1. Risk Transfer. There are a lot of risks inherent in managing email: viruses, spam, loss of confidentiality, database integrity, and service uptime … just to name a few. The risk for managing email is transferred to Google. In theory, Google is better at managing services than you.

2. Disaster Recovery. Along with managing a service like email comes the burden of managing backups for disaster recovery. Again, Google takes care of all of that. Google is better than you at managing data and recovering from loss. If a PC gets lost or destroyed, we just access Apps to get our data back. Nothing’s ever lost.

3. Scaled Investment. You buy and pay for what you need under  a subscription-based model. Under an ownership model like owning your own server, you purchase an asset that can deliver a maximum capacity, and you pay for that excess capacity both up-front in an acquisition cost and through the life of the asset in maintenance cost. Shouldn’t you only pay for what you need?

4. Email Everywhere. Under Google Apps, your inbox (its folders, email, contacts, calendars, tasks – everything you see in Microsoft Outlook) is available to you on every device everywhere. If it’s sent from your phone, it’s in your Sent Items on your PC; if you filed it under a folder called Rocky, the Rocky folder is available on your tablet computer. There’s no distinction for when and where you receive stuff.

5. Ubiquity. Finally, one of the best features that I like about Apps, is that it can be used on any device and in any combination of software. Mac, PC, Linux; Droid or iOS; tablets, laptops, or PC’s. If you’re a Microsoft Outlook fan or just like the ease of accessing email under a web browser like Chrome, the service accommodates. It’s flexible enough to fit with any end-user preference.

These are some strategic reasons why you want Google Apps for your small business. There’s plenty of technical reasons but really – this is the kind of capability you want out of an information service. Why mess around with owning capability when you can lease it, and shift the risk to a player like Google who can manage this stuff much better than you?

R

Well, yeah, that sounds bad, but the PC was actually owned by a recently-deceased family member of a client. They didn’t know the password and they needed in.

This is called white hat hacking. It’s white hat because I’m using a hacking technique for what might be perceived as a “good” service.  I’m doing this family a service by getting access to an otherwise restricted resource.

You might be familiar with this term. White Hat refers to a “good guy” from the old westerns. Black Hat refers to the “bad guys” who always wore the black hat.  Good, bad; hero, villain. You get the idea.

But the truth is this can happen to small businesses, too. Somebody decides to password-protect a company asset and they need in. Maybe its a termination issue or a policy violation, or somebody just locked themselves out. Happens all of the time.

In this case, I was using an old tool from my toolkit. It allowed me to boot the laptop up on a CD, load up a small operating system, reach in to the registry of Windows, and reset the passwords of all of the user accounts. Bingo, bango, bongo: we were done in five minutes. Sometimes it’s the little tricks up my sleeve that lets me bring extra value to my clients.

For us, hosting is kind of an invisible value-added service. It’s part of our strategy to help small businesses leverage cloud computing.

Instead of purchasing and owning complex server resources themselves, we do it for our customers and we do it a lot cheaper than what they could do for themselves. The stuff we host also becomes available to them anywhere across the Internet. We make it simple for our clients.

When I first started hosting, the business was oriented around physical assets: what we call “iron” servers. These days, we don’t really pick up physical servers like the ones you see here, but instead create virtual servers on much larger computers. Admittedly, I have more virtual servers than “iron” servers these days.

Finally, a colo (co-location) is a secure facility with backup power and temperature-controlled environments. Our colo, Opus Interactive, recently opened their new, state-of-the-art facility in downtown Portland, requiring us to move our physical servers to the new facility this last weekend. The picture that you see here is the last of our “iron” servers racked-up in the new colo space.

Secure, professional, dedicated, and delivering enterprise-class capability to small business – that’s what we do.

R

On this blog, I often talk about the times where I’m called in to save data. Well, sometimes, I’m called in to play executioner.

A few weeks ago, I lined up a bunch of PC’s that I had to wipe for an upcoming liquidation, and one-by-one, I ran through a process to wipe the drives and permanently destroy their data. This has to be done with a specific kind of software utility.

You see, if you FORMAT, SYS, FDISK, or DELETE a file system on a fixed disk, there are ways data can be recovered by seeking the drive and rebuilding its indexes. You can scan the drive and recompile pointers to the file … hence the idea that data is never truly deleted.

Now, to sanitize a drive to military spec DoD 5220.22-M, you have to fill every addressable location on the drive with a random garbage character. That prevents those indexes from being recompiled. You need special software for that, and I use it to secure my client’s intellectual property while divesting or retiring microcomputer assets.

So even if you’re looking for somebody to help destroy data rather than save it, I can help you with that, too!

R

Right around the holidays Eric had a big problem.

His server went belly-up and more than 250gb of client data became inaccessible to him!

Yikes!

After a while, it looked like there wasn’t going to be a fix for the server – it was dead on arrival. Still, Eric needed his data off of the machine so he could get back to work. So he gave me a call.

It took a little doing because his data was spread across three hard disks, but in a few hours, my team was able to access the drive and recover the data. I drove it over to him the next day and gave him access to it through an external drive.

Eric told me that he’s going sleep better tonight knowing he’s got his mission-critical files! And next up with him: probably a conversation about our online backup product!

R

Before he met me, he was trying to login to his work PC remotely on his Mac. It was a hit-or-miss situation. All of his critical files, contact information, email, and appointments were on his PC.

Meanwhile, his Blackberry would only be as current as the last time he plugged it in to his PC at work to synchronize.

So you can probably understand his problem. Jason was out helping clients. He wasn’t at work to sit down at his PC and it’d take a pretty long time to get some basic work done.

Well, we took care of SW Office Systems by bringing their whole shop on to Google Apps. This allowed for Jason’s email, calendar, and contacts to move effortlessly between his PC, Mac, and Blackberry. Then we used Dropbox to sync critical files across all of those devices, too. Now he doesn’t need his PC to get work done. In short, we made the data he needs to do his job available to him anywhere. That makes  Jason more productive and in-sync with his client’s needs out in the field – where he’s needed most.

Today I was out at SW Office Systems and I asked him how it was going. All he said was, “Awesome”, “Great”, and “No problems!” Well, okay – you can’t argue with that.

R

What are the top 5 IT problems for small businesses?

What are the top 5 IT problems for small businesses?

How do I know if I am addicted to information on the web and not really deriving lot of value from it?

You likely have a mobile phone. That’s a screen. Perhaps a pad or tablet computer. That’s also a screen.

You might also have a laptop or a desktop computer. Those are screens.

Televisions, movie players, game stations and consoles. Screens.

Each of the screens are updating us, notifying us, giving us information – 99.9 percent of which our brain just classifies as “trivial” and doesn’t even bother to commit it to short term memory. We forget most of what we’re told by our screens within seconds.

We have to. If we tried to make sense of the deluge of data – digest it, organize it, store it – we’d burn out quickly on this stuff.  We’re not computers. We can’t efficiently deal with so much data, so we have to quickly (subconsciously) evaluate it for relevance and quickly forget about it.

I think 2012 might be a tipping-point. An inflection where the consumer (and companies) make a conscious choice to start turning some of their screens off. I think we’ll start seeing consumers make more conscious decisions about what updates they receive, what social networks they join, what games they play, and start leveraging filters to a greater extent to control the data flow.

But it won’t just be consumers. In a great example, Volkswagon is giving its employees a break from email after hours. They realize that their employees can’t be (shouldn’t be) plugged-in and working all the time. Employees don’t want that, either.

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Am I predicting a Luddite-like wholesale rejection of technology in our modern lives? No, not really. What I am saying is that processor, memory, bandwidth, and coverage on mobile devices has become so powerful and ubiquitous and cheap that constant data flow to consumers is economically and technically possible, but not all-together desirable … at least by consumers. Consumers are going to make choices. I’m betting they’re going to make choices that strengthen their privacy and reduce their need to process irrelevant information.

Producers will, of course, watch to update consumers all of the time.  I think we’ll start seeing signs of rejection from consumers in the next year, like, a digital burnout, where people try to arrive at a stronger balance between screens and real life.

R