Plenty of smiles, full bellies and ugly sweaters at the annual Red Level Christmas Pot Luck. This year's spread featured everything from chocolate chip waffles to Filipino Pancit to extra cheesy mac and cheesy to tangy bbq ribs to mounds of fresh baked goods to a sea of shrimp cocktail to a kettle full of meatballs. We're all fat and happy. This is a great place to work!
Red Level's offices will be closed on Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 23rd. We wish you a Happy Thanksgiving filled with family, football and a tasty feast. We have so much to be thankful for - especially our great team and amazing clients. Our offices will reopen Friday, November 25th, but you are never alone. For emergency tech support, please call 248-412-8210.
Does your business rest on a solid IT foundation? And as a business owner, do you know what you need to know in order to make that determination? It's more than understandable if you don't. Unless your business is focused on information technology and products or services related to it, you've probably got little time or patience for IT issues - after all, they are complex, and you have your core business to attend to. But that doesn't change the fact that today, virtually every business depends on digital systems and services of one sort or another. Even the smallest and most technology-averse companies have been compelled to enter the digital realm on some level, if only for something as elementary as credit card processing. My many years of experience in consulting and advising small to medium-sized businesses of all types - retailers, manufacturers, professional services firms and more - ...
“Time is money” – so says the old adage. We all know it’s true: In our increasingly fast-paced society, all of us seem to have less time than ever, along with more demands on the time we do have. Wasted time costs us dearly. Consider what wasted time costs a small business – or for that matter, a large one. And consider that when an IT disaster strikes, time effectively stops. Employees are idled, production grinds to a halt, orders go unfilled, shipments go unsent, and vital communications hang in limbo. Time becomes money – money spent and lost – in a very real, immediate sense. This is the first, foremost consideration when deciding on a backup or disaster recovery strategy. There are very few companies for whom a major data loss, security breach, or instance of system unavailability stands to be less than a catastrophic and costly event. We ...
Red Level’s offices will be closed on Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 24th. …
There’s very little that Americans seem to agree on these days – our recent, seemingly endless, election season demonstrated that. If there is one feeling that most people seem to have in common, though, it’s that they’re glad it’s finally over. Businesses have a particularly good reason to be glad: Election season represents a protracted period of uncertainty, and if there’s thing the marketplace has a problem with, it’s that. To strategize, plan, or budget effectively, you need a reasonably solid sense of what future circumstances are going to be like. Now that this election’s over, we have some sense of that. Even if the outcome isn’t to everyone’s liking, there’s a lot to be said for certitude: The way it looks right now, the markets have taken the news in stride, and there’s no strong likelihood of major changes that would be disadvantageous for business. For many of the ...
A CIO’s work, it seems, is never done. For that matter, neither is the worry associated with most of it. It’s a big job, and one that seems to get bigger just about every day: New technologies, new security threats, new business challenges, and new opportunities alike conspire to consume more of our attention and more hours of our waking lives (and at worst, keeping us up at night and intruding on sleep time as well). …
[NOVI, MI] [SEPTEMBER 23, 2016] – Red Level, the Novi-based technology consultancy, has announced the addition of two key new positions, and two associated new hires, in response to continuing expansion of its business. Marco D’Aristotile will be joining the firm in the role of Help Desk Manager, and Quade Finnigan has signed on as a Senior consultant. The additions come in the wake of strong growth across all of Red Level’s lines of business, particularly in Managed Services and Cloud Technology Solutions, which D’Aristotile and Finnigan will play key roles in supporting. The company has recently added several significant new clients, including National Coney Island, Ellis Porter, and the National Franchise of Goldfish Swim Schools. Prior to joining Red Level, Finnigan served as a Senior Systems Engineer and Consultant for Apex Digital Solutions. His experience included stints as Team Lead-Systems and Networks for Sumitomo Bakelite High Performance Plastics and ...
Whatever you happen to be doing, it is usually a good idea to be doing it right. That involves following the basic steps needed to successfully get from the starting line to success – steps that have usually been discovered and developed by the legions who have gone before you who have tried things out, learned from their mistakes, tried again and succeeded. Take cooking a steak as an example. There are some things you always do, and some things you definitely don’t do – say, put frosting on it, or let the dog play with it. And there are some things you MAY do – if you really know what you’re doing. The things you MAY do usually don’t take much extra effort or time, just a little more knowledge – but usually, it’s those discretionary steps that make the difference between “pretty good” and “fantastic.” So how do ...
Excuse me if I seem a little bit proud at the moment. I am. Red Level has been named as Microsoft USB Champions Club Heartland Cloud Partner of the Year for 2016. Not for the first time, or the second, but for the third year running. In 2014, Red Level was named Partner of the Year and for the past two consecutive years, Cloud Partner of the Year. A true “hat trick”. What does that mean, you ask? Well, if you’re not in our line of work, that title might not mean a lot to you, but from where we stand it means a lot. In essence, it means that our company has been selected for outstanding performance when it comes to, in the Microsoft’s words, “arming the small business community with the right technology and services they need to be successful.” In practical terms, that means helping companies to ...
