Why will do not list customer references

Brooks ePC has been in business as an IT Consulting, Design and Engineering organization for over fifteen years in Southern California.  We achieve a mutually respectful relationship with our clients and we feel it is in our customer’s and our best interest to not use them as a marketing tool.  The trust relationship is more important than bragging rights and although our customers are very impressive and successful, we know that it would be hypocritical to guard their online security and call attention to them simultaneously.

 

We respect the privacy of our customers. In fact, a huge part of our existence is geared toward security and privacy for customers who range from household celebrity status and household product name recognition status, to small boutique organizations.  We therefore do not use their names or references to bolster our value as a consulting and IT Management Company, in charge of systems where intellectual property and identity should not be offered for compromise.

Our services cater to the individuals and companies who understand how important security is.  Our reputation and our growth within the vertical markets we serve is directly related to the way we handle the information entrusted to us as contracted consultants, engineers and technicians,  with access to one’s private information, passwords and often confidential information.

 

We are the guys who work to keep hackers out of your networks and opportunists out of your business.  Public figures, politicians, business owners, musicians, actors, producers, celebrities, sports figures, and those with enough sense to understand that the Internet is a place where there is no privacy, put their trust in us to keep that little bit of anonymity and personal space sacred.

 

We sincerely apologize if the lack of a customer reference page is a practice which leads you elsewhere for your IT Managed Services and Consulting needs, but think about how YOU want to be treated with what is becoming so big that a subset of the web is deemed “The Internet of Things” (IoT)

 

The ubiquity of information on the web is exponentially growing as is the need for security in every transaction you take part in, with every business you are involved with, every financial institution you put your trust in and every small software developer you decide to invite into your computer or mobile device as part of a “helpful applet”

Protect yourself and make wise choices, do not trade your personal information for “free” applications.  Do not install trial software without reading the details of each aspect of the item(s) you are installing.

Keep track of the services you purchase online and the terms of those agreements, especially renewals.  Understand that it is very common for even the most reputable companies to have their service automatically renew each year at the standard published pricing which can be considerably more than taking five minutes to manually renew the same service.

Keep in mind that the largest software solution providers often use a third party to handle their renewals and billing.  Frankly, this practice is common place to make it very difficult to opt out of renewals if you do not catch it in time.  These renewals are often licenses for products installed on tablets, phones and PCs that you may not even own or use any longer.

Online credit card payments and statements, online banking and the overall fact that money has simply become numbers we see on our computer screens make it easy to overlook these charges.  The regularity of a monthly charge can lend itself to validity when in fact it should be scrutinized.

In the accounting departments at small businesses where the personnel are used to seeing a monthly fee for something that was, at one time, valid will not question this charge over time and being responsible for payment, but not involved in the use of a specific software or service fee, can lead to months or years of over payments which were charged in good faith and are simply not recoverable.

Even in our personal lives where we are our own accounts payable, receivable and tax departments.  Where we are the purchasing manager and the travel agent, and the car service, lawn service and pool man all wrapped into one, we can become complacent and end up spending our hard earned money on vapor ware.

It does not take a devastating infection of ransom-ware to defeat your financial status.  You must be vigilant at all times.  Time is tough to come by and manually scrutinizing every line item you are billed for can consume more time than you have.  However the same industry I am telling you, you must be careful with does provide tools and services to watch “the store” for you.  Where you can set limits and have any threshold breaches brought to your attention.  Where you can outline your spending habits and have those patterns dictate any possible errors.

Brooks ePC represents many software and solution providers.  Some of those organizations could see this article and discretely decide that some of the things we are pointing out are just accepted business practices, and perhaps decide that Brooks ePC is not representing them in the most favorable light.  That is something that we cannot worry about.  Our commitment is to our customers first and the vendors we use are truly above board, or they are not represented by our efforts for very long.  When the life-cycle of a software application is slowly ending, and the provider has the majority of their income derived from that single offering, they often change the way they do business.  A company which was well respected and topped the list in their market can be diminished to a shovel ware application that has very little in common with its former self.  Their logo may be the same but the business practices are those perpetuated out of desperation.  Just because a virus protection product, for example, was the best in class a few years ago, and was inexpensive, effective and easy to deal with only a few years ago, does not mean it should blindly be trusted and used to protect your files.

Do your homework, evaluate the installed applications running on your computers, evaluate what you are paying for. Evaluate the rates you are paying and the practicality of the applications you are using.  Audit your digital life at least once a year.  If you are a small business owner, you owe it to your business; which is such an important extension of your financial foundation, a third party audit to see what you really have, what you think you have and what you are paying for.

Even if you have a Managed Service Provider and they are doing a stellar job for you.  They should not feel threatened by your desire to have an objective overview performed which is comprehensive enough to look at all of the data and voice services you pay for, all of the hardware you use, all of the cloud services you use, the rates you are paying, the terms of your contracts and your network security.

 

For information on our IT Consulting and Audit services please contact us through our website at https://brooksnetworks.com/