A few months ago, I moved back to Sarasota after 4 years away in the Tampa Bay area. I cannot be more pleased to be back, especially living in my top floor apartment overlooking Sarasota Bay. And with high-speed, gigabit broadband! From intermittent internet service running at about 14 megabits per second (on a good day) to over 1,400 megabits per second (rock solid), I’m like a kid in candy store.

As much as I maintain a mostly remote client base, it is my hope to enhance my newfound experience with local clients where I might weave my services into the fabric of the community of Sarasota.

My remote work is wonderful with a focus on Microsoft 365 and specialties in its Microsoft Teams and Endpoint Manager (Intune) components. But one missing element has been my ability to offer hardware support. By more closely maintaining the devices that people rely upon so dearly, I find human interaction as a sorely missed experience.

While personal computers are easily serviced from afar by connecting to them via remote software, handheld devices are not only more difficult and expensive to support, but mobile phones and tablets have become ever more popular to access work resources. We can possibly use convoluted methods to hopefully view the problems at hand, but there is no substitute for being present and shoulder-to-shoulder with the device’s owner. (Of course, everyone still must be fully vaccinated and masked up.)

Physical servers have gone to the cloud, so the need to connect within a defined physical network has significantly diminished. The network of today is quite simply the internet itself, so computers and devices can be used anywhere with reliable connectivity, enabling access to the firm’s resources. To accomplish this scenario in a secure fashion, then the devices need to be maintained in good health and configured properly to protect the company’s data.

And when we meet in person, then a rapport is strongly established, which fosters a healthy working relationship.