Yesterday’s Boston Globe reported that over the last 4 years, roughly 3.2 million Massachusetts consumers had their personal information compromised or stolen.

That’s over HALF of the residents of our entire state that have potentially been harmed due to businesses losing their personally identifiable information, in addition to financial info!

We’ve talked about the Massachusetts data laws now in place after the TJX data loss a few years back; in fact, we set up a website to specifically help clients out with services to protect them under the new MA 201 CMR 17 laws that call for fine of $5000 PER RECORD that’s stolen or compromised.

These numbers are staggering – it’s a huge loss for both the consumers, and the businesses who take a huge hit when a data breach occurs.

We have a number of services to help businesses avoid these very situations – managed firewall and VPN services, encrypted email, and secure automatic offsite data backup are just a few services that we can provide to any size business. And to be honest, a data breach can happen to any company, no matter if you have 1 employee or over 1000.

If you’re a business that maintains personally identifiable information, or financial data, on a Massachusetts resident and you are not sure if you are adequately protected, please contact us today. We’ve been helping businesses of all sizes since 1996 with their Internet and data needs, including security.

Help protect your customer data, and help protect your company as well – contact us for a free consultation on your current services, and how we might be able to help

Are you aware of what day it is today? It’s the day before World Backup Day!

We encourage all of our home and business users to make sure that all of their vital documents are backed up. If you’re at home, maybe it’s your personal financial documents and priceless pictures of family moments. For our business clients, it could be your customer database, your company proposals and contracts, or perhaps your own time tracking sheets.

It’s critical that everyone make sure their data is both protected and backed up, not only here in Massachusetts with the MA 201 CMR 17 data laws, but worldwide – any unrecoverable data loss could affect you personally AND professionally.

We offer a wide range of backup services for our customers, ranging from the small single-PC home user all the way through large corporate environments. Even better, ALL of these services provide for automatic backups. You don’t need to remember to dig out that USB drive, plug it in, highlight all your folders… as long as your computer (or even server) has an active Internet connection, our backup services will automatically protect your data by backing it up to our servers.

Nearly 1 in 4 computer users will suffer data loss this year – contact us today to see how we can help you stay protected, and keep your data backed up.

There are quite literally hundreds (if not thousands) of web-based providers when it comes to hosted services such as email, websites, and storage. A simple Google search returns pages of responses, all companies that promise to have you up and running with a credit card and a few quick keystrokes.

In most instances, these companies tout the convenience of using them as your web/email/storage provider, along with their attractive prices. When you’re in a bind and looking for someone to quickly set up your new services or migrate existing services to, often times these providers seem like the best choice.

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Email has become such a critical communication tool for businesses. Recently, with the rise of smartphone use, we’re seeing a trend moving away from locally hosted email servers and back towards cloud-based email services. Different businesses of course have different needs, and to help fill those needs we have a number of different email services available.

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Long gone are the days when we could call a local business and say “Hey… have you heard of this thing called the INTERNET? Do you know what it could do for you?” Internet access is now one of the top 3 services critical to any business, and users have become incredibly reliant on being connected to do their jobs.

MegaNet has always had Internet access as a core service offering, and it’s safe to say that we’ve all progressed from the days of 56k dialups back in 1996. How can we keep YOUR company connected? Here’s the many ways we can help.
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One of the worst feelings a computer user can have is the one you get when you go to boot up your machine and… nothing happens.

Sometimes it’s just a bad cable, perhaps it’s something that needs to be plugged in better, but in a worst case scenario, you could be faced with the dreaded dead hard drive.
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Since we opened in 1996, one of our primary goals has been to offer quality support services to all of our clients. We hear all too often the horror stories of companies calling a service provider to report a problem or ask a simple question, and they end up stuck on hold for an hour while waiting for a non-local tech to read from a script. Your job is to run your business, not sit on hold listening to muzak for hours on end.

At MegaNet we have a live support team standing by, ready to help or just answer a question about your service. We’ve got plenty of ways to reach us if you need help! You can:

Call us at 508-646-0030
Email us at support at meganet dot net
Tweet us @meganetcapecom
Participate in an online chat at http://support.meganet.net/

We also have many online support resources for our clients to use, which can be found at http://www.meganet.net/support and may help answer your question right away.

MegaNet also proactively monitors leased lines (T1, wireless, fiber, server colocations) 24×7 for status. In many cases, we’ll see a business connection drop and we’re calling the customer before they even notice it themselves; just another value add when using MegaNet as your ISP.

If you’re not happy with long hold times and unanswered questions from your current provider, contact us today to learn more about how we can help you and your business!

Of all of the services we offer, VoIP tends to be the one most asked about. Many of our clients ask about how it works, the quality of calls, etc. and we’d like to help answer some of those questions for you right now.

1) How is the quality of the phone calls? This is the most commonly asked questions, and rightfully so, as we remember what VoIP calls sounded like when the technology first started spreading. VoIP calls sound as good as, or in some cases even better than, regular landline calls. Of course, the quality of the Internet connection plays a big part in this equation, however nearly any quality high-speed connection will provide great phone call quality. In fact, we’ve often had VoIP clients tell us they’ve had callers mistakenly assume calls might have dropped because the quality was so clear, with minimal background noise.

2) Where do my calls go exactly? When our VoIP users make a call, our local phone switch determines the call destination, then chooses from a number of voice carriers to provide the best path for that call. Our equipment, along with the phone company handling the other end of the call, provide all of the conversion if needed. This also helps provide great call quality, along with the lower VoIP pricing.

3) Do I need to use my computer to make phone calls? Not at all! There are three ways you can use VoIP in your home or business. If you are a residential user, we offer a small device you’d plug into your existing phone, and then into a home router to provide VoIP. There’s no need to sit in front of your computer using a headset. For businesses that have an existing PBX phone system that handles local voicemail and internal extensions, we have an adapter that will work with your existing system.  And for those users who want to go with the full fledged hosted PBX system, we offer Cisco/Linksys phones pre-programmed to provide all the options and features you’d expect.

4) How much of a cost savings can I expect? Our residential users see savings of around 35% on average. Many business customers average around the same savings, with some larger businesses reporting a nearly 50% savings every month! Your current use and calling areas can help us determine how much savings you might expect to see.

5) Who would VoIP benefit? Realistically, it can benefit EVERYONE. Residential users with high speed Internet connections can save money every month, small businesses can drastically reduce their phone bills while adding in a host of features normally associated with expensive hardware systems like voicemail, auto attendants, voicemail to email, and find me/follow me. Larger businesses, especially those with multiple locations and remote employees, see a huge cost benefit as all internal calls are free, regardless of the caller locations.

We hope this helps shed some light on the benefits of Voice over IP, and we’re happy to answer any other questions you have. Contact us at  sales@meganet.net or call 508-646-0030 and let’s see how we can help you save money and grow your business with VoIP!

The East Coast (our main service area) was hit earlier this month by Hurricane Irene, and while the Northeast didn’t take the brunt of the hit, many areas were still hit hard by power and telco outages.

As a managed services provider, we have redundant power, backup generators, and multiple backbone connections to ensure our core services are not impacted by a major weather event. In most instances, a power outage or telco issue might last a few hours, but this recent storm caused many outages to customers that lasted nearly a week in the worst cases.

Most small business can  tolerate power or Internet loss for a few hours, but a week long outage could be crippling, especially if your staff and clients are solely reliant on services you’re hosting on your internal network.

With the rise of low cost/high speed connectivity, we’ve witnessed a migration of essential services (email and hosted applications) from secure data centers to in-house networks.  This disturbing trend creates a network administrator’s worst case scenario, a single point of failure.

If you have overlooked the network aspects of business continuity you should consider moving those servers to a secure data center, such as the one MegaNet offers at The Foundry in Providence, RI. A small monthly fee to keep essential business services housed in a facility with multiple bandwidth connections, UPS units and backup generators is usually offset by reduced costs for power and environmentals incurred when keeping those servers running in-house.

Give your staff and clients uninterrupted connectivity to your core services by using the power of cloud computing and secure offsite hosting.

For more information and a free quote and analysis for your services, contact us today!