Blog

There are three technology options for analog line replacement depending on your use case and location. Here are the technical details you need to help you make the right decision for your business.

Ransomware and other cyber threats are increasingly common. If you couldn’t make it to our webinar this week, check out this video to learn best practices to protect your organization from these threats. In this video you will: Understand the common types of attacks and where your organization might be vulnerable Review a recent clientRead more

Well, I guess that is that, and we are left to wonder what might have been. A variety of financial factors led to the Five9 stakeholders rejecting Zoom’s bid and there are a lot of great articles covering all those moving pieces. I’ve had a number of clients reach out today and wanted to giveRead more

The client was moving to the cloud and required a solution to uniformly apply network and security governance across the enterprise as they acquired additional subsidiaries. Client Bio: A 46-site comprehensive lifestyle service and hospitality company growing through acquisition. The Challenge: The client is made up of subsidiaries that have historically operated on disparate systemsRead more

ARG Welcomes New Senior Technology Advisor, John Cooper ARG is excited to introduce 15-year industry veteran, John Cooper, as our newest Senior Technology Advisor.  John comes to us from a magic quadrant market leader and is excited at the opportunity ARG presents for him to expand his IT acumen.  He worked tangentially with ARG atRead more

ARG Welcomes New Senior Technology Advisor, Kelly Ahmed ARG is thrilled to welcome new Senior Technology Advisor, Kelly Ahmed. A veteran in the industry, Kelly most recently served as the Director of Networking and Telecommunications at RadNet. In that role, she managed hosted voice and contact center implementations across 340 locations, 16 call centers, andRead more

How a Cloud Solution Delivered Scalability, Efficiency, and Competitive Edge for Growing Government Contractor Client A twelve location privately held United States defense and services company. With over 600 employees and a strong presence in both government and commercial markets, they were looking to simplify and add scalability in anticipation of potential mergers and acquisitions. Challenge AnRead more

Hurricane seasons is upon us and the lines at the grocery stores are getting longer as people stock up on essentials to weather the storm. From a business perspective, hurricanes can wreak havoc with power outages and flooding. However, there are much bigger threats that are year-round, especially for businesses that rely on power andRead more

Below are the top 7 initiatives among ARG’s forward looking clients.  Are these in your 2018 plan?  ARG may be able to help you accomplish all of these things without increasing your current total IT spend. 1.  Test your backup.  Getting all your data backed up is definitely key.  But, with all the attacks that are happening,Read more

As we wrap up week one of the Verizon workers strike, we are beginning to see some impacts to our clients. Service windows are expanding and the chance that a window will be missed is increasing. As the strike continues, our experience is that intervals and responsiveness may continue to erode as the backlog of work increases.  Run through this quick checklist to ensure that your company is in a strong position to survive service interruptions.

CIOReview touts itself as the navigator for enterprise solutions, so when they selected ARG as one of the Top 20 Unified Communications Providers of 2015, we were very proud.

The National Weather Service noted the possibility for severe thunderstorms today.

ARG is here to help you weather the storm. We’ve been in touch with our carriers to make sure resources have been lined up to respond as quickly as possible for restoration and repair.  ARG is here to assist you if troubles arise. We are here to answer your calls, open tickets, escalate with the carriers, and provide technical consulting and troubleshooting along the way.

For Summer 2015 we have a FREE two week Trial available for Direct to Cloud DRaaS that will cover one server up to 500GB. If your business is unsure, this trial will showcase the protection and recoverability of DRaaS and the ease of administration for the service.

For clients that have requirements for a local recovery point, ARG also offers DRaaS in a Hybrid model that puts a recovery point on site for the business as well as offering the cloud recovery. 

Here at ARG we find it incredibly important to share our success stories with you. More importantly, our team looks for every opportunity to help our clients, and make sure they are extremely happy with their technology solutions.

Recently, Implementation Engineer Matt West brought his experience and knowledge to a turn-up with an ARG client and Zayo. Here’s what he had to say:

Most people think that the way to avoid a long, boring, drawn out meeting is to use common sense. Have an agenda, give attendees a limited amount of speaking time, etc. But what if that’s not the solution at all?

This is off the table for now, but don’t hold your breath.  If these two don’t try again, it will be someone else.  Time Warner Cable is the parent company of Navisite, and that is an attractive entry for most cable companies into the world of cloud.

DC got a wake up call yesterday as a piece of PEPCO equipment broke loose in Mechanicsville, Md and knocked out electricity to the White House, State Department, a large chunk of the nation’s capital and Maryland suburbs early yesterday afternoon.  The outage wasn’t caused by a natural disaster or terrorism and served as reminder to many of the importance of having a backup plan.

Life as we know it has changed drastically in the business world.  In the last ten years, we’ve seen massive adoption of smartphones, tablets, and phablets. Cloud has emerged as a major initiative and with it, bandwidth requirements have skyrocketed from T1’s to Ethernet. Telecommuting has become commonplace at companies large and small.  In order to better support clients and attract and retain staff, companies are working smarter by embracing new technologies.

Do you hear office grumbling about slow internet?  Bandwidth can seriously impact productivity. At some point we’ve all had the feeling of “taking forever” as we twiddle our thumbs waiting for a large file to download.

You may have also experienced latency — when the media file you are watching on line stops or stutters repeatedly. These interruptions waste valuable employee time and can lead to unhappy customers who have to wait for customer service because “the system is slow today.”

The ARG team enjoyed seeing Bob Tisch at the Channel Partner Show in Las Vegas. 

Bob was publisher at Virgo Publishing in the mid-90’s, and he eventually took on a leadership role to create an event to support the emerging channel in the telecom industry. 

Mobility was such a hot topic at our September seminar that we featured it in our November webinar on Best Practices for Developing a Mobile Strategy. We had a great turn out and good split of attendees who currently support BYOD (33%)  Corporate Liable (44%) and Hybrid (21%) policies for their users. ARG’s very own PatRead more

Follow ARG on LinkedIn for access to all of our daily updates, including blog posts, customer testimonials, outages and issues, seminars, and other events that are taking place.  You can expand your networks and get connected to the telecom world while staying up to date on news, policy, and deals. If you’ve worked with ARGRead more

The DC area is in for another rough winter, according to predictions from the Old Farmer’s Almanac.  “It’s going to be colder, wetter, and snowier than usual — so, almost like last year,” says Old Farmer’s Almanac senior associate editor Sarah Perreault.  Snowfall in 2014-15 is predicted in our area every winter month between NovemberRead more

ARG loves to help organizations that help our community. Community Residences is a local organization that we are proud to support and we were delighted that they were willing to share their experience working with us. “I have been working with ARG for a few years now and can’t tell you how impressed we areRead more

Looking for Microsoft 365 Email archiving security and continuity in the cloud? Mimecast’s online software as a Service (SaaS) solution may be the answer. With a single platform to streamline business email management and help eliminate growing risks and complications, Mimecast Unified Email Management bundles security with continuity, 24×7 access, and more on a scalableRead more

Kristine Barton celebrated her 11th year with ARG in 2014, and in 2015 she’s looking to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) as a key factor in company productivity. VDI’s are built to be easy to navigate, and contain the ability to front end any infrastructure that lives in the Cloud. Kristine uses an all too familiarRead more

The Court of Appeal in Cochran v. Schwan’s Home Service stated: “We hold that when employees must use their personal cellphones for work-related calls, Labor Code section 2802 requires the employer to reimburse them. Whether the employees have cellphone plans with unlimited minutes or limited minutes, the reimbursement owed is a reasonable percentage of theirRead more

Frequently there is a lot of anxiety about changing voice providers.  This is understandable and ARG project managers and engineers do everything possible to minimize customer risk. We are aware that any interruption of service is disruptive and can be perceived as a stressful by someone who is responsible for their company’s phone service.  A largeRead more

Carissa Seligman is a graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park and spent most of her life in the Washington, DC area. Carissa began her career with Nordstrom in late 2008. Two years with the company provided her with a deep understanding of what good customer service really is, which she still values today.Read more

“Electrical and telecom outages plague the area of downtown Bethesda, MD and we’d be lost without the ability to have our critical communications needs handled with speed and efficiency. During the day or night, or even on the weekend, our requests get immediate attention and resolve. The support team freakin’ rocks — very thorough andRead more