensure that your data is available, even in the event of issues with AWS.

A Brief Overview of the IT Glue Infrastructure

We fully understand that there may be concerns about the integrity of your data as a result of an outage. In light of this, we wanted to take the time to explain more about the resiliency we have built into IT Glue to ensure that you have no concerns about possible data loss in the future.

IT Glue’s platform is hosted in AWS. This is made up of front-end web servers, servers responsible for integrations, search services, file services, and our database back end. The entire environment is designed for maximum fault tolerance and business continuity.

AWS includes significant fault tolerance within each geographic region, but we’ve extended that significantly. Our database back end, for example, is automatically replicated live to another physically-separate datacenter, with different failure characteristics within the same geographic region (known as an availability zone). In addition, it is also replicated to another instance in an entirely different AWS geographic region.

Our application is designed in such a way that we can survive a significant failure even within the same availability zone and continue without an outage. Were a disaster to strike, we are able to recover our entire infrastructure to an entirely different region of the country in a matter of minutes.

We are continuously working to improve on this while also paying just as much attention to ensuring our compliance with security standards such as SOC 2.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel to contact us and we would be glad to discuss this further. Thank you for your continued trust and loyalty.

Local Backup Availability

Some of you have wondered if you can get local backups of your IT Glue data. Yes! You may export data into a .ZIP at any time or a list of assets into a .csv file to maintain your own copy of your IT Glue data.

IT Glue is the leading documentation platform for MSPs, designed to eliminate waste, improve productivity and help you hit your SLAs better. We are committed to continuous improvement, and this means we are constantly rolling out new features. Check our blog or our release notes regularly to learn about the latest features.

The post The Importance of Data Resilience appeared first on IT Glue.