Business Computing Assessment

An expert inspection of your organization’s IT can get you started toward a better business.

If your business relies on information systems to function, and most businesses today do, you know just how quickly situations can arise with your IT. By having the experienced IT professionals at Connected Technologies do a thorough assessment of your entire IT infrastructure, including onsite and cloud-based hardware and software systems, networking equipment, printers and copiers, and data storage facilities, you can get a comprehensive view of how your business works, and how those operations can be made more efficient through strategic improvements and properly managed and maintained business technology.

Understanding Blockchain

The Technology Behind Cryptocurrency Will Do Much More In Time.

There are enough new technologies today that it can be hard to keep up with all of them. One technology that is leaving a lasting mark is blockchain. The technology behind the ever-popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin (and every other cryptocurrency), is quickly becoming a household name.
Here is a brief look into blockchain technology, how it works, and what kind of innovations businesses can use to make it work for them

Profitability is less the measure of being able to turn a profit, and more the measure of how much profit you can make. For the successful small business, the integration of technology can dictate what kind of annual margins you are looking at. For the new company, however, it can be something even more critical: the difference between setting a course for success, or wallowing in failure. Today we analyze the cost difference between hosting your IT in-house, or choosing to host it in the cloud.

For this experiment, we’re going to assume that we are starting from scratch. The optimism and cautious excitement that goes into starting a new business endeavor is palpable. Let's assume for our purposes that you’ve determined that you need to support the following applications: 

• Email

• Voice over Internet Protocol

• Line of business applications

• Productivity applications

• HR and operations software

• Storage (enough to support above)

• File sharing

• Backup

It’s not hard to ascertain the surface costs of implementing these technologies, but when trying to figure out the total cost of ownership, it may be a little more difficult. Objective comparison of the two platforms has to begin at their core needs. On one hand, In-house computing comes with several, including power, maintenance, management, and redundancy (and the management and maintenance of that platform), while cloud computing may need enhanced bandwidth and redundancy to work for a business. These costs have to be figured in when trying to plan your next steps.

Then there is the question of who is going to use your data, and what kind of protections need to be put in place as a result of that qualification. What compliance regulations does your organization have to meet? How many users does the network and infrastructure have to support? What software do you need to run? There are literally dozens of questions you have to ask before making any definitive decisions about what kind of hardware you are going to need, let alone what kind of hardware solutions you plan on using.

Once you’ve ironed out the particulars, you will then have to make the big choice. Do you want to buy physical hardware, cloud-based hardware, or some combination of both? Let’s analyze all three options:

In-House Computing

The first thing you have to be cognizant of is that once you decide that your organization needs in-house server infrastructure, you have to know that it is going to cost you a pretty penny. In order to support a full-scale communications solution, all the applications your business uses to do business, email, and backup you are looking at a seriously hefty price tag. Not only are you looking at a few thousand dollars per server, costs that are incurred in configuring the servers, warranties, and maintenance to that server could push the cost into untenable territory, especially if there isn’t a good deal of upfront capital available.

Beyond all that there are HVAC and security costs that need to addressed the first time around. The biggest expense, by far, is the cost of management. If you outsource your IT services management to a company like Connected Technologies, you may be able to mitigate some of the recurring costs and get expert management, but ultimately the facts point to on-premise hardware rollouts costing a substantial amount more than utilizing cloud, especially with today’s IaaS costs.

Implementing an in-house server room does provide you with some pretty stark benefits, however. They include complete management over the systems within, the resulting comprehensive data security, and access to data without an Internet connection. It also front-loads the costs associated with the environment, so if the big capital expenses don’t cut into your operational budget considerations, you will be paying less per month. The infrastructure costs (which are fixed costs) and the management and maintenance of it, and operational costs (that are very often variable), all have to be taken into consideration, as does your organization’s regulatory compliance needs.

Cloud Computing

For the start-up that doesn’t have any overreaching data compliance issues, utilizing cloud computing is a no-brainer. Not only are there limited set up costs, there are so many different service-based computing plans that it is now possible to strictly use the cloud for all of your organization's central computing.

For the established company, it may be a little more difficult, so before we go “all hail the cloud!” on you, we have to admit that there are plenty of considerations you have to make if you were to go ahead with a completely virtualized computing infrastructure for your business. Here are a few:

• Migration Time and Cost: Getting started with cloud computing may not come with the enormous capital costs that an inhouse server would, but there is cost, especially if you are migrating data. For an established business to move from physical servers to cloud infrastructure there is a substantial investment. It takes a lot of bandwidth and time to move all if an organization’s data over, and in doing so, you will likely incur a fair amount of cost.

• Dependability and What Uptime Really Means: Cloud providers like to measure their effectiveness in uptime; and, in doing so, don’t properly represent what customers want from their cloud provider. Businesses need ubiquitous access to data and applications stored on a cloud construct, and sometimes that can be a problem. The VM running the server may be up, but if there isn’t access to critical information and applications, a business deals with their own downtime, which is a major problem.

• Problems Estimating Costs: The cloud’s cost to a business seems simple enough, but a lot of business owners do a poor job of estimating the true cost of the service. With cloud computing pricing costing businesses so many cents-per-service-unit, they often fail to multiply this cost over months and years. By moving the least utilized applications over first, a company can save more money than just moving it all over at once.

• Trusting Your Architect: Well before cloud implementation, a company would have a cloud architect make them a map (of sorts) so that decision makers can see how the data flows. A problem arises when you’ve trusted the plan and mid-implementation, the migration team wants to change everything. To avoid a complete cloud migration failure, your best bet is to consult with the architect to make certain that everything goes to plan.

• Cloud security: For companies that migrate over to the cloud, they will have to know beforehand that all of the solutions they had deployed to protect their systems from threats are probably not going to be deployed by the cloud provider. As a result, it may initially feel as if the cloud construct is lacking security. Hiring a third-party to test your security will go a long way toward alleviating (or reaffirming) the concerns you may have about your cloud’s security.

As costs go, it’s pretty evident after considering all the factors, that deploying new infrastructure is always going to be costly. An organization can save money by moving to the cloud as long as the migration is done properly and meets all the file sharing, data security, and deployment needs that an organization has. In fact, most organizations have some sort of cloud project on the books for this very reason. The benefits outweigh the detriments for a lot of what companies do.

The Hybrid Approach

Nowadays, the Hybrid Cloud approach is becoming more popular. As data regulations increase and legacy software is still mightily functional, the best option is often to deploy both a cloud platform and keep an on premise server. Essentially, finding ways for the two to work in unison is called a hybrid cloud. While this seems like a match for nearly every business, it comes with a great deal of design and implementation headaches, and can cause significant cost overruns.

In order to design and deploy an effective hybrid cloud, you first have to know what the potential pitfalls can be. Two include:

• Utilization uncertainty: When moving part of an organization’s data and infrastructure to the cloud, there should be a baseline of utilization that is acceptable. If you overplanned for cloud utilization, you could be looking a pretty hefty bill in the face for computing resources your organization will never use.

• Development costs: The two computing constructs often won’t “play nice” and as a result you may be looking at substantial development costs during the integration. These costs are variable and are difficult to plan for, so like everything else IT, plan to spend more than you will and you won’t be left disappointed.

 To solve the challenges that come with significant hybrid cloud costs, many organizations will abandon the idea, but really it’s about simplifying the whole process. New strategies, practices, and products are being formed that will simplify the hybrid cloud process, while allowing an organization to get the most out of their IT infrastructure. It won’t be long before there will be hybrid cloud services that will marry the two ends into one secure and dynamic IT infrastructure. Until then, however, controlling your computing costs, no matter the platform, will take careful consideration and thoughtful planning.

 At Connected Technologies, we have years of experience designing, implementing, managing, and supporting powerful IT infrastructures for businesses of all sizes. To learn more about cloud computing, including hybrid cloud implementations, reach out to us today.

This article contains both the letter and the social media needed. To get the link to include in the letter and social media posts, you will need to go to Components > Easyblog > Posts > and make sure the blog: Knowing, and Planning For, Your Organization’s Compliance Burden is published. It will appear in the Miscellaneous Category on the front end of your website. 

===Letter===

DAY, MONTH, YEAR

Dear [CONTACTNAME],

Understanding the numerous regulations your business must comply with can be an arduous and expensive task for small-business owners. The average small-business owner is estimated to spend at least $12,000 every year on average dealing with regulations, not to mention the dozens of hours spent ensuring that your company meets the standards of those regulations. Educating yourself on what your company needs to do in order to comply is necessary in today’s society to ensure compliance - or noncompliance - costs don’t sink your business.

We at Connected Technologies want to help ease some of the burden that these regulations put on your company. To help, I would like to point you to a blog article on our website that discusses the issue of compliance in detail. We care about your company, and want to make sure that you don’t have to shoulder this burden alone.

You can read that article here: LINK

I’m available to answer any questions you may have about controlling your compliance situation. I can be reached at (706) 548-9598 - EXT, so please don’t hesitate to give me a call so we can chat about your company’s compliance burden and what Connected Technologies can do to help.

Sincerely,

CONTACT NAME

POSITION

COMPANY

===Social Media===

Facebook: In today’s data-driven world, it’s more important than ever to ensure that your information systems are secured. However, regulations that involve protecting sensitive information are expensive for SMBs: LINK

Facebook: The average small-business owner is spending at least $12,000 every year dealing with regulations. Are you prepared to handle the cost of compliance? LINK

Twitter: The cost of compliance will hurt your business if you’re not prepared for it. Can your business afford to comply? LINK

Twitter: Regulations are costly for small-businesses. Make sure your organization is prepared to handle the cost: LINK

LinkedIn: The average small business pays more for their regulatory compliance programs than larger businesses in the same market do. That’s why it’s important to plan ahead: LINK

LinkedIn: Ensuring that your small business is compliant with all applicable regulations is a complicated and expensive (but necessary) process: LINK

The late American author Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.” Written in the 20th century, it has been put in practice by 21st century businesses. As the Internet has grown, the amount of companies expanded, and the amount of data that those companies collect has grown exponentially, especially now that there is a market for such data.

Today, many of the largest and most lucrative companies in the world, Google, Apple, AT&T, Amazon, Verizon, Facebook and Microsoft are all, more than manufacturers of computer-based goods and services, data brokers. These data brokers create services that they then sell to advertisers that allow them to target you based on the information these companies have of you, which can accurately tell how and what to sell you.

Since nearly everyone has a near-ubiquitously-connected experience there is a lot of data collected, bought, and sold every year and it’s big business. Facebook, a company whose main revenue stream is from selling advertising, made a net profit of nearly $16 billion in 2017. This tells us that if you have people’s data, you have people’s hopes, fears, and dreams, which means you can pretty easily get someone to pay you for access to that information.

For small businesses it’s much less lucrative. In fact, all the data your organization needs to keep, is probably necessary to simply do business, not to sell to advertisers. Facebook voluntarily gets a lot of personal information from every one of their users, as where the typical small business often has to strategize to just get a name and a phone number. The information that is sensitive (mostly customer information that you collect) has a lot of value to the people looking to steal it. So while you aren’t making billions of dollars selling consumer profiles, it is still a mightily important part of doing business, and needs to be secured.

Is Data a Commodity?
Technically speaking, it isn’t. Since a commodity’s value is based namely on its scarcity and the amount of capital that needs to be put up to create it, in both resources and labor, the data that is being purchased isn’t really a commodity. In lieu of the dissolution of the U.S. Net Neutrality laws, this has created the argument in the U.S. that since now it’s up to the telecommunication companies how they want to manage (or more accurately bill) data consumption, that they would throttle and tier service, something that isn’t possible with a true commodity, where there are laws prohibiting those types of practices.

On the other hand, Internet access is something that a majority of the commerce requires, and delivering data is in itself an expensive endeavor (infrastructure spending, development, utility costs, etc.) so telecoms, who are seeing their would-be profits syphoned by over-the-top content providers, and publicly demonized as a result of a very public lobbying effort to gain control of the ability to implement some sort of prioritization strategy, have to find a strategy to sustain their ability to get a workable return on their investments.

Securing Your Organization’s Data
Regardless of what your view of data is, it’s an important resource for your organization, and as mentioned above, it needs to be secured. For one of your company’s most important resources, data can be lost relatively easily, so there needs to be a concerted effort to keep your network and infrastructure free from the threats that could put your data at risk. At Connected Technologies, that’s what we do. We ensure organizations like yours get the professional IT expertise you need to work efficiently, effectively, and securely in what is the most turbulent time in computing history. With the litany of threats your business faces everyday, you need experts that have your back. We offer:

• Backup and disaster recovery: With a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery system in place, all of your organization’s data is safe, redundant, and able to be restored on demand.
• Proactive monitoring and management: By keeping a dedicated eye on your network and infrastructure, our technicians can be proactive.
• Patch management: By keeping all of your organization’s software up to date with the latest threat definitions, you can ensure that your software isn’t going to be a problem.
• Access control and threat detection: By having full control over who can access what, and a complete view of the entire network, we can keep people who aren’t supposed to see certain information from accessing it.
• Training: Most times, your own staff is responsible for data breaches and malware. We can train you all on what to look for to ensure that you are doing your best to keep your network and infrastructure free from threats.
• Around the clock support: If three out of every four businesses deal with phishing emails, and over 95 percent of all phishing emails deliver ransomware, chances are that if a mistake were to be made, you will need immediate IT support. Our support and help desk can remediate a lot of your security issues to keep downtime to a minimum.

With data such a major part of doing business today, ensuring you have the right solutions and support in place to be confident that any situation you face will be managed before it becomes a problem is in itself a benefit. Call Connected Technologies at (706) 548-9598 for more information.