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The Skyen team.

To say that the global office landscape has been turned upside down due to the COVID-19 crisis is a massive understatement.

In the span of less than six months, the pendulum has swung from companies all over the world sporadically allowing employees to work from home to many of the largest technology companies giving employees permission to do so into perpetuity. It’s also forced small- to medium-sized companies to make tough decisions about downsizing office space.

For most businesses, while that shift has some upsides, it’s also a IT security nightmare, as a steady stream of headlines has reminded us in recent months. It can also be a headache extricating your business from no-longer-necessary relationships like phone contracts and hardware purchasing.

That’s where IT experts like Skyen come in, says Glenn Johnson, director of operations for the company, which has offices in Corte Madera, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon. As Johnson explains it, Skyen is an outsourced IT company for small- to medium-sized businesses, providing all IT services, including networking, servers and endpoints like desktops and laptops. Skyen’s clients tend to be businesses with 10 to 50 users.

“We pride ourselves on customer service and a high ticket response rate,” Johnson says. “We have a small team of tight-knit technicians that are all about customer service. A lot of the companies we sign up with are mainly fed up with their old IT company. Our mission and goal is to show them that it doesn’t have to be an awful experience.”

Johnson says that advances in IT management tools and technologies have made it easier than ever for Skyen to predict when a critical system will fail before it happens, from data recovery and storage to VOIP phone infrastructure support.

Skyen debuted nearly 15 years ago when owner Marc Vaccaro founded it in Portland. Vaccaro moved to the Bay Area eight years ago and bought out his partner four years ago.

“We’ve really created a team-oriented company culture and solid customer relationships – those are our two primary goals,” Johnson says. 

MORE INFO ON SKYEN.

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