SPECIAL EDITION: It’s beginning to feel a lot like… BUDGETING!

As we start to see the weather change and the holiday decorations being displayed (way too early in my opinion), we are reminded of the impending end of our current year and the need to start planning for the next year. Financial forecasts report a modest 2% growth in our economy and business spending increases to continue as signs of our economic recovery, slow as it is. (source: http://www.kiplinger.com/businessresource/economic_outlook/)

A good expense control plan that helps to keep your employees productive will be a key component of everyone’s budgeting process for 2012. Budgeting for IT expenses can be challenge since we typically look at IT spending as just a “reactive” expense, however I would challenge us to consider this expense more of an IT investment in productivity. When we start to revere IT expenses as supporting our employees’ productivity, the budgeting process can take on a whole new perspective. 

My recommendation would be to start with asking several questions to start the internal dialog:

What has changed within my business since implementing our current infrastructure? Has your business grown this year or do you plan on growing in 2012? How is your current infrastructure supporting your growth? Adding additional people, changes in workflow processes, changes in software and/or regulation can take their toll on performance and productivity. Also, software licensing may need to be upgraded to support your growth.

What parts of my infrastructure are aging, starting to have issues, or just need performance upgrade? Typically, servers have a planned useful life of about 5-6 years, desktop computers will provide good service 3-4 years and laptops should be expected no more than 2-3 years.  While computer hardware relatively has come down in price per performance rating, software that does more and our reliance on them has increased at an even faster pace. Scheduling them for replacement or upgrade now can avoid the much higher cost of having to react to a catastrophic failure, especially when you consider the costs of overtime, lead times for hardware, and the impacts on your employees and customers. 

What's new in products and services that could enhance or replace parts of my infrastructure? With the introduction of cloud-based services and new remote accessibility products, we have to consider if these options make sense for business. And the attraction of converting the large capital expenditure to a manageable monthly expense to get the “new stuff” can make a lot of sense for the small business owner. For example, migrating from an aged in-house Email server to Microsoft Office 365 just might offer more features and abilities to enable a more productive workforce.

How do I get the most out of what we have now? Discuss the condition of your current network infrastructure, servers and workstations, software and IT–related services. Also, discuss creative ways to get the most from the dollar already spent. Many times, there are “unlocked” secrets of functionality we may already have, but are not using to their potential to increase productivity. For example, using Exchange and Outlook’s calendaring and tasks collaboratively can decrease the needed communication, reduce re-work or duplicate efforts and increase productivity with the ability to delegate and follow-up in moments versus hours. Also, do your people have a resource when they have trouble or just a question about their systems? Help Desk services might be good way of increasing productivity as well.

What are we doing to be proactive and prevent catastrophic failure? Discuss your current infrastructure with your IT provider and identify potential points of failure and review ways to postpone or prevent the inevitable  - as every piece of machinery will fail at some point. Some of the options would be managed support services to ensure all security updates are applied, review event logs and performance markers often. Ensure you have a certain amount of redundancy so if one part fails, you have an automatic plan “B” in place. Some examples would include fixed rate managed support service, off-site backup services, a good backup solution or even a good business continuity solution. 

What is my plan if we do have a catastrophic failure? Ask yourself “What would happen if I just shut off my servers?” Brings chills down a business owner’s spine, doesn’t it? When was the last time you verified your backups are really able to be restored? How will your people work during a catastrophic failure. More important, how will your customers be served and revenue maintained during a catastrophic failure of your core systems.  Now would be a time to have a frank discussion and planning for business continuity with your IT provider with recommendations for the next year to be as prepared and economical as possible.

When would be a good time to implement change? I know the initial response is “Never!”, but what I’m referring to is the business high and low cycles. The best time to upgrade or implement change is during a non-peak period specific to your industry instead of crisis during your peak period. Sometimes, training and adjustment time needs to be considered as well. Only you know when it’s a good time to introduce change. And finally, reactive-based change (like a catastrophic failure) is never good timing.

After you have done the soul searching that these questions may have introduced, build a plan of spending recommendations and timing for the next year. You are ready to apply dollar amounts for your budget! While the best source of pricing estimates will be your IT service provider, here are a few examples of pricing for various common budget items.

• Server Replacement: $3,000 – $25,000+ depending on size, usage, software licensing and migration

• Workstation Replacement: $1,000 - $2,000+ depending on usage, size, business version of Windows and Microsoft Office and other software licensing

• Off-Site Backups: as little as $10 per workstation or $75 per server per month

• Fixed Price Support and Proactive Managed services: as little as $40 per user/workstation and $170 per server per month

• Software  upgrade:  cost of licensing plus 1-3 hours per machine for installation and migration

Also, don’t forget the cost of security products, anti-virus/anti-spam software and server warranty renewals. 

And finally the cost to discuss these questions and options above with your IT service provider: typically FREE – yes, that right… Most IT providers will want to partner with your small business for FREE to discuss your needs and help plan a graceful, least-impactful upgrade of your infrastructure.

And a little shameless plug… Schedule your IT Planning and Budgeting Review TODAY with CAP5, your trusted partner.  Just call us at 713-979-5280 (option 1: sales) or send us an email to sales@capfive.com, or visit us on the web at www.capfive.com

As always, your comments regarding this article and suggestions for future articles are desired and appreciated.

Until next post…  

Business-Class Firewall Security

We are often asked “Why does my business need a business-class firewall? Won’t the firewall I bought at the electronics store work for me?” Sadly, in most cases the consumer-grade firewall lacks the kinds of security measures that business-class devices offer – unknowingly …

First, a little back ground… Every website page, most email messages and other internet traffic are actually a combination of requests to send and receive information of some sort. For example when your Outlook grabs your email, a request is sent to your mail server and then your email is sent back. When you go to your favorite webpage, your Internet Explorer sends a request to a web server and the page with all the graphics is sent back.

This system works great until someone with malicious intent and a little technical knowledge uses it to their advantage. These mal-intents know that they can get a user to click a link because “their IRS tax return has been rejected”, “their bank account has gone into overdraft” or “their Facebook page has been hacked”. When someone clicks one of these links, the request is made and whatever these people want to install on your computer is now “authorized” and sent to your computer.

Think of a firewall as the screening agent for your internet traffic in and out of your network much like the TSA screens your luggage before boarding a plane and international customs interviews and inspects your luggage before entering your destination country. It’s not always enough to say “Who are you?” – the actual baggage needs to be X-rayed and inspected first. The passenger needs a pat down to be more secure.

A consumer-grade firewall is designed to provide basic protection against an outside attack, one way, from the outside but does not provide any protection against an attack from inside your network. When a user clicks that “bad link”, the consumer-class firewall allows this to happen because the user requested that information. These mal-intents also know and continue to learn how to get around the basic security measures that these low cost devices provide because these devices never change and never learn any new security tricks.

With a business-class firewall, this is less likely to happen since every piece of information (sending and receiving) is inspected and blocked if appropriate. This major difference of technology is called Deep Packet Inspection. Also, the device is re-trained on a regular basis with the newest of threats by a secure central server that is constantly surveying the internet for newest and latest internet vulnerabilities. If one of your machines does happen to get infected, it is less likely to send out your business information because the traffic going out to the internet is inspected as well.

Also, with business-class devices you get other types of protections and features:

• Comprehensive Security for Anti-Spam, Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, Intrusion Prevention
• Content filtering that prevents access to sites and services that you may not want viewed in the workplace such as adult-oriented content.
• Application level filtering that blocks certain kinds of traffic such as file copying or internet messaging services.
• Ability to prioritize certain kinds of internet traffic (such as VOIP telephones) or reduce the speed for less-business related content like music streaming.
• Wireless Zone Security that is also inspected and separated from your devices plugged into your network.
• Wireless Guest Services that provide special network access for your visiting guests that blocks access to your internal information.
• Secure remote access and VPN features
• PCI Compliance if your business handles credit cards
• Cellular 3G data network failover in case your primary provider goes down

You may be asking, “What should I expect to pay for a firewall for my business?” The pricing will vary depending upon how many users and what specific features apply to your business security needs, but start at less than $500 fully configured and installed plus a small annual fee for the Anti-Spam/Virus/Spyware filtering services.

CAP5 is a SonicWall Medallion Partner and is fully qualified to review your network security needs. Call CAP5 today with any questions you may have regarding your business network security. Mention this article for a FREE business security assessment.

What can the Cloud do for my Business???

We have all seen the advertisements for doing things “in the Cloud”. It sounds like some new magic in Techie Land, doesn’t it? All these new features and abilities, making your computer so much easier to use. Water cooler talk about how things are so cool in the cloud seems to be rampant.

In actuality, we’ve being using the cloud for a while now. Think of it as a Version 1 Cloud. We send and receive email, access great amounts of data via your Internet Explorer or Firefox, maybe even use offsite backup services and file transfer tools over the internet. What is new is the focus on the user experience and in some cases even making enterprise functionality available to the home office user.

Typically, cloud-based offerings have one or more of the following things in common:

• Free or low cost monthly subscriptions
• High-powered tools and resources
• No high-dollar capital project expenditures
• Work on many devices, not just your computer or smartphone
• Allow data sharing from many of your devices (including tablets and smartphones)
• Typically accessed via a web-browser versus a specific installed software

For example, imagine being able to walk to up to any computer, access your software and your data as if it were on your computer. Without you doing anything, the most current version of your documents are also available for your laptop, desktop, smartphone, TV, tablet, etc. All synced together at all times. What if you could just your friend or colleague’s computer to get that document you left back at your office? That would be amazing, right?

That seemingly far-fetched concept is alive today as you can see from the following products:

Microsoft Office 365. Microsoft as released it’s cloud-based Office 365 where you can have a full version of Microsoft Office, including Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. But wait, you install NOTHING on your computer. You just go to a Microsoft website, login and begin managing your users and accounts, setup mailboxes, etc. You can open YOUR documents in YOUR Microsoft Word from any web browser in PC and even Apple Mac systems. Yes, I said “even Macs”. There are even tools to create your own website using SharePoint services and share documents with people that don’t even have a Microsoft product. Packages starting at only $6 makes this very attractive for the home office.

Apple iCloud. October will bring IOS 5, the new operating system for iPhones and iPads that will bring your content to all your devices – Apple as well as PC. You will be able to take a picture and have it instantly appear on your spouse’s device for that instant share. You will be able to synchronize your documents, music, apps, latest photos, email, contacts, and calendars across all your devices.

MozyPro. We’ve used this product for a couple years now. For less than $10 a machine, you can remotely back up your information into the cloud on an automatic schedule so when you accidently delete that data, you can restore it from your own computer. You can even restore a whole computer’s store of information in case of theft or catastrophic loss.

SalesForce. A common cloud-based tool for sales people to track their sales leads and opportunities, measure their performance and keep track of the details to ensure the close of the deal.

Springpad. A free form “smart” notebook to save your information the way it’s easy for you to remember. You add a note on your smartphone (iPhone or Android) and it’s automatically synced to the web to accessed from your PC or Mac, tablet or PC. Microsoft also has a similar tool called OneNote.

There are so many cloud offerings from so many vendors out there, and new ones are being released just about every day. We are definitely going to be “living in the cloud” in ways that we never imagined very soon.

As always, please contact CAP5 Technology Solutions with your questions about the Cloud and what it can do for your business. We can make the Cloud work for your business.

Lesson: Restoring your Business after Disaster

Welcome back to IT Reviews by CAP5Dave!

As I've started writing for this blog, I've been reminded one of a small business' biggest needs in a very close-to-my-heart kind of way...

Data Backups and Restore Solutions...

I created this blog a little over a week ago with great and grand intentions to help other small to medium business owners and managers from my person experiences. I selected and tweaked my personal design, setup a screen layout, put up my first post and invited several people to see my handiwork. Then went back a day later to check on things and found that my blog was gone - yes GONE - with a cute little error message that said my blog did not even exist! I did a little research and found out that Blogger had a catastrophic database failure and lost everyone's blogs. They began the 2 day restore process to bring every up and asked for everyone's patience. I waited my two days and found that this blog STILL didn't exist. A little more research brought to light that I wasn't going to get my blog back because they could only restore to the point in time of the day BEFORE I set mine up. I was out of luck and just had to start over. Of course, of which I did...

Important lesson and a personal mantra...

Backups are only as good as the point which they can be restored.

Backups should almost be renamed Restores. Because if you can't restore, your backups are virtually useless.

So, let's review a few typical backup solutions for small business:

• Tape Backups. This is where you have a tape drive on your server(s) and several tapes that you rotate and ensure all your data and system configurations are copied to tape on a regular basis. It is recommended that after tapes are copied, they are taken off-site in case of disasters such as building fire, theft or weather-related risks such as flood, hurricane or tornado. In today's world, tape drives are loosing popularity because they tend to be slow and our need for data often exceeds tape capacities.

• Hard Drive Backups. These are very similar to tape backups, but instead of using tapes, files and configurations are copied to an external hard drive. Hard drives are relatively inexpensive, are much faster than tape and come in various sizes into the terrabytes so they address our growing data needs. The same off-site recommendations apply.

• File Backups. Many people copy just their important data files to another source such as a server share or thumb drive. These may appear to be very effective, but won't bring back (restore) server configuration settings which may slow the ability to keep your business running during a catastrophe.

• Off-site or Cloud Backups. A great solution for servers and workstations (laptops included). Typically, every device is provided a unique encryption key and special software is installed. After an initial file "sync", this software just stays working in the background and synchronizes your changes to your service provider's network of secure, redundant servers. If you ever need to "go back" on a file, you just use their tools to get a past version of your file - sometimes as far back as several versions ago. This style of backup works very nicely for laptops that are not in the office regularly since it does not matter where you are as long as you connect to the internet. Backing up servers in this manner however does require some planning as well as a review of your internet bandwidth to ensure you can get a completed back up without affecting your office users.

It's also very important to ensure you are not only getting copies of your important data files, but also your network configuration like Active Directory and other server configurations. Your SQL databases and Exchange mail servers have some very special requirements for backups as well that need to be reviewed.

What ever your backup style, it's always a good recommended to perform a restore (at least partially) from your backups on a regular basis to prevent any belief that your backups are being made yet experience a failure in times of critical need.

In a future blog, I'll review a few of the name brands of products and services to further discuss these options.

Also, I would recommend to discuss your backup and restore solution with an I.T. professional (like CAP5) to ensure you are getting the most for your I.T. dollar. Schedule it today! Don't be caught in the unfortunate position of not being able to restore your business after a failure.

As always, you can visit our website for more information www.capfive.com.

Until the next post... What can the "Cloud" do for my business?

Welcome to IT Reviews by CAP5Dave...

... where I'll will be reviewing information technology products and services geared for the small to medium sized business.

So much technology.... So much change... So much terminology... All so fast... What will work for me and my business? That is the info tech world we all must survive in; and the one that I hope to help shed some light.

You may be a small office with nothing but a few laptops or maybe your computing infrastructure is supporting 200 users in several offices across the country. There is one thing in common for us all: the information and processes to run and manage our businesses are critically dependent on a strong, dependable computing platform.

We are definitely moving into a more service-oriented world, but when is it a good time to move into these services and when is it good to invest in your own?

A little about me... I'm a small business owner in the information technology field in Houston, Texas. I helped build this business from the ground up. It's been over 8 years now and I've seen so many of our clients having the same questions and have the awesome position of being able to see all of the good (and not so good) business practices related to I.T.. Before joining CAP5, I worked in retail sales and operations management from sales person, through store sales, operations and warehouse management, up to a four-state division position overseeing pricing and marketing. I've seen good I.T. and not-so-good I.T. and the business practices around it.

Over the next few weeks, I attempt to discuss and review products and services that will answer the kinds of questions all of us - the small to medium business owner and/or manager will need to know. Planned topics include (in no particular order):

• What is this "Cloud" and what will it do for my business?
• What should every business have in place for their information needs?
• How much security do I really need?
• The Big Dilemma: PC vs Mac
• What really should be done to maintain and protect my information?
• Do I need off-site backups? What is a "good" backup solution?
• Software licensing
• Why are patch updates so important?
• Benefits of true collaboration

I also plan to take suggestions for this blog in things that you want to know more about... please send me feedback and suggestions.

Until the next post...