MSPNetworks Blog

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.

Let me ask you: how confident are you that all of your data is in your control? How confident are you that you have access to it as you need it? How confident are you that it is properly secured, wherever it is being stored?

These are all important, arguably critical, questions to know the answer to. They are also all questions that are best answered by storing your data centrally.

Let’s explore why centralized data storage is so important for today’s businesses and their success.

First of All, What is Centralized Data Storage?

Centralized data storage is pretty much what it says on the box. Instead of keeping your business’ data spread out amongst disparate devices, it’s kept on a central, shared device. There are a lot of reasons that this is the better option, particularly where your business’ data continuity is concerned.

It’s Far Easier to Maintain Control Over Your Data

How much control do you have over your employees’ personal devices? If yours is like most businesses, very, very little. Therefore, any of your business’ data that makes its way to one of these personal devices is effectively lost to you. Using a centralized storage space that your team can remotely access if needed makes it far, far easier to keep track of your data.

You Can Ensure Your Data is Sufficiently Secured and Backed Up

On a related note, by ensuring all of your data is in a centralized location, it becomes far easier to put all the proper security in place to keep it safe. It also makes it easier to keep your data properly backed up, as again, it’s easier to keep track of it and protect it.

Everyone Who Needs Access to Certain Data Can Have It

Thirdly, by keeping all your data in a single, safe place (outside of your backups, of course), it is easier to properly manage your team’s ability to each access the data needed for their roles—and just as importantly, restrict team members from accessing the data they have no need for, following the principle of least privilege.

You Should Be Enforcing the Use of Centralized Storage Space

Long story short, centralized storage space is just the better option for businesses, particularly those that rely on collaboration. We can help you set up your business to utilize such a storage strategy. Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 to learn more.

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 MSPNetworks, 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 MSPNetworks, 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.

If your business is looking to use technology beneficially, the ability to store data is going to be a major consideration you are going to have to confront. After all, not having enough storage space, or having too much, can be major problems for most businesses. Today, we’ll ask some of the most pressing questions you’ll need to answer to get the right (and the right amount of) storage space for your needs.

Storage is a major consideration, no matter your business. If you don’t have storage enough to house your cleaning supplies and instead have to leave them out in the hallway for everyone to avoid, it is a problem, right? What if unsightly clutter isn’t your biggest cause for concern? What if you run a furniture retailer, for example? Being in a position where you don’t have enough warehouse space available to keep your furniture in; or, you have too much warehouse space left over, will both likely end up being expensive.

Business Data

Every piece of your business data tells a story. Data is emails. It’s invoices. It’s every move your business makes. With that much data being kept, data storage has to be structured in a way where it will help the business. Since technology continues to evolve, this means data storage will as well.

The traditional model for data storage has been one made up of three tiers. You have storage facilities, servers that allow users to search those storage facilities and the networking angle that allows more users access to the data. Under this model, a business would have to understand exactly what data storage they need, and will need, for up to five years.

In many cases, five years is too long.

Today there are seemingly superior options that provide all the resources you need. Hyperconvergence is an IT framework that was created to deliberately reduce data center complexity and improve the scalability of physical hardware, while there are many cloud options available that deliver all the computing resources you need for an often-reasonably-priced  monthly payment.

In any case, there are options out there. But you need to know what to look for. Here are four questions you should ask.

1. What capacity do I need? - Understanding the amount of data storage your company needs is a major determination. Today’s cloud solutions are more scalable, but by considering what type of storage your company is ultimately going to purchase.
2. What about my performance needs? - Not all options are created equal. Some are faster and some offer huge storage capabilities. Knowing how you plan on using your applications and databases will go a long way toward helping you know which solutions will be right for you.
3. What does my current IT look like? - One consideration that has to be at the forefront of this process is what infrastructure do you already have in place. Knowing your current needs will help you ascertain how you are going to handle the future.
4. How will you handle your backups? - Every business has to have a backup plan. If you depend on data, you likely can’t afford to lose any of it without some blowback. Having a comprehensive backup and recovery plan will ultimately dictate what any new data storage will look like.

Finding good solutions for your company is important in any regard, but when you are talking about the storage of what is quickly becoming your most prized asset, you should take your time and find the solutions that will work and not hinder your ability to create revenue. Call MSPNetworks to get started finding the right storage for you today at (516) 403-9001.

Microsoft is the world’s most profitable software company, and if your business is like any of the millions of businesses that rely on Microsoft’s servers, you know they are both useful and secure. Occasionally, however, Microsoft will retire older software titles as they need constant care and support. On July 9, 2019, Microsoft will officially retire their SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 operating systems. If your organization still uses this software there is no time like the present to get you systems updated, as losing support will be a major problem.

What is SQL Server?
Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system (RDBMS). SQL server is used to securely manage the storage and retrieval of, and access to, large amounts of data. Often line of business apps like your CRM system, inventory management, and other business applications use these databases to store their information.

That’s the exception here. Since the only reason you would need a database is if you had, or will potentially have, a lot of data, the only reason you would need a RDBMS is to manage the data within. In order to quickly retrieve the queried information, you need a management system that integrates with the applications you are using.

Essentially SQL Server is Microsoft’s Database Management Software, and with Microsoft software on the majority of enterprise servers in the world, plenty of people utilize Microsoft database products. If your business has been using one of the SQL Server 2008 versions, your time is running out to upgrade your SQL Server before you are put into a real bind.

SQL Server 2008/SQL Server 2008 R2 End of Life
As we come up on July 9, the 2008 versions of SQL Server will be losing their support. After previously stopping mainstream support in July of 2014, Microsoft has decided to pull the plug on SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 five years (to the day) later. Organizations that don’t upgrade away from SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 R2 could be looking at immediate security problems and potential data loss. These factors could completely decimate your reputation, which could cause your entire business to collapse.

Your Options
For the business that is on the clock, they’ll need to consider moving quickly to upgrade their database management system. MSPNetworks can provide you with solutions that could completely change the way you look at your business. Today’s RDBMS is light years past 2008s in terms of integrations and intelligence. Any RDBMS can be locally hosted, but we can also implement a cloud-hosted database, that can be used to make your business even faster.

No matter what option you choose, you have to have your SQL Server migrated by July 8, 2019 to ensure that you have the security and data protection you need to keep your business’ most powerful asset safe. Call MSPNetworks today at (516) 403-9001 and see how we can help your business get all the technology it needs to succeed.

Server units--you’ll find them in most offices out there, but they are all used for different purposes. Since well-maintained data is so essential to the success of many organizations, it’s important to keep your server units in proper working order. Today we’ll discuss the best ways to make sure your servers are in peak performance.

What Causes Server Room Problems?
Even some of the little problems facing server rooms can create considerable trouble for your business. Of course, we are talking about an excess amount of dust and other small contaminants. It’s difficult to control and tricky to clean, as it can be blown all over the place (including into server components). When lots of dust accumulates, it can act as an insulator, increasing the overall temperature of server units by about 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Just like the human body, an increase of temperature like this can be catastrophic.

Other contaminants include particles generated by humans, like skin particles and dander. Wear and tear from the devices themselves can also become a culprit in this regard, as belt debris and metal shavings can accumulate over time. By far the worst culprit is the soles of the feet. It’s estimated that around 80 percent of this damaging debris enters a server room in this fashion.

Mitigating Issues Through Maintenance and Prevention
Imagine how much damage could be done to your business if your server were to fail. All of the data you were supposed to protect is suddenly lost in a puff of smoke, despite your careful efforts to ensure it stays secure from both internal and external threats. Therefore, it’s extremely important your business keeps maintenance and prevention as a priority. This can be accomplished by adhering to strict cleanliness standards and keeping contaminants to a minimum.

Keep Things Clean
If you can keep your server room free of dust and grime, it’s much easier to keep it in proper working order. You should always leave comprehensive cleaning jobs to professionals, but you can take action now to minimize the chance of this dust influencing your server’s operations. For example, if your server room has people frequently coming and going, you can vacuum it to keep the floors clear of any contaminants. If cleaning your server components has you concerned, you can use an antistatic cloth to keep them clean, as well as cans of compressed air to blow dust out of the way of particularly important components.

Minimizing Contamination
You can also take certain measures to ensure the dust and grime that accumulates in your server room doesn’t become a problem. You can try installing air filters, as well as using an entryway room with special mats to keep grime and dirt from getting in. Other measures like hats and booties can be used to minimize the amount of human contamination that makes it into your server room. In fact… that’s the best way to keep your server room clean--just not going in at all.

To learn more about how MSPNetworks can help your business take care of this important technology, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.