Back in March, colleges sent students home as the coronavirus spread through the country. At the time, this decision to transition to online...
Manufacturing IT Blog

Why a Robust Network Firewall is Essential to Business Operations
Every minute of every day, attackers are scanning your corporate network, trying to break in so they can lock up your files with ransomware or...

How to Make Remote Learning More Effective in K-12 Classrooms
For many school districts, the looming question on the horizon is: what will happen for the remainder of this year? The Corona Virus does not seem...

Benefits of Technology in the Classroom: Helping Teachers Help Our Children
Teachers devote so much time and energy to their students. Even outside of the classroom, teachers need to lesson plan, grade tests, run clubs or...

Key factors when selecting a network switch for performance
The network is the backbone of your IT system. It allows employees in different locations to communicate easily with each other and to stay on top...

Why strategic advice is crucial when rationalizing IT systems
When your company’s network goes down repeatedly or an employee’s laptop is running too slowly, it may seem that the easiest solution is to...

CNS Partners Releases Manufacturing IT as a Service Solution
Andover, MA, October 26, 2020: CNS Partners today announced the availability of a new IT solution custom tuned to the needs of manufacturing...

What are the benefits of cloud backup or backup as a service?
The emphasis of that question is implicitly on the word service. To legitimately offer Backup as a Service (BaaS) the provider needs to have the...

The benefits of an expandable compute & storage system
When you are designing your compute and storage infrastructure, you may be thinking primarily about optimizing the performance for your business...

Essential requirements to support the latest storage arrays
When a customer wants an estimate, you need quick access to information. It’s not just frustrating when the system is slow to return the numbers...

Managing Storage Array Risk When Space Runs Low
Anyone who manages a storage area network has probably already learned (perhaps the hard way) that performance and protection are almost mutually...

When the Network Problem Isn’t IOPS
More times than not, poor network performance can be traced back to a storage system with poor IOPS. But what if you already ran the diagnostics...

Diagnosing Network Performance
Network switches are core components in any network, because everything on the network connects through a switch. If the switch is not performing...

Understanding IT Database Performance Challenges
Poor database performance manifests itself as that noticeable (and sometimes intolerable) lag that occurs when navigating, querying, or submitting...

How IT Network Latency Affects Performance
For anyone who has been in IT for a while, the phrase “latency” probably conjures up images of spinning disks, spindles, and actuators… the things...

Disaster recovery plan: 10 keys to rapid recovery and productivity
A fire destroys your building. An earthquake knocks out power to large portions of your region. An equipment failure takes your database offline. ...

A modern IT backup strategy for fast & accurate restore
Backup systems have evolved from the days when they involved copying data onto disks or tapes – possibly on a schedule but often just whenever...

Impact of IOPS on IT System Performance
IOPS (input/output operations per second) is a standard unit of measurement pertaining to the maximum number of reads and writes to non-contiguous...

How to implement robust IT for intrusion prevention
Manufacturing companies use gates, locks and security cameras to keep their facilities safe. But digital risks to your business should get the...

How to streamline your networking infrastructure
Businesses function most efficiently when the technology they use is running smoothly. This means, for example, that sales team members can easily...

Why Every Business Needs a Disaster Recovery Plan
Disaster can strike any business, in any industry, at any time. Is yours ready to get back on its feet again as quickly as possible? Whether it’s...

Preventing a Data Breach from an IT Systems Hack
That cybercrime causes devastating losses to businesses around the world isn’t news. U.S.-based companies suffer between $57 and $109 billion in...

Defeating Downtime: High Availability IT Strategy for a Manufacturing Business
Downtime is highly disruptive—and thus expensive—for manufacturing firms. Though exact costs are difficult to calculate, there’s little doubt that

Why IT System Reliability has a Direct Effect on Performance
When you’re putting together an IT system, it’s easier to focus on cost than reliability. The cost is printed in black and white, whereas...

Why the Right IT Systems can Improve Business Operations
Your IT systems are the backbone of your business. They provide up-to-date information on inventory and manufacturing and track financial...

Keep Insider Threats Out: How to Harden IT Systems Against Bad Actors
If you’re like the majority of leaders in small to mid sized manufacturing firms, it’s likely that you think of your employees as your business’s...

How to Engineer IT Systems for Rapid Recovery in Case of Natural Disaster
From 1980 to the present, the United States has seen 265 weather- and climate-related disasters that each resulted in more than a billion dollars’...

How to Recover from a Ransomware Attack
It’s every business owner’s worst nightmare: one day you discover that every one of your files, on every single device connected to your...

How to Upgrade IT Components to Recover from an Outage
In early May of 2019, a particularly virulent strain of ransomware called RobbinHood struck the city of Baltimore. This was a large-scale and...

How to Restore IT Systems without a Recovery Point
“Apocalyptic” isn’t too strong a word to describe the situation. Whether it was caused by a malicious criminal act like a ransomware attack,...