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McLean, Virginia: June 26, 2018. Association Resource Group, Inc. (ARG) announced today the acquisition of a technology consulting practice serving the Northeast region of the United States. The practice, and seven industry veterans, was acquired from Carousel Industries and includes a client base of 500 businesses concentrated from New York to Maine. This addition bringsRead more

ARG is honored to have been named a Top Workplace winner by The Washington Post for the fifth year in a row. Fewer than 30 companies in the entire Washington DC metropolitan area have achieved Top Workplace recognition for five consecutive years. The Top Workplace award is based solely on employee feedback gathered through aRead more

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a new compliance standard designed to improve individual data protection in the EU. Failure to comply with these regulations by May 25th, 2018 could result in millions of dollars in fines. Answer these 4 questions to determine if your company may be subject to the new GDPR compliance requirements:Read more

We are on the third installment of our cybersecurity for mid-sized companies program! If you missed our introduction, consider reading the Cybersecurity Strategy & Budgeting Guide overview before proceeding further. Now that you have conducted your active threat assessment, vulnerability assessment, penetration testing and compliance audits, as applicable, you are feeling one of two emotions: significantRead more

We are embarking on our cybersecurity for mid-sized companies program! If you missed our introduction, consider reading the Cybersecurity Strategy & Budgeting Guide overview before proceeding further. ARG’s program is designed to assist you in understanding the types of security threats you need to manage. We will also discuss how to go about identifying aRead more

87% of C-suite executives and Board Members do not have confidence in their company’s level of cybersecurity. (Ernst & Young)

How can your executives be among the 13% that do trust in their cyber security program? The answer may be easier than you think.  

The reality of any cloud solution is that architecture and planning is vital, and at the end of the day service is only as good as the support you want and need. 

SIEM offers significant value for security by aggregating data into meaningful bundles and proactively alerting on malicious activity.

Cybersecurity regulations from the Washington DC based National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are built to provide flexibility for organizations while protecting critical infrastructure.

SD-WAN offers bulletproof reliability, optimization and robust management tools, Learn how it works and how your company can benefit.

Some legacy voice services are end of life.  See what market conditions are leading to these changes and what alternatives are available for your business.

Cloud computing offers unique solutions as organizations struggle to ensure compliance across both internal and third-party technology environments.

High levels of availability and productivity can be achieved with the cloud, and the right partnerships can help you get there.

A good cybersecurity assessment will identify areas where your systems are vulnerable and make recommendations for how you can improve security.

Hosted VoIP and UCaas offer an enhanced experience using a number of digital features simply not possible on traditional platforms.

Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) vendors give small businesses affordable access to the expertise and resources needed to back up their critical infrastructure without the pain of a long window for recovery.

The enterprise world is primed to finally adopt web-based video conferencing as its go-to method of remote communication.

With thousands of UCaaS seats deployed throughout the Washington DC area for hundreds of clients on multiple carriers, here are the top reasons we see hosted voice adoption growing.

Employee engagement is key to keeping remote workers happy and productive. Surprisingly a technology consultant might empower your workforce with the tools they need to be successful and more engaged.

ARG had a Three-peat – taking home a Washington Post Top Workplace Award for the 3rd consecutive year!

Cisco WebEx was down for a good portion of Friday, June 3rd.  Learn how to prevent future impacts whether you use or provide Internet-based services.

We examine several trends shaping the future of data center technology. 

Cybercriminals are now using “ransomware” to hold organizations’ own documents captive until the company pays for their release.

Learn the whats and whys of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and why you’d have to be insane not to at least examine it as an alternative to the normal IT procurement cycle in ARG’s latest cloud education blog.

An increasing “must have” in commercial IT services today is desktop as a service (DaaS). Not only does DaaS improve employee productivity and ease of getting work done from anywhere on any device, but DaaS is increasingly recognized as a key component to the security strategy of an organization. Learn how this technology increases efficiency and eases  IT management burdens.

Minor disasters might be severe weather keeping your employees at home, a power outage in the middle of the summer, an innocent mouse click that downloads a virus which holds your data for ransom, or even accidentally saving over a document that then needs to be recovered. These are individually inconvenient – well, your data being held for ransom is more than an inconvenience – but in the aggregate, they probably represent a significant impact upon the productivity of the business and the IT organization.

Learn the 5 keys to a modern system that will protect you against all disasters- big and small.

As you know, Verizon is on strike as of this morning.  Over the years, we have seen Verizon strikes that last hours, days, weeks and months.  It’s hard to predict what will happen here.  So, while we hope for a quick resolution, we have to prepare for a longer term dispute.

At ARG, this event is an opportunity for us to show our clients value.  Throughout the industry, every shortcoming in the coming weeks will be blamed on the Verizon strike.  Some of it will be true.  Much of it will not.  At ARG, we want to discern the truth.  We want to come up with solutions and alternatives.  We want to anticipate potential issues and delays.  We want to listen to our clients and communicate frequently.  We want to make a difference.

Sample Use Case for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

An ARG client for voice and data was on the verge of making a substantial investment in infrastructure. Even though time was of the essence, we asked them to consider an alternative to resolve their situation. Rather than just replace what they had, we encouraged them to think differently. The results speak for themselves…

Beginning in 2014, ARG saw interest in cloud services start to grow substantially. Our clients were getting comfortable with the solutions and 3 key elements were being addressed to their satisfaction:

·         Security. The concern that the cloud is less secure than their own datacenter. Gartner and other independent analyst firms have studied the risks, concluding that cloud is generally more secure than premises-based implementations.

·         Savings. 

We regularly manage RFPs & project plans to upgrade technology to hosted voice/UCaaS (unified communications as a service).   There are a number of reasons organizations are moving this way:  business continuity and disaster recovery, future proof technology, scalability, and the desire to offload the management and move everything to the cloud.  In the interest of setting realistic expectations for deployment, I sat down with ARG’s project management and implementation engineering groups to find out best practices…