Not Just in the Sky Anymore
What is the cloud? Let’s talk about it. Cloud is probably one of the biggest buzzwords in the IT industry right now. There are many different applications and strategies that utilize cloud technology. Simply put Cloud is utilizing a vendors network and size to gain easy access from anywhere and have large company redundancy and reliability with a monthly charge rather than building the same environment at your office. This could be using an accounting companies software and accessing it via a secure web browser session or storing all of your files on their network and letting them handle backups and server maintenance that could be costly. At G33k Consulting we can say hands down that the cloud service that we are most excited about is Microsoft’s Office 365. It allows you to roll several technologies that would require multiple servers to run all into one service that has a low monthly cost. Let’s take a quick look at what they are: Email with Exchange: If you have corporate email that you are internally hosting you know the cost isn’t cheap. If you are utilizing a cheaper hosted service that only allows POP access to your email you know that received, read, and deleted emails don’t sync between your devices. Exchange uses a push technology to send emails to your devices when the email is sent. If it is read or deleted that change is replicated to your Outlook, mobile device, or web login. No need to manage your email in several places. Adding a contact on your phone automatically syncs it with your other applications and devices. Depending on the subscription your team could have up to 50 gigs of email storage and unlimited archives that are easily accessed. No longer do you need to delete emails because of the cost of storage. Another great feature that comes along with Exchange is the ability to have personal calendars that are easily shared with staff and people outside of the firm. Office Apps: Microsoft is always updating their software. Unfortunately it’s not always backwards compatible. If your clients are sending you files in a new format you are forced to upgrade. If you are using Office365 you no longer need to plan ahead for those large expensive upgrades. The monthly pay as you go subscription gives you the newest software as it comes out. You can choose to upgrade as soon as it’s rolled out or wait until the need arises. With each licensed account that user has the ability to install the office suite on up to five devices. So you could have a copy of MS Office that you are used to using on the work desktop or laptop, the home machine, smart phone, tablet and still have a license to spare. Not to mention access to use the web based Microsoft Office apps that are accessible from any internet connected PC in the world. SharePoint: SharePoint is a web based CMS (Content Management System). You can build your intranet or extranet on it. Creating sites that your clients can securely log into to see information pertinent to them is easy. Templates can easily be created and you can leverage the online storage and sharing capabilities to easily share large files with companies or individuals. SharePoint has forms that can be created with little effort to automate...
read moreVoIP. Clear and Simple.
Isn’t that just phone? Pretty much…but lets try and think of it as phone that runs on your data network. There was a time when this technology was cutting edge and plenty of people had bad things to say about it. At this point it is about as tried and true as the Ma Bell network that was strung all over our country. With that being said you are using VOIP right now whether you know it or not. All the back end phone company networks are running on it for a simple reason. It’s cheaper and just as reliable. VOIP stands of Voice Over IP. IP is Internet Protocol. In layman’s terms this means phone that works over the network that your computers use to communicate with each other. In a lot of cases the biggest reason for moving to VOIP is cost savings. In some cases there is a large initial investment that is easily recovered in cost savings. You may ask, “How is that?” Basically if you have several offices and currently pay long distance in between the two of them for you daily interoffice phone calls you are wasting your money. VOIP allows for those calls to be essentially free assuming you already have a WAN connection between the two offices. Another perk is what is called least cost routing. In that instance you could be in your San Francisco office calling a client in the Los Angeles area. Instead of paying long distance from San Francisco the call is routed through your Los Angeles office as a local call. The long distance charges that you are paying currently could be dramatically reduced. This is where a majority of the ROI comes from. There are other great features like single number reach. This allows you to have one phone number on your business cards for your clients to call. When they dial that one number it can ring your desk phone and your cell phone at the same time. As far as the client is aware you are at the office. There are mobile apps that allow you to place calls from your cell or tablet and appear they are being placed from the office. In our newer mobile workforce it makes finding and communicating with someone much easier and less confusing. No longer do you have to try several numbers to get ahold of someone. VOIP systems also have the ability to send your voicemails to email. This is a great feature that allows you to save client voicemails to your network if pertinent information is left in the voicemail. Not to mention it becomes much easier to send that message on to others in the team without having to repeat what the voicemail said. We must admit that some of the reasons for going to a VOIP system are better suited for a company that has multiple offices, however there are other reasons that make it’s ROI just as easy in a single office scenario. Feel free to touch base with us if you have any questions and we’ll be more than honest with you on whether or not it fiscally makes sense for your...
read moreMaximize Space & Save Money
NAS’s & SAN’s, let’s break this down. If you’ve been involved in any Information Technology (IT) project then you are more than familiar with the fact that IT is chock full of acronyms. I’m pretty sure IT is right up there with the US Military in how many it uses. So what is NAS? Network Attached Storage. What’s that? Think of it like a hard drive that is plugged into your network. You can reach it without having a server set up. So then what’s a SAN? Storage Area Network. More simply, it’s just a NAS’s big brother. So what’s so great about that? Ultimately it’s similar to the Virtualization scenario in that you are grouping all of your storage space in one pool and then distributing it out as needed to each of your servers. This allows you to have a bunch of hard drives for redundancy and speed that each have a little bit of the data on them. That way if one fails you can just pop it out and replace it. It also allows you to separate your storage of files from a server and add them to another server with a few mouse clicks. So if one server fails you can keep that file share up and easily accessible while fixing or replacing the hardware. Some NAS and or SAN hardware has the ability to simply replicate to another device over your WAN for a disaster recovery (DR) scenario. There are many price points in the NAS and SAN market. We have implemented this hardware in offices as small as a few people to large corporations. In either scenario it is very easy to see the pro’s simply outweigh the cons. Ultimately you will save money, have more redundancy, and create a simple scalable storage strategy that will allow you to focus on your business and not on Information...
read moreDownsize Your Server Room
Let’s do a bit of talking about virtualization. This may or may not be old hat to you. However if you are not implementing virtualization in your environment you may be doing your business a bit of disservice. For those of you not familiar with virtualization you may be asking what is it? We’ll do our best to give you a good understanding without getting too technical. Historically you would purchase a server with the hardware that you would assume would last the entire lifecycle of the purchase. So you would buy the best CPU, most RAM, and storage space with growth and scalability to the highest amount of utilization you can imagine the server could possibly be hit with. This model would leave you with a large amount of resources not being used the majority of the time and possibly never if your best guess wasn’t accurate. If you ended up needing more storage or CPU it could also put you in a position that the upgrade and migration process is rather labor intensive. Sometimes you may want a separate server to separate services so that if one server failed it didn’t affect other services. An example is that you may want your web server on a separate physical box than your email server so if maintenance was done on your web server email wouldn’t be effected. In that scenario you end up with twice the cost. Most of the time that these servers are running the utilization is let’s just say less than 10%. This is where virtualization comes into play. Using this small environment we’ve been talking about as a further example we’ll show the added value. However keep in mind your environment could be set up different. Virtualization is very scalable and depending on how risk adverse you are it can be very fault tolerant and extremely redundant. Back to the scenario, you could buy a single server but install each server virtually. This allows you to install the whole server installation in something that can be related to an app. Then you can do several installs on the same physical machine and allocate how much of the physical hardware you want to each virtual machine. For instance if your physical server had 4 CPU’s, 16 gigs of RAM, and 4 terabytes of storage, you could create two virtual machines that have 2 CPU’s, 8 gigs of RAM, and 2 terabytes of storage each. Or four servers with 1 CPU, 4 gigs of RAM, and 500 gigs (1/2 a terabyte) of storage. Then down the road if you notice that one of those servers is not using much CPU or RAM but the other is not you can easily in the virtualization software change one of the servers to have more CPU and RAM while removing it from another. You can also sort of double book the hardware knowing that one server may not be using the CPU or RAM when another is. With the storage you can allocate space to the server as needed instead of giving that one server a terabyte you could give it 500 gigs and then add space when needed. That way let’s say your email server starts using more space than you expected you can in the virtualization program add more storage...
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