Happy New Year, and welcome to 2012.  This could be your year of business ubiquity.  What I mean is with the use of current and cost affordable hardware and software, we can work from almost anywhere, at any time, as effectively as we do in the office – and sometimes more so!  For instance, as I write this blog post on New Years’ Day, I am still in my PJs sitting in my living room chair in front of a fire with a football game on the TV.  I can assure you in years past I would not have gotten dressed and driven into the office to write this article.  Further, after I write this, I’ll probably work on other stuff for a few minutes here and there as I feel like it.  And it’s not just business owners that can do this – it’s your staff too!

So, on a normal day, after getting the kids on the bus, I sit down in my soft-comfy recliner at about 7am and begin my workday by opening my laptop and logging into Microsoft Outlook to read e-mail and review my calendar.  I am not talking about a watered-down “OWA“ version of Outlook.  I am using a full installation of Outlook on my laptop that is now able to communicate directly with our company Exchange server back at the office over my in-home wireless Internet connection – and the experience is just like when I’m connected to our network in the office.

When I finally arrive at my first meeting of the morning, if I find I have arrived a little earlier than my counterpart - no need to be frustrated over wasted time, I just reach for my smart phone (I currently carry the iPhone 4) and can do any number of helpful things such as responding to e-mail, reading the mornings news (local, national, or just about anything in print), watching the morning news (local, national, or just about anything on TV) or catch up with people via social networking such as Linked In or  Facebook. 

Following my breakfast meeting, frequently I have a lunch appointment in this same area – rather than burning 30 minutes driving to the office and 5-10 more minutes of water-cooler talk, I decide to slip over to Panera Bread, Paradise Bakery, or any one of the local restaurants that now offer free wi-fi.  Once there I remotely connect in to our Microsoft Terminal Server for access to all my office applications, web applications, and data – just like sitting in the office.  And, now that we use the Cisco Small Business UC series phone system at work, any calls at the office simultaneously ring to my cell phone.

It is 2012.  It is a new year… and hopefully a new economy is emerging.  Is your staff armed with the technology they need for business ubiquity?

If you find this article helpful - I would appreciate you letting me know by clicking on the Like button below!

As President and co-founder of Crossroads Business Solutions, Rob Green is responsible for the day to day operations of this central Indiana IT Outsourcing Company. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration & Management, as well as an MBA in Finance from Butler University. Over his 25 year career, he has obtained a broad array of Sales, Accounting, and Operational experience with businesses of all sizes, from startup to Fortune 500 high-tech corporations.

Crossroads Business Solutions is a central Indiana company providing Professional IT Services including advice, design, implementation, management, and maintenance support to small and medium size businesses that typically have 1 or no IT personnel on staff. To receive additional technical updates, sign up for our quarterly newsletter here.

Many business owners these days are asking themselves if they should move their whole business to the cloud.  While there is much to like about a web-based “cloud” model – unless your business is small and simplistic, you will want to carefully consider a number of aspects before making your final decision.  Here are some of those critical aspects:

Bandwidth:  If you were to move your business technology entirely to the web, it is imperative that your bandwidth be reliable and of sufficient capacity.  The more interruptions you have, the more your productivity will be impacted.  And don’t be fooled - interruptions are not always a complete outage.  On occasion you could experience network latency for a variety of reasons.  Because different applications rely on different communication protocols – they have different resiliency to network latency.  For example, e-mail and web apps are designed to be very resilient against network latency.  Database type applications, on the other hand, often experience data corruption if network latency is experienced.  If your bandwidth speed is at least 3-6mbs, and has very little latency – you may be “cloud ready”.

Data Size: If your business creates and manages large data files – such as high-resolution pictures or CAD drawings, it is unlikely that moving these files to/from the web as a day to day practice will result in acceptable performance or reliability.  If your business relies on files or attachments several megabytes in size, or any type of design application/files, the cloud will generally not be a good fit for you.  However, if your business only manipulates common file types (Word, Excel, Outlook e-mail, .pdf, .jpg, etc.) - you may be “cloud ready”.

Database Applications: Many business applications store their information in a database repository such as Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL, MySQL or some propriety database technology.  It is important to know that database applications almost always require direct-attached storage, and cannot run on externally attached storage.  For applications that already run on the web – you have no database concerns because your hosting provider is hosting the database right along with your web application (i.e. Salesforce, QuickBooks, etc.).  If you are currently running an “on premise” business application (meaning it is running on a server located in your business) that has a database component – then the cloud is not going to work without switching to a cloud based version of your software.  If you are considering switching from premise-based software to web-based, be prepared for less functionality.  To accommodate lower bandwidth customers, web based application creators tend to pull all but the most common features from their software to improve performance.  On the other hand, if you do not run any applications that use a database at the core of the application – you may be “cloud-ready”.

Security: Depending on your business, you may need to abide by specific security measures such as HIPAA (medical), Sarb-Ox (publically traded stock companies), or PCI (credit card transactions).  Additionally, data security relies on many factors.  Perhaps the single greatest factor is “who” wants what you have.  Even the most security-minded and capable organizations (i.e. US Dept of Defense and Microsoft) have been breached.  Most SMB’s following common security best practices, do not become the target of malicious security breaches because the resources they protect provide relatively little reward for the effort required obtain the information.  Compare this to larger organizations who can offer significant reward – even when the effort is greater.  For the SMB market, this equation changes when many SMB’s are consolidated into one cloud offering.  Many SMB’s combined start to offer a combined reward that can be worth the effort.  So, unless you obtain and store sensitive data for your organization or your customers, you may be “cloud-ready”.

Cost: If you have made it this far without ruling out the cloud, one of the last considerations will be your business size.  During a few general cost comparisons, I have found the typical inflection point to be between 10-15 users.  When you consider the cost of data storage, user fees, and the other monthly recurring fees, the long term cost of moving to the cloud can be more expensive than purchasing the Hardware/Software needed for your company.  However, if your organization is under 10 users, and you do not have issues with the most common considerations above – then you will find the cloud can provide a significant cost advantage over purchasing, installing, and managing your own technology.

In summary, it is my opinion that there is currently a stampede toward the “cloud”.  The herd mentality states that if everyone around me is running a certain direction – then I had better run that way as well – even if I don’t know exactly why.  Unfortunately I have also found a few business owners that have started moving toward the cloud without considering all of the above aspects, only to find their business in a difficult position.  Like anything, with a bit of proper research and planning you can avoid  an operational and/or financial setback.

If you find this article helpful - I would appreciate you letting me know by clicking on the Like button below!

As President and co-founder of Crossroads Business Solutions, Rob Green is responsible for the day to day operations of this central Indiana IT Outsourcing Company. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration & Management, as well as an MBA in Finance from Butler University. Over his 25 year career, he has obtained a broad array of Sales, Accounting, and Operational experience with businesses of all sizes, from startup to Fortune 500 high-tech corporations.

Crossroads Business Solutions is a central Indiana company providing Professional IT Services including advice, design, implementation, management, and maintenance support to small and medium size businesses that typically have 1 or no IT personnel on staff.  To receive additional technical updates, sign up for our quarterly newsletter here.

Quick overview: opinions of over 350 Indiana chief executives from all areas of the state and from a wide range of manufacturing, service, and not-for-profit organizations captured in this survey.  Link to the survey overview and results: http://www.inceosurvey.com/2009_results/

Lots of interesting information and I pulled this info to share and comment on:
Section 6: Information Technology 

1.     Over 60 percent of respondents indicated their company has no method for monitoring the amount of time employees spend on the Internet, and over 75 percent indicated their company has no formal policy on employee-authored blogs.

2.     There is only weak agreement that executives are able to monitor the productivity of their IT staffs, or that they are able to evaluate their IT leaders.

3.     "Production/maintenance of company Web site" and "server maintenance" are the only IT functions which emerge as having a "likelihood of outsourcing" that rises above the scale midpoint.

#1 bodes well for Compendium Blogware out of Indianapolis.  It is so simple and inexpensive for a monitoring tool to be installed. Not sure why this isn't happening, and we made this recommendation a stern request in a recent letter to our clients - see: http://blogs.xrbs.com/managing-your-information-technology/smb-internet-usage-alert 

#2 Business leaders cannot evaluate IT Leaders. There is a tremendous shortage of competent business and IT trained individuals to lead and manage.  A smart business leader reads a book or an article finding the right "questions to ask" your IT staffer.  Yet, the business leader can't evaluate the answer.  Business leaders can't call "BS" or dig deeper to ferret out miss-information. (Business can't hold IT accountable, as they can't audit the IT work).
I talk after about how SMB business owners can't hold their IT staff accountable.  When you outsource accountability is the service vendors’ responsibility.  This should be part of your interview questions, "How do you hold your IT Staff accountable?"  If you don't know the answer, ping me and I'll share 1-on-1.

#3 There are three core areas of an IT department: help desk, applications, infrastructure.  Applications are where you create a competitive advantage for the business (process, workflow, one-click, etc).  You are likely to want to own what gives you a competitive advantage.  Infrastructure, you want to outsource that to a service provider that can use operation excellence to manage and maintain it.  Maintenance is repetitive, boring, detail oriented.  Sr. IT staff won't do maintenance, and business leaders are ignorant of the issue (can't hold IT accountable, as they can't audit the IT work).  Help desk, outsource or insource based on volume.

What do you think??  Can you manage your IT staff? How do you hold them accountable?

1. First, "the FBI are advising small and midsize businesses that conduct financial transactions over the Internet to dedicate a separate PC used exclusively for online banking." A nice start, but security has a significant "human" component and individually targeted "spear phishing" techniques create an initial compromise. Train your employees what to avoid and block all non-business activity on work networks and PCs.  
2. This should scare you: "Gartner's Litan tells acquaintances who run small businesses to switch from commercial online accounts to an individual consumer account. That's because consumer-protection laws require banks to fully reimburse individual account holders who report fraudulent activity in a timely manner. However, banks have taken to invoking the Uniform Commercial Code—a standardized set of business rules that have been adopted by most states—when dealing with fraud affecting business account holders. Article 4A of the UCC has been interpreted to absolve a bank of liability in cases where an agreed-upon security procedure is in place and a theft occurs that can be traced to a compromised PC controlled by the business customer". Small business owner, beware. As stated in teh article, "many cases end in civil disputes in which small businesses often lose".  
3. So is Internet banking "safe"? It is, assuming that account holders continually secure their PCs against cyber-intrusions.  

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