Central Service Technicians for Your Chicago Business

Central security services: Protect your company from hackers and viruses

Central Services encompasses many areas of your business that are vital to its continued operation, namely, security concerns and efficiency. Everything from staying up to date on antivirus software to maintaining your backup and disaster recovery measures is necessary to keep your business safe from hackers and ready to spring into action should a problem appear. Monitoring your systems also alerts you to any roadblocks impeding efficiency.

We offer a wide array of remote maintenance and network monitoring services to Chicago SMBs. These services are all part of our managed IT plans that help us align technology with the needs of SMBs. Growth is often a primary goal for these organizations, and technology alignment allows you to keep pace with the big guys. Central Services is just one piece of the puzzle, but a very important one.

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See What Our Clients Say

…We are now able to have the resources of a big company, but don’t have to pay full price for them…If there is an issue, we don’t have to do anything but call them. They are easy to deal with and their staff does whatever they have to do to get issues resolved.

Phusion Projects

I've contacted XL for IT support with various issues and assorted software and apps, throughout the workday and off hours. They have consistently been incredibly responsive, helpful, friendly, and professional, and they help me understand the problems in layman's terms. Thanks XL!

Rachael Georges

Appraisal Institute

XL.net provides me and my business every tool we need to succeed and a peace of mind that can’t be bought. What we pay now is less than what we were paying before – with a side of extra competency. We are getting better services for less.

Illinois Ventures

Compared to our previous provider, the transition to XL.net saves us $7,000 – $8,000 a month in IT expenses and the fact that we no longer have an in-house IT tech. This is the best IT vendor I have had experience with – and I’ve had a lot of experience with IT vendors in the past.

TradingBlock

The biggest thing XL helps us with is to manage our time. Everyone’s busy and we can’t solve the problems ourselves, so having XL as a resource to take over when we don’t know how to handle tech issues ourselves is very helpful.

Overall, we’ve had a great experience with XL. Everyone is very personable. We don’t have any negative feedback because we’ve had a great experience. I have no issue picking up the phone and calling someone at XL. I always feel very comfortable. XL makes things that I wouldn’t want to deal with smooth and easy to deal with

Emily D

I am very confident in XL’s team, enthusiasm, and knowledge. I know that when I reach out to them, I can get an answer and a fast resolution.

If they didn’t have the answer, they dug for a solution. That’s what gives us confidence in working with them.

I can tell that XL is growing. I see that new names are popping up on their tech roster. Each of them must be going through a great training program because they are all top-notch.

Shailesh P

The Goal of our IT Central Services

You need Central Services to keep your environment running and protected. This department, or function in some instances, is accountable for the deployment and management of tools like: Backup and disaster recovery, antivirus, patching, monitoring, content filtering and vendor management.

When considering your Central Services, there are a few things that stand out as primary concerns:

Complete coverage

Like insurance, you want to know that 100% of your environment is accounted for and protected 24/7/365. Anything less than that could severely damage your company with the possibility of putting you out of business.

Unobtrusive

You want to know it’s there in the background, but without it slowing you down and requiring your attention. Your security measures shouldn't be a nuisance to everyday employees.

Affordable

You want these tools to cost as little as possible, while supporting your organization to the fullest capacity.

Complete Coverage protects your business from hackers

We understand human error is unavoidable, but we can certainly plan for it and do everything we can to counteract it. In addition to accounting for errors, we also need to defend businesses against the possibility of data breaches. Many SMBs make the mistake of thinking they are too small to hack, but a little over a quarter of data breach victims are small businesses, and the results are especially damaging to these organizations. The effects of poor security measures could result in substantial trouble for the future.

The more important the purpose of a tool is, the more stringent the plan must be to protect it.

We have three levels of criticality:

1. It’s important to protect your environment from viruses

Antivirus, antispam, security training, crypto prevent, content filtering, remote access and other tools are all important to daily operations and security. We have two departments that audit them following our documented procedures in SweetProcess:

Our System Analysts deeply inspect and ensure all tools are set up to meet our standard on a monthly basis.
Our Technology Officers audit your setup on a quarterly basis.

2. Critical monitoring helps identify hackers quickly

Critical elements include patching and monitoring. Patching is critical in reducing security and productivity loss risks, while proactive monitoring is critical in identifying issues before they negatively impact you and your staff. We have three departments that audit patching and monitoring following our documented procedures in SweetProcess:

Our System Analysts deeply inspect and ensure the two are set up to our standard on a monthly basis.
Our Technology Officers audit your setup on a quarterly basis.
Our Security Manager audits patching and monitoring once a week across 100% of our clients.

When it comes to keeping an eye on things, we offer proactive network and device monitoring throughout Chicago and the surrounding areas.

3. Mission Critical: be prepared when/if the worst happens

Mission-critical aspects include backup and disaster recovery. They are the most critical as they are the last layer of defense when all else fails. We have three departments that audit backup and disaster recovery following our documented procedures in SweetProcess:

Our System Analysts thoroughly inspect these aspects and make sure they meet our standards each month. They also perform a quarterly disaster recovery test to simulate a disaster and validate you can recover from it.
Our Technology Officers audit your setup every quarter.
Our Security Manager audits backup and disaster recovery for compliance twice a week for all of our clients.

All of XL.net reviews the results of backup and disaster recovery compliance audits across all our clients on a weekly basis:

When we detect failures from our audits, we learn from them by performing an ISO 9001-level incident report and consider all issues to be process issues. Growth is the name of the game at XL.net, and we take careful measures to understand how and why any issues occur and prevent them from happening again.

IT Services shouldn't disrupt your workday

If managing one of your business-critical tools would be disruptive or distracting to your staff, we can always do the work after hours. There’s no point in having them be interrupted by these tasks when we have three live shifts operating 24/7/365. Our staff is always available to work when it won’t impact your productivity.

We also take care to employ tools that won’t negatively impact your systems. For instance, if we install a new antivirus program, your staff probably won’t even notice. We won’t slow down your computers with unnecessary or troublesome programming that could reduce productivity.

One exception to being invisible is our security training. We perform the most advanced simulated phishing attacks randomly twice a month on you and your staff. It takes a few seconds a month and, potentially, an extra 15 minutes of security training when a test is failed. We find that this small time commitment is well worth the significant reduction of risk it provides to protect your business from hackers successfully compromising you and your staff.

Affordable IT Services in Chicago

We include all of the central services as part of our service fees. This allows us to purchase licenses from tool vendors in bulk and leaves us accountable for the cost as it impacts our bottom line. This means that the more problems you have, the less profitable we are, making positive results a win-win for both of us.

Remote Network Monitoring and Management Services in Chicago

For proactive network and device monitoring services in Chicago, XL.net has the skilled staff and managed IT resources to help. We take many steps to ensure safe and secure environments for our clients with our full-coverage, discrete and affordable proactive network monitoring in the Chicago area.

Central service technicians focused on growth

When you work with XL.net, you work with a team that focuses on growth and strives for perfection. Our network device monitoring services is just one of the ways we get there. Central Services is a component of our larger managed IT program, which all starts with developing a technology alignment plan to ensure your tech supports the goals of your business.

To get started with your plan or learn more about our Central Services, reach out to an expert today.