What is Unique about Locked-On Technology?

Our goal in providing you with contracted IT Management is to satisfy your organizational need for an experienced and knowledgeable IT resource, without tieing up others within your organization who are accomplishing other tasks.  IT Management is typically a part time resource in most small to mid-size organizations, while hands on technical resources might be either company employees, or outsources, depending on the structure and needs.

An outsourced IT Manager can be a very cost effective way to have a dedicated resource to perform many of the tasks Locked-On Technology usually performs as contracted engagements, with an "ownership" feel, and without the added expense.  We can work with you to determine the number of onsite or remote hours required, at an economical rate.  We can also assist with hiring or training of your own Technicians or Server Administrators, or provide you with technical staff engagements as required.  The possibilities are limitless, and we are happy to discuss what would work best for your specific environment.

In the hundreds of projects we have managed, one things we have learned, contrary to many organizations approaches, is that there is no such thing as a single type of approach.  Each project is different, and a fatal flaw to many projects is that the project management plan components were not tailored to the specific project.

Large software programming projects might require an agile project management approach, while smaller software or difficult to predict projects might require iterative approaches.  The creation of excess workload of standardized project processes spread over many workers can easily disrupt a project.

Locked-On Tech will analyze requirements, create a project plan and work with stakeholders to insure the plan is right before starting any project.  We insure communication methods are transparent across the stakeholder pool, analyze risk to minimize any disruption, and follow the project through to termination, including planning for future maintenance requirements, closeout review and provide the post-project recap and analysis.

An IT Strategic Plan is a critical component of funding requests for presenting to decision makers, and for compliance such as PCI.  Most importantly, is how you insure that purchases work together to contribute to the most effective future configuration.  The process consists of 3 steps.

The first step is to perform a full analysis of your current systems, similar to a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis.  It includes a full technical infrastructure analysis, surveys of both internal and external customers, meetings across the organizations with stakeholders to determine optimal future  functionalities and more analysis as required by your particular situation.

The second step is a Locked-On Tech process to review all the information that was gathered in step one.  Analyze the external environment  and prepare the most effective steps your organization can take to meet the future configuration requirements based on several possible timelines, and several budget scenarios.

The final step in the process is to meet with stakeholders, discuss recommendations, timelines, budget and to formulate a final, detailed and step by step IT Strategic Plan that can easily and effectively set up your organization for the most cost effective and efficient way to meet future IT requirements.

Any time your organization engages with any service provider, purchases a major component or maintenance contract, has an app created, or installs a new application, you enter into an agreement.  Sometimes it is official, legally reviewed and signed, other times you click a button to "Accept". 

When you trust a lawyer to review an IT agreement, they are of course well qualified to assess the legal aspects of the contract, but do they understand how a maintenance agreement on a new server works, how the programming of a software application works, and the costs and opportunities you might incur from a technical perspective?

Locked-On Tech can provide a cost effective second set of eyes to review specialty technical agreements from an IT perspective.  

• If you are having an application created, will the programmer provide you with the appropriate documentation you will need later for any future maintenance?  
• Is that maintenance contract for a hardware purchase structured for the proper response time depending on the level of severity or the time of the outage, and are you compensated? 
• Are you properly covered if a 3rd party doing maintenance on your application inappropriately shares data or creates a cybersecurity issue?

These are  just a few of the many issues you might come across that we can help you with at a fraction of the cost of ignoring them and just signing the vendors stock agreement.

A business continuity plan is critical to any organization that has internet facing resources, business critical or sensitive data, runs a risk of a "phishing" attack where data is encrypted and a ransom must be paid, runs a risk of misuse by employees or 3rd party vendors, and other scenarios.  

A business continuity plan can be very detailed and include all aspects of risk, including the criticality of the resource, probabilities of disruption, timelines requirements for restoration and repair, secondary failover sites, backup requirements, resources needed to restore, and much more.  The plan can be iterative, initially covering the most critical aspects of restoration, or can be a detailed handbook that anyone working on restoration can use as a step by step guide to complete the restoration.

Whatever your scenario, a continuity of operations plan is critical to insure any business loss is not catastrophic to your organization.  Locked-On Tech can provide you with a plan that fits your individual needs, and has the resources needed to fully implement a solution.

Locked=On Tech does have capacity to provide cloud migration services to move applications, data, and infrastructure to the cloud.  If that is your decision, we can help you choose the appropriate cloud provider, review proposed agreements, develop a migration plan that minimizes downtime and disruption, and manage the migration itself

Cloud migration is however a strategy that requires analysis.  It does make sense in some situations, for example, many SAAS (Software as a Service) web hosted applications.  Cloud providers can provide reliability, flexibility and eliminates a considerable amount of complicated security and networking if an organizations utilizes an application that needs to be web based.  Web sites and customer facing web services are examples of these type of SAAS applications.

That said, our general strategy is for your organization to be in direct control of sensitive, mission critical, or other data that can easily be stored, backed up and managed if your organization has appropriately robust and secure local servers.  If there is not a reason to migrate to the cloud, why would you want to put that control in outside companies, why would you want to pay monthly fees for them to manage it, and why do you want to add third party risk for cyber attack or network outages?  That is a decision we can provide all sides of the debate.  We will never recommend a solution based on our own financial interest.

We do have expertise in cybersecurity, can provide your organization with recommendations, and generally recommend and implement a layered cybersecurity approach.  We work with you on what the best process is for your organization, but generally recommend having 3rd party assessments completed for vulnerability assessments, penetration testing and threat detection in order to seperate our work from the actual analysis. We would then provide you with alternatives and implementation ideas, implement recommendations, then work with your staff for security awareness training.  The final step would be to have an additional assessment performed so you are confident in the cybersecurity work performed, and for any legal or required organizational assessments.