CIO Bulletin

Visual Edge IT: One of the Largest Providers of Leading-Edge Business Technology Solutions

The COVID-19 pandemic forced thousands of companies to send people home to do their work, and as the world tipped on its axis, the burgeoning remote workforce continued to attend meetings, share files, and go about their business — all from their kitchen tables and makeshift home offices. This massive shift only served to highlight the growing importance of office technology solutions, remote monitoring, and administration of networks. However, such solutions have often proven to be “hard to implement” — especially for small- and medium-sized businesses.

Visual Edge IT (VEIT) is backed by its remarkable 20+ years of experience as a technology service provider and a national network of expert engineers. Specializing in managed IT services as well as security, cloud computing, and print/copy solutions for businesses across the U.S. (including remote office locations), Visual Edge IT has been helping companies adopt better business technology, faster. The company offers a full line of office technology and services, including 24/7 remote monitoring and administration of networks, service desk, as well as data backup and recovery planning to improve business processes across various industries.

The company is positioned in over 90 locations across the U.S., which allows it to provide local service with national reach to more than 250 technology experts. The Visual Edge IT family works with customers from coast-to-coast and is the industry’s leading provider of office technology, allowing businesses to secure their IT infrastructures, and get technology solutions, equipment, supplies, and service from a single source.

“Our organization has been partnering with Visual Edge IT on our technology needs since 2005. We have worked together on several network upgrades, the annual deployment of laptops for our traveling staff, and many other IT projects. The engineers listen to us when we describe what we think our organization needs and propose solutions that will work. The engineers often go above and beyond what we would expect of them while meeting our service needs. I would be happy to recommend Visual Edge IT as a technology partner,” said Lori, a Director of Finance and Operations (VEIT client).

“30% of all businesses will be breached in 2021. This means that every company must be proactive and mitigate as many risks as possible.”

We interviewed Austin Vanchieri, Chairman and CEO of Visual Edge IT, to know more about the company. Read on for the excerpts from the interview.

Q. How did Visual Edge IT transform to become one of the largest providers of leading-edge business technology solutions?

We began this journey by acquiring office product MFP dealers across the country. It was our aim to expand the offering to a full array of IT products and services. This enabled us to accumulate 57,000 customers and provide a wide scope of IT products, including managed services and security. As we acquired companies during our expansion, we were able to use this approach to avoid the typical customer acquisition costs.

Q. How important is the leadership of your company?

Determining the best leadership teams in each region of the country was the most important step toward establishing national sales and service skill sets. This leadership team is made up of the most talented proprietors of the companies we acquired.

Q. How has the vision changed since Visual Edge’s establishment to what it is today?

For the most part, it’s been fairly constant. Our vision has always been to become the best national office technology provider in the business and to serve the SMB market and then moving up market to the Fortune 2000.

Q. What has been your biggest achievement lately?

It’s been really special establishing a comprehensive national team encompassing corporate IT sales, support management, NOC/SOC staff personnel, and associated engineers to focus wholly on customer satisfaction and sales leadership.

Q. How would you describe the company culture?

We foster a spirit of entrepreneurship. The companies we acquired were full of entrepreneurs and we continue to encourage local leadership as well as a customer-driven mentality.

Q.What is the firm’s mission?

To supply innovative solutions, technologies and services that will continually increase our customers’ productivity while also monitoring and securing their technology infrastructures, and providing our employees with a creative, supportive and growth-enhancing environment.

Q. How do you keep your customers informed about the current technology?

We keep our customers informed of trends, threats and emerging technologies through regular interaction with customer contacts, routine visits, and Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs). Part of our business model includes keeping our customers looped in with email, webinars, social media updates and website content. We are also preparing to kick off a podcast soon to inform and connect with customers as well as external audiences.

Q. How can Managed IT Services reduce business risk?

Managed services offer proactive maintenance for tasks such as routine patches, backups and monitoring for suspicious activity. The 24x7 monitoring and management provides risk avoidance while also delivering instant remediation when an incident is identified and requires immediate action. Visual Edge IT can also act as an external “risk mediator” to help identify where risk can be mitigated. We do this by running tests to pinpoint vulnerabilities and eliminate them.

Having an external partner to assess your IT environment, employee activity, processes and technology is critical.

Q. In what way does the company’s engineering team help customers be successful?

Visual Edge IT has established a cross-functional team of engineers that focuses on projects/break-fix functions. But they also work on collaboration, especially in the areas of Security and Cloud. This provides a deep bench that helps improve customer availability.

Q. What are the upsides of using Visual IT’s Dark Web Assessment?

In today’s world, it’s safe to assume that at least some of a business’s data has made its way onto the dark web. In fact, there have been thousands of data breaches that have leaked billions of user credentials. According to research done by The Digital Shadows Photon, since 2018 there’s been a 300% increase in data and security incidents. And we already know that more than 80% of small- and mid-sized businesses are concerned about falling victim to a cyberattack. So, it makes sense that dark web monitoring has emerged as a crucial element within an advanced cybersecurity strategy. Knowing if valuable company information has been shared illicitly is critical for a businesses’ safety, and the good news is, Visual Edge IT can help.

Visual Edge IT’s dark web scan and dark web monitoring can find exposures to warn you and your users before they lead to bigger, more complex problems.

The Dark Web Assessment provides a point-in-time report of company data that is available on the dark web including:

The number of unique, company email addresses at the top of page available for sale on the Dark Web
Email addresses and passwords that are available with clear text
The publish date, or when it appeared on the dark web
The breach source
If employees are using their work email for unprotected social media sites

Q. How is IT security with data backup beneficial for businesses today?

Thirty percent of all small businesses will experience a breach in 2021. Every company must be proactive in order to mitigate as many risks as possible. This not only means following the proper safety protocols but having recovery measures in place. Long story short: businesses must have a plan should the worst-case scenario become a reality.

Managed security services provide five main types of assistance areas: awareness, protection, detection, response, and recovery. Each of these areas require specific expertise, tools, processes, and staff, 24 hours a day.

When assessing the status of a businesses’ current security environment, the first phase is pinpointing: 1) critical data/access points 2) impact and 3) costs. The second phase is using the assessments to determine what type of protection should be provided. The third phase dictates how a business will monitor, correlate and detect security threats, and the fourth focuses on threat response. While many companies could potentially complete the first two phases, the remainder requires trained experts and continuous monitoring.

The first three phases are proactive, while the fourth requires escalation and action. In some cases, this last phase also includes backup creation, which safeguards critical information by creating an offline copy of the company’s data. It’s considered a best practice to have three versions of critical data: a production copy, an onsite backup and an off-network backup. This is useful in a situation where all data has been taken, or ransomware has been installed and the business doesn’t want to pay the ransom. The last phase can also provide high levels of mitigation through the use of a detection tool, which in some instances, may be able to roll back the malicious attack without impact.

The Leader Upfront

Austin Vanchieri, Chairman and CEO

Austin is the former President of Xerox Information Products division, a billion-dollar division of Xerox Corporation, and former Xerox Corporate Vice President. His responsibilities at Xerox included desktop publishing, word-processing products, facsimile, desktop printers and the Xerox Agent program. While at Xerox, Austin recommended broadening the office product offerings beyond copiers – one of his longtime goals. A graduate of CCNY, Austin received a Bachelor of Science degree in physics with concentrations in engineering and has since applied his understanding of technology to his work. After obtaining an MBA from the University of Rochester, he moved into technical management roles. Mr. Vanchieri resides in Northern California.