Cloud Adoption One trend that has seemingly been a trend for almost a decade is the continued use of cloud computing to expand the reach of a company. Nowadays, there have been several innovations that now make cloud computing a no-brainer for the modern small business. Servers, software, and other resources can be extraordinarily expensive, and maintaining them can often cost even more. Many of today?s most utilized productivity software now come in a service package through the cloud. This presents an opportunity for the small business to get any type of software in needs without carrying the huge capital investment that buying new hardware and paying for software licensing is sure to thrust on a business.  Smarter Business (BI & BA) Another trend we are seeing is that more and more small businesses are utilizing business intelligence and business analytics platforms to get a better read on how their business investments are returning revenue-generating situations. Using these platforms allows businesses to alter their business strategies to the market in which they compete, giving them a better understanding of what they need to do to improve their operations. Everything Digital  Up until recently, and even today, digital transformation is often considered too costly for the SMB. That shouldn?t stop smaller businesses from pursuing this strategy where they can. The more a business does early to prioritize building a digital workplace, the better position they will be in going forward. There are several ways a business can go about doing this. They can start either in their customer-facing strategies or with their internal ones. One way that a business can start is by installing a platform that allows for secure remote work experiences. This will not only make it easier for their own staff to work remotely, it also opens up the possibility to leverage outsourced workers into higher degrees of productivity and cost reduction.  If you are looking for the right technology to invest in, the consultants at White Mountain IT Services can help you find innovative solutions that will create workable ROIs, while boosting efficiency, communications, and productivity. Call us today to see how we can help at (603) 889-0800.

Let?s take a few moments to examine how the support offered by a managed service provider is delivered, and how it ultimately benefits the businesses that leverage it. What Makes Managed Support So Different? Consider what you could expect to experience if you encountered a technology issue under each approach to obtaining support. In the traditional system, a user would only call in support when a problem had been encountered – one severe enough to prevent them from being productive at all, or at least one that hindered their capability to work effectively. Their ?computer guy? would come into the office to see what the problem was, and whether or not it could be fixed on the spot. If it could, the visitor would spend a few hours in the office, noisily making repairs. If not, it was back to his shop for a time, leaving the business short a workstation and an employee stuck unproductive. On the other hand, with a managed service provider offering their support, a user?s overall experience would play out quite differently. Rather than a computer guy being called in to diagnose the workstation in person (or whatever IT component was acting up), a technician could be called and, without any travel time necessary, remotely access the problematic equipment to identify the problem and resolve it. Onsite Support if Necessary In the majority of cases, this remote connection is sufficient for the managed service provider to accomplish what they need to do. However, there are some issues that will need a physical presence to resolve. In these cases, a managed service provider will send out one of their trained technicians to attend to the problem, professionally and proficiently. Rally Your Business with Reliable Support Services Technology is meant to be a tool – don?t let it actually hurt your operations. The professionals at White Mountain IT Services can help you make the most of your IT through managed services. For the next part of this series, make sure you check back on our blog.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) A recovery point objective is measured in time. The figure describes and determines how much data a business is willing to lose in the event a disaster strikes their business. This metric is a good one for an organization to determine how often to perform data backups, since in theory, the more data you need to maintain, the more frequently you will be backing up said data.  Recovery Time Objective (RTO) A recovery time objective is also measured in time. It determines how much time you can go without recovering data and IT infrastructure before you lose continuity of your business. After a disaster it is extremely important to get data and infrastructure back up as soon as possible, but some businesses can function better than others without access to its normal critical data and infrastructure.  RPO vs RTO RPO and RTO are both metrics widely used in business disaster recovery and need to be qualified properly in order to be effective. To help you and your network administrator set up a disaster recovery platform that is right for your business, we look at some of the differences between RPO and RTO: Calculation This is where it gets tricky. You would think that RPO is easier to calculate because there are fewer moving parts, right? The problem is that you can only restore data to working hardware, and if a disaster knocks out your organization?s server, for instance, you won?t be able to restore anything until new hardware is procured. So when calculating an RPO, you have no choice but to do it by calculating inherent cost and demand for data. RTO, on the other hand, has to stay aligned with what is possible. If your business? RTO is too close to its necessary RPO, you business may be in jeopardy if a major outage such as a server failure takes place.  Assessment and Cost  The costs associated with maintaining a strict RTO will likely be greater than those for RPO. This is largely because in the case of RTO, you are looking at the complete computing infrastructure, while RPO is just about data. As far as the assessment of each, RTO incorporates a lot of your business? more crucial needs, while, again, RPO is focused on data. Automation To meet your organizational RPO goals, all you need to do is perform data backups at the interval specified by your RPO assessment. Since data backup is one of the easiest parts of your business to automate, having a strong RPO strategy is simple. Unfortunately, there is no practicable way to automate RTO, since many of the systems that need to be restored are likely physical hardware systems.  Takeaways When building a disaster recovery plan that will keep you in the game after a disaster, but also won?t cost your business a lot of capital, setting realistic RPO and RTO goals is critical. For more information about RPO and RTO, or disaster recovery, reach out to our knowledgeable professionals today at (603) 889-0800.

We get it, people everywhere are sharing all this data without a care in the world, but businesses are targeted and are losing revenue, data, and face in the process. What can you do differently? We will discuss three things you can do right now to improve your organizational data security. #1 Keep Sensitive Data Behind Your Firewall The majority of data is secure behind your business? defenses, but with the clear capital benefits brought by cloud computing, more organizations than ever are moving their business-critical data and applications outside of their control to the cloud. This could lead to detrimental situations like your data being intercepted or your cloud platform being breached.  That?s not to say that cloud platforms don?t provide passable security, most of them absolutely do, but what happens when one of your employees go on a trip and use the airport Wi-Fi? That cloud platform filled with critical information is just lying in wait for some hacker to come along and steal it. Using a virtual private network is a good option, but not as good as keeping your sensitive data in-house.  If you want to keep your business? data secure, one of the best things you can do is to ascertain which data needs to be secured and protected and then store that data on locally hosted hardware. This gives your ability to control access, security, and the overall management of the data system a boost.  #2 Keep Continuous Backups Protecting data assets is one of the first steps of organizational risk management. There is no better solution on the market today to do just that than a backup and disaster recovery platform (BDR). Not only does this allow you onsite local backup, it also pushes copies to the cloud, ensuring that you don?t keep your proverbial eggs (data) in one basket (server). Another suggestion we have to make is that you should frequently test your data backup solution to make sure that it is working properly. It would be devastating if you needed to restore your data only to have the backup system you use unavailable, or worse yet, corrupted when you went to use it. By testing the backup system, you will know that your data is, in fact, available in the event that something goes wrong and you have to restore it.  #3 Monitor Your Information Systems Backup or no, the best way to ascertain if there are problems with your IT is to monitor those systems closely. In doing so you will be able to decipher whether or not hardware is functioning properly, whether the systems are properly secured against outside infiltration, and where you need to prioritize your management efforts.  Our expert IT technicians use some of the most dynamic remote monitoring software on the market to mitigate anything that stands in the way of your organization?s productivity and security initiatives. If you would like to know more about White Mountain IT Services or how to ensure that your software is up to date, deployed, and monitored closely, call our knowledgeable professionals today at (603) 889-0800.

The Public Cloud When you see advertisements in magazines or on television for cloud computing, it is likely a public cloud that they are talking about. The public cloud is simply a cloud platform that uses shared virtualized computing resources. Public cloud resources are readily available from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Dropbox, Adobe, and a slew of other providers. Essentially, you share the computing hardware with hundreds of thousands of other users. That?s not to say it?s available to anyone else, as it is protected by a login platform, but overall public cloud resources have the highest risk of being insecure. The price is generally a small, per month, per user fee. For that, you get the storage/applications you need at a price that is advantageous for any business. The Private Cloud If a business is looking to take advantage of remote access of data, but needs that data to stay as secure as possible, they will build a private cloud. Essentially, a private cloud is hosted on hardware that is dedicated to that lone organization and has a significant amount of security and customizations available to keep the data behind the organization?s firewall, and therefore secure. It allows an organization to completely control how sensitive data is distributed, and is the most secure cloud platform a business can have. Costs are usually substantial as you will need to either buy and maintain the hardware on-premises or purchase dedicated space in an enterprise data center. There are ways to minimize the cost a bit, but ultimately you will be on the hook for large capital costs, with smaller operational costs. The Hybrid Cloud The hybrid cloud is part-public cloud and part-private cloud. It is also well-known to be harder to manage as there are considerations about where data is stored and called from. The main draw is that an organization can take full advantage of the cost savings that public cloud services provide, while also keeping sensitive information secured on a dedicated private cloud server. The integrations needed to make a hybrid cloud work properly are usually in place, but can also be developed by the organization looking to use hybrid cloud architecture. An orchestration layer, as it is called, connects public cloud resources to an organization?s private cloud servers. This provides end users a seamless experience, with no extra work needed to access data from public or private cloud interfaces.  Which Is Right For Your Business? The million-dollar (or multi-million-dollar) question is: what works for your business? For the average small business, a private cloud solution makes the most sense as it gives you complete control over your data and applications–and keeps your data and infrastructure onsite–generally thought of as a best practice for smaller businesses. If you want to use public cloud resources for your business, to cut costs, or because your company?s needs don?t call for building a dedicated private cloud, you will want to understand just how your business? data is stored and accessed, and if you will need more security at the end points.  There are cloud resources for all types of business processes, so finding one that will work for your business won?t be difficult. They include: Accounting Operations Productivity Project Management Collaboration Communications Email Telephone Conferencing Document management Storage and backup Security …and much […]