Thinking About Hiring Your Own Internal IT Staff – Think Again!
Outsourcing your IT brings additional business value
by Stuart Crawford, President and CMO of Ulistic
Republished August 2011 and used with permission.

Businesses today wrestle and grapple with the thought of hiring their own technology support staff to support their daily need for IT support without fully understanding the risks and the costs associated with having their own team of technology professionals.

Business owners, C level execs and Managers are attracted to the idea of having a team or a consultant readily available within shouting distance down the hall, basically having an IT resource committed to them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. However, many of today’s business owners across the country are not aware of the total risks their business is exposed to by electing to bring their technology support in-house.

More often than not it is purely a cost based decision, on the surface it may appear to be more cost effective to hire a consultant or employee who is committed as a full time employee. CFOs and Accounting Managers often look only at the cost of having their IT outsourced and or attracted to hiring someone for a few thousand dollars a month as part of their staff will save their company in the long run. This is not the case in reality and having a full time employee will actually end up costing business today more in the long run.

So, what are the advantages of having an IT partner or Managed Service Provider (MSP) who focuses on delivering a complete managed technology solution? There are a number of immediate benefits over having a full time employee. These benefits include:

• The average technology professional with five years’ experience may be worth $70,000 plus a year. This is great when you looking at the bills from your IT provider and see that you have probably spent paid the same in their consulting bills for only a fraction of the time. When a business elects to go internal, a $70,000 salary now buys the business one person and not a team of professionals offering depth in expertise and knowledge.
  
• MSP’s will provide around the clock monitoring and coverage throughout the entire term of the contract. When a company hires their own IT staff, now the challenges around vacation scheduling, training and time off from illness impacts the company. An outsourced MSP provides full time IT coverage, but vacations, illness and other absences now are not an impact on your technology support.
  
• There are hidden additional costs when a business elects to hire internally. The costs associated with training can rise rapidly; when you have a trusted IT partner or MSP, training is no longer your company’s challenge. The MSP ensures that the skills of their team are up to date. Combine this with costs associated with procurement of equipment that include iPhones, SmartPhones, laptops and other supplies, expenses can quickly add up. And then there is the added payroll expenses associated with healthcare, payroll and other logistical items.
  
• MSP’s can offer a wealth of knowledge and great resources when needed, offering networks of partners who can support a wide geographical region, or just across town, wherever support is needed. When a company turns to hiring their own staff, this experience often is not available to them and they are stuck with just a single person or a very small team with limited expertise. Now when these skills are required outside of the skills level of their staff, this becomes an additional expense that normally the right IT partner can extend to a company as part of their program.
  
• IT technicians always like to be challenged– even the ones that you hire. What happens at the average company when the challenges stop occurring? Boredom is disastrous as lack of incentive can set in quickly. There are two possible outcomes that occur with in-house staff or break-fix providers who deal with these challenges:
  

  o They choose to leave to seek out challenges – When a company loses a member of their own internal staff, the intellectual property and knowledge goes with them. This leaves a huge void in the understanding of your systems and network layout. With a trusted MSP, this knowledge is retained and companies continue to function as if nothing occurred. o Extended repair times – This can be disastrous as well. Many IT expenses are the result of an over extended repair time or emergency billing opportunity. When dealing with a break-fix provider, what is not being accomplished is the attention to the daily needs of your systems and network. Those issues are being managed on an emergency “need it done now we are down” relationship at the highest cost possible. And, there is little incentive to complete the repair quickly when they are billing at their highest rate. MSP’s provide the daily attention to your systems require as the main focus of their services.

Alex Rogers, President and CEO of ARRC Technology a Master Managed Service Provider in Bakersfield, California commented about the value of having a full service managed IT partner and what it can bring to a company. “Employers can be held hostage with the skill set of their break fix technicians or internal employees. Goals to repair issues quickly or stay ahead of the business needs are limited by having one individual skill set on staff or a provider who bills hourly to repair issues. The incentive for them is to take longer to repair the issue. They both make more money this way.”

There are many firms that elect to go with their own in-house IT person or try to complete the needed tasks themselves. However, what seemed like a great idea quickly turns into a huge business mistake that ends up costing them.

Mary Phillips, CFO of New Vision for Independence in California was previously handling her company’s IT needs personally. “We are a small shop with only seven people and I just couldn’t do it all anymore. I sure couldn’t keep up with all the technology and be a CFO at the same time, they are mutually exclusive. Outsourcing our IT returned my time and efficiency to my company.”

Adam Cline, CEO of Kern Glass Company in California was previously heavily involved with his own IT service delivery. “Outsourcing freed me up where I could focus more on the business, growing the business. I was running it, managing it and running everyone’s desktops and I just couldn’t do it anymore.”

Shane Swanson, COO of ARRC Technology reminded me that, “Training is a must for our employees. Because we invest in our people, our managed service clients have the benefit of access to all our certified technicians without the pressure of keeping them on payroll. It is a win-win situation for our skilled technicians and our clients.”

When a company elects to retain an outsourced firm over hiring staff, they are getting service from a company who is focused on ensuring the IT needs are being addressed in the most efficient manner possible. Many trusted MSP’s are focused on the bigger picture, ensuring everything is looked after in a company’s environment including:

• Vendor Relations
• IT Budgeting
• Network Monitoring and Preemptive IT services
• Knowledge Base Management
• Disaster Recovery Planning
• Hardware on demand or as a service

Partnering with a trusted Managed Service Provider brings value to any business no matter what the size, what makes more sense to you? Limiting the knowledge, options and having to deal with people challenges such as complacency and boredom or expanding available options by having a wonderful relationship with a trusted IT partner who understands what business needs to grow, increase profits and the importance of the right technology solution.

Stuart Crawford is the President and Chief Marketing Office for Ulistic, a Calgary-based specialty firm focused on information technology marketing and business development. You can contact Stuart at scrawford@ulistic.com or through his blog at http://stuartcrawford.com.

Cloud Computing for Small and Midsize Businesses
reprinted with permission from the HP Small Business Center

You’ve no doubt heard a lot about cloud computing (or the cloud). What you may not have learned is how this misty concept can help with the real problems of operating your business, especially in hard times.

In short, cloud computing offers attractive options for small and midsize businesses that need critical IT upgrades, but may lack the cash for a large capital investment.

Through the cloud, you can add new, vital applications or you can supplement the capacity of an existing infrastructure. Because cloud services are delivered via the Internet (often the Web) you only pay for the features and functionality you use and don’t pay for extra hardware, software, staff and maintenance. As a result, your business can grow its IT capabilities, often at a lower cost than doing everything itself. And you can pull the cost from your operating budget rather than your capital budget.

So what is cloud computing exactly, and why is it significant to small and midsize businesses?

Understanding the Cloud
The cloud can deliver software-as-a-service (SaaS) or supplemental infrastructure capacity, such as data storage space or processing power, all on-demand via the Internet, usually the Web. Cloud services don’t require that you purchase dedicated hardware and software or manage those particular applications. You simply pay for the functionality, sometimes as a flat monthly fee and sometimes by metered use.

For example, a small greeting card company might sign up for a cloud order-fulfillment system. The application would be hosted and managed by the provider, and it would be accessible to users through a Web browser. The company could sign up for the service instantly, without having to undergo a complicated implementation to house the application on its own servers.

Salespeople across the country could then access the fulfillment system from any Internet connection, no need to go through their employer’s network or install software on their own computers. Multiple users can be quickly added or removed, as well.

It’s clear how attractive SaaS is to smaller businesses when you look at its growth in the last few years. Forty percent of midsize businesses worldwide use SaaS in some form, according to a study from industry analyst firm AMI-Partners. The firm projects that number will reach 57 percent by the end of November 2009.

Now let’s say that the greeting card company allows customers to create and print their own cards and needs extra server capacity during peak workloads around the holidays. The company could add processing power to its existing servers or it could increase its network bandwidth by purchasing a new server. But the cloud adds another option. Renting server space or processing power from a service provider would allow the company to augment its in-house servers, without having to purchase and maintain new hardware that might sit idle the rest of the year.

Considering the Benefits
If you’re looking for alternatives to traditional IT, cloud computing offers some advantages to consider.

Lower costs
Cloud services don’t require in?house IT expertise or capital investment in new hardware. The pay-to-play pricing model requires that companies only pay for what they use.

Flexibility
The extreme scalability of cloud services allows small and midsize businesses to stay agile, either expanding or retracting their IT infrastructure based on their business needs.

Faster deployments
Because cloud services can add lots of users very quickly, customers can deploy and get value from them faster. There is no lengthy, expensive or complicated installation or roll-out processes. In turn, businesses can add IT capabilities or introduce new services to their own customers much faster.

Integration
Cloud services are designed to be open and flexible, so they can integrate with other services and on-premise applications. This is critical because most small and midsize businesses will use a combination of cloud services and on-premise applications. And because cloud offerings can be integrated, businesses don’t have to redesign their infrastructures or commit to large-scale adoption of new applications or services.

The Cloud is Already Here
The cloud is no longer a futuristic concept. It provides services that small and midsize businesses are adopting today, with tangible benefits. In a tough economy, the cloud offers some attractive options for saving money, while staying ahead of the innovation curve.

BYOD, Are You Prepared? Questions You Should Ask.
by Jack Safrit, CEO of Axxys Technologies

No, I’m not talking about having a party but rather one of the hottest topics in technology today. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is becoming an absolute factor in almost every business today. Your employees, vendors, and guests all probably bring some type of personal communication device or their own notebooks to your workplace every day. Many employees are using their own devices to connect to your business networks, if for nothing more than the receipt of your corporate email. So why is BYOD a hot topic?

Many companies provide their employees laptops and smartphones to serve as their business computing and mobile communications devices. The business owns those devices, and as a result, the business can control the security of those devices and any business data that the user had downloaded to them. When Blackberry was a standard, Blackberry server handled many of the business security concerns present in mobile devices. Today, we see that burden of security falling back on the business and their IT departments as many employees are bringing their own smartphones, tablets, and notebooks to the office or are connecting to your business network remotely to do their work. And while that ability has certainly may potentially make them more productive, it certainly has made it more difficult to control access.

Questions you need to ask about BYOD at your business

• What happens when a user loses their smartphone or tablet? Have they lost your vital, business confidential information also?
• Are your employees using more and more of your bandwidth by connecting to the Internet with not just their computer, but also their smartphones and tablets?
• Are they using their personal devices to text, to listen to music, or to surf the Internet – activities not related to their business role?
• Is your IT department receiving more calls from employees asking for help to connect those devices to your network or to fix a problem with those devices? How many different types of devices is IT having to support?
• Are you responsible for the non-business information that is on those devices or flowing through your network if your policy is to allow employees to use them in business or if you reimburse them for some of their cost?
• Do you have a policy in place that allows your IT department to remotely “wipe” those devices if lost or stolen to protect any corporate data like contact info, confidential emails, executive schedules that your employee may have downloaded?

Consider these solutions

• Decide what you want your IT providers or IT department to support. Their time is valuable and working on personal devices can be a distraction to business critical work.
• Establish a policy for personal devices and let users know that your business information is yours and you will take steps to protect that information – no matter where it resides. Axxys has all employees agree to allow the company to do a remote wipe of any device they use. This permission is a condition of employment and is designed to protect our information and the information of our clients.
• Make sure your company has appropriate Internet usage rules in place and that all employees understand proper Internet behavior and usage.
• Consider standardizing or which devices are allowed for business use. Some are more secure that others and the shorter the acceptable list is, the more efficient IT can be.

Finally, the November 15, 2011 issue of the Wall Street Journal dedicated an entire page to the BYOD concern. (See link: Is It Better for Businesses to Adopt Open or Closed Platforms?)

We recently read an article on Gigaom which talks about cloud computing and the way the current market is set around it. We liked this article because it has to do a lot with our clients and future clients that are trying to fully understand cloud computing.

Of course when we discuss "cloud" computing, we are not really referring to an actual cloud....

A few of the solutions that are discussed in the article are that offered by IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, and Openstack. These are among the best solutions to be offered at the moment with the current market the way it is and the article is pretty much a review of all four of these major solutions.

One of major things that the article talks about is the decision that CIO’s have recently been getting over. In recent months there has been a major shift in the way that CIO’s have thought about cloud computing and their trust they put in it. Economics and innovation have to be in perfect harmony in order for an idea to really take off and that is exactly what has recently been happening with cloud computing.

5: CIOs are getting over cloud phobia

It’s taken time, but the economics of cloud computing are too good for CIOs to ignore, Coyle said. Any doubts they had about moving at least some corporate data to an outside cloud storage provider, for instance, have evaporated in recent months.

And they’re getting emboldened to do more than storage. The advent of Hadoop and NoSQL technologies means that companies could actually get some use out of all that old stuff sitting on tape or in platters, he said. Uploading that information, and massaging it with the latest analytics means that historical data can be used to test assumptions and new models, for example, seeing what a price change means to sales over time.

This is the exact part in the article that talks about the cloud usage and how CIO’s are readily warming up to the idea of backing up a lot of data in the cloud.

Please, let us know what you think about all this! Do you believe that cloud computing will eventually take off and become a huge part of the internet and economy or do you believe that it is a dead end?

You can read the full article here.

We recently read an article that talks about the certain essentials to cloud computing, a new technology that is just taking off. The article was found on ConnectWise, an IT managing company. The company has been referred to prior to this article as being known as an IT Blog of all IT Blogs. It is a major influence for all IT Consulting Businesses in the Boston, Massachusetts area.

One of the cool things that the article talks about is the necessities and tools that can be used with cloud computing. One of the big strategies that a lot of companies utilize is called “Hybrid Cloud Computing”. In order to utilize this technique a company must own a local appliance that will act as an NAS (Network Attached Storage) unit. This means that this device must act as a back up device for the computers that are operated locally but it also must send the same data that it backs up, off site to a third party. They contain machines that do magical things with this data such as decompress it, optimize it, and make it able to stream over reduced bandwidths.

All of this sounds real technical to an average reader but I’m sure everyone knows that the people of Boston are some of the smartest in the world, and that is where our company, Roan Solutions is based out of. What this all means in simpler terms (to all the non-Boston readers) is that it backs up all data that is sent to a cloud computing company. The data will still be used directly as it would if they didn’t have this appliance but it would also be backed up locally. This creates higher security because the company wouldn’t be relying on a third party to send all of their data too.

One more brilliant advantage of this is the cost advantage.

Cost Benefits
• Private clouds are expensive.
o Large financial investments are necessary to produce an effective solution.
o Regular maintenance/labor costs
• You don’t own all pieces of puzzle with Hybrid.
o Only the local unit is purchased, while the rest of the infrastructure lies in the 3rd party’s cloud.
o No costly maintenance is required by the MSP. Only a monthly service fee.

Business models in this industry are not universal. With some solutions hardware is not directly purchased, but leased or provided with no upfront cost (HaaS). While no initial investment is required, monthly service fees are generally substantially higher and require long-term contracts.

That is the shortest version of hybrid cloud computing that we can provide. Hopefully we were able to help! You can read the full article on Connectwise.com by clicking here. Please, we beg you to drop us a comment if you have any questions or to call Roan Solutions if you need any IT Services.

written by David Tan, Chief Technology Office, CHIPS Technology Group LLC

Microsoft held their first ever Build Conference in Anaheim in September. It’s a new annual event for Windows developers to gather and learn about building applications for the Windows platform. This one was special not only because it was the first, but also because leading up to it, all the buzz was about how much of Windows 8 Microsoft would show and what details we would learn about the next version of the most popular operating system in the world.

Microsoft did not disappoint. They have showed demos, talked about features and functions, and even made an open beta immediately available to all who are interested to download, play with, and Microsoft hopes develop applications for. The buzz leading up to the conference has grown into a fever pitch with partners, developers, and customers all extremely excited about the next Windows release. What is it about this platform that Microsoft is doing right, and why is everyone so excited?

First off, Windows has a new look and feel. The next interface, dubbed “Metro” represents the single biggest change to the Windows interface since the additions of the start button back in 1995. It has been completely revamped from the ground up. It is a radical departure. The traditional desktop and icons have been replaced by dynamic tiles. These tiles will not only allow you to interact with program, but will allow the applications to communicate with the user by surfacing key messages, data, or photos, depending on the needs.

Speaking of revamped, the operating system has been rebuilt from the ground up. According to Microsoft, this version requires about half the memory of Windows 7, allowing for things like longer battery life, and more importantly, much better performance on less powerful processors. This last point is very key. Microsoft’s vision is to have a single operating system that runs on all hardware platforms – phones, tablets, PCs, etc. More importantly, they are trying to enable developers to write a single version of an application that will work on anything, unlike their counterparts from Apple, which currently requires 3 different builds of a program to work across the entire Apple hardware universe. This philosophy will be extremely popular with developers and will no doubt help Microsoft gain market share in the smart phone and tablet space very rapidly.

Getting back to the interface for a minute, it looks like it was built from the ground up to be touch enabled. Microsoft is most definitely designing this operating system to work on the next generation of hardware – tablets and otherwise. Even though a commercial version of a Windows tablet will probably not be available till next year, Microsoft distributed 5,000 early version units at the Build Conference. Just a further effort to get developers working on building “Metro” versions of their applications as soon as possible. In addition to being designed for future hardware platforms, this operating system looks to be the first designed from a user-centric point of view. In other words, Microsoft finally took a page out of the Apple playbook and built a user interface with the user in mind. Working with it just feels really natural. There is no doubt it will be a considerable adjustment for most users, but I’m pretty confident from my early experiences that the changes will be wildly
successful.

Microsoft still has a lot of work to do to catch Apple and Google in the mobile and tablet space. Windows 8 will be a giant leap in the right direction. Coupled with the fact that they already own the desktop space so dominantly, I think people will flock to the new version when they see what it can do. I’m fairly certain that Microsoft will be solidly second in that space at this time next year, passing Google’s Android platform without much problem. I also truly believe Apple will be firmly in their sites. If Windows 8 lives up to the early demos and hype, Microsoft is finally on the right track to establish a leadership position in this critical market space. Let’s hope this new “reimagined” Microsoft (as Steve Ballmer called them during his Build keynote) stays the course because that will be the best possible scenario for any business looking to expand their use of mobile and tablet devices going forward.

reprinted with permission from the HP Small Business Center

The economic downturn that sent financial shivers through all businesses and the unemployment rate skyrocketing has a silver lining especially for small and medium businesses. With the economy turning around, and your business poised for growth, you have access to perhaps the world’s greatest talent pool ever.

The new era of connected mobility collapses time and distance; you can tap the potential of motivated and highly skilled individuals located almost anywhere!

The ‘perfect’ candidate three time zones away may prove a better choice for your business than the ‘very good’ candidate located in the same city as your operations.
Outsourcing repetitive tasks and some functions offers many benefits. But other times your business demands having the sustained contribution of a full-time employee.

So how do you find, equip, and maximize the potential of these mobile workers? Here are a few ideas to consider.

To find them, think like them. . .
Make sure the job description on your web site stands out! What intangible qualities do want your employee to possess? One music-related business in search of a marketing manager wanted to know which song they’d play at the office. Be creative.

Put your social network to work. Spread the word to your LinkedIn connections. Your employees may be willing to do the same to their connections. Increasingly, Twitter is used to match employers with potential employees.

Check references, as well as your candidate’s online presence. Arrange a video teleconference rather than only a phone interview. Some businesses rely on firms such as PI Worldwide that use surveys to make science-based decisions on individual’s potential.

Provide the right tools, the right mobile infrastructure
Now that you’ve made an important investment in human capital, it’s time to make the right technology investment. Technology, simply put, is the lifeblood of your mobile workforce. It enables them to connect, collaborate, create, report, print, prospect, code, propose, and much more.

The specific function of an employee will determine whether she requires a laptop, a desktop PC or a powerful workstation.

The ability to print high quality color or black and white documents, locally and remotely, is often a key requirement.

A support plan can minimize downtime.

Inspire!
Despite having access to the best technology, working remotely is sometimes isolating. Engage your extended, mobile workforce as you do your employees who sit nearby.

Face-to-face meetings, even once a year, promote relationship building among team members.

Be aware of the challenges your mobile workers face. If they participate in meetings by phone, for example, it is difficult to hear soft-spoken individuals, and impossible to participate in side conversations.

Set goals and objectives together and ask for regular status updates in writing—a best practice for all employees.

Take advantage!
Incredible talent is out there! Find, equip, and inspire the newest members of your mobile team, and your business will reap the benefits of the potential you unleash.

used with permission from the Cisco Small Business Resource Center

Anyone who manages a network is embarking on an exciting ride. Maybe you’ve already strapped on your seat belt and are underway, riding through:

• A steep climb in Internet traffic and network access from smartphones and tablets
• Increased traction in cloud services and virtualization
• The growing popularity of IP voice and video
• Challenging twists and turns in security, including international hacking

• Any device, to any content, any way. The network will unify wireless and wired access to support the proliferation of devices (“bring your own device”, or BYOD) and ubiquitous mobility. Virtualization and cloud services will deliver content whenever they provide a lower cost of ownership (this is why Cisco is now migrating most of its own business applications to data center virtualization).
• Collaboration with customers, staff, suppliers and other partners will grow, using video, data, and voice communications on a variety of devices. The ability to quickly and easily collaborate no matter where people are will transform business processes, as it has done already in education and healthcare.
• Video will be the cornerstone of collaboration. Video conferencing and person-to-person video calling are already proving particularly powerful for sales processes and for doing business at a distance, both locally and globally.
• Network security elements such as firewalls, content security, and policy and identity management will converge. The result: seamless connections and context-aware security that recognizes who you are, what you’re supposed to have access to, what device you’re on, and where you are globally, and then provides access accordingly.
• A network technology architecture will connect any device across any combination of networks, increase cost efficiency by integrating network security and management, and improve business processes, including energy management.

• Reliable and secure Wi-Fi access. Smartphones, tablets, and wireless IP phones used for business need the speed and stability of Wireless-N (802.11n) network access, as well as support for quality of service (QoS) for latency-sensitive traffic. Adding access points is easier and faster with clustering. Some wireless routers integrate security—such as VLANs, firewall, VPN, and security services—to increase and simplify your control.
• Power over Ethernet (PoE). PoE juices up a network in two ways: It gives you more flexibility in locating wireless access points and other wired devices, and it adds more power per port to support higher-draw technologies such as Wireless-N. PoE is included many Cisco® switches, routers, phones, and wireless solutions.
• Stronger network security. Mobility, social networking, cloud services, and international hacking are growing. Is your security technology keeping pace? Essential technologies include content security, firewall, VPN, and VLANs. Security solutions that are integrated can increase application performance, save you time, and give you centralized control. Powerful integrated security is available in a variety of Cisco security solutions (see more specifics below in “Next Steps”). Even some small business routers have baseline Internet security.
• Collaborative communications. Each year more small businesses reduce operating costs and raise productivity by using unified communications and video and audio conferencing applications; some subscribe to a telepresence service or have customer service centers. Collaboration technologies demand high-performance, high-availability connections. And they require reliable, intuitive user devices, ranging from basic IP phones to more powerful IP phones and unified IP phones.
• High-performance, high-availability connections. Fast, efficient traffic flow is a top priority for any business using mobile devices, cloud applications, or IP voice or video. You can speed traffic by using Wireless-N and Gigabit Ethernet (see more specifics in “Next Steps”). Your traffic intersections (routing and switching) must optimize traffic flow, using technologies such as QoS. And if you invest in a new router or switch (or DNS server), it should include support for IPv6, as Cisco products do.

Often times during PowerPoint presentations you might want to share video and audio clips. Doing this means you have to get out of your presentation, find the video file, play it, then get back into your presentation and find the slide you were last on.  But what if you could play movie clips and sound files from within your presentation?

If you have these files on your computer, you can!

Step 1: Put all your files in one place
Media files inserted into PowerPoint presentations are linked. Put all your files into a folder. If you need to take your presentation with you (such as on a flash drive) or need to e-mail it to someone, send the entire folder with all the files, or else the media files will not play in the PowerPoint.

Step 3: Insert media files.
Go to the slide(s) where you want to insert media files.

Go to the Insert tab.

Find the Media Clips group.

Click either the Movie or Sound icon. Find the file you want to insert and click OK. If a dialog box appears, select When Clicked.

Video files will appear as boxes, which you can resize and move about. Audio files will appear as a sound icon, which you can also move about. When you click on an inserted media icon, you will see a new Video Tools or Audio Tools tab on the Ribbon, which you can use to customize the playback of your media.

Step 4: Play media files
Always test your PowerPoint to make sure that the media files are working properly. View your PowerPoint as a slideshow and click on each media file you inserted to make sure that it plays.