Skyriver IT Blog
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The #1 thing your IT provider doesn't want you to know!
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What I'm about to share should concern you. This common IT services practice leaves you vulnerable to the whims of your IT service provider and can cost you thousands of dollars you would not spend otherwise.
It is the reselling of services, such as email and web hosting to clients. Why is this a risk for your company? Well, let me illustrate the problem using a client who recently came to Skyriver IT for help…
The owner of a 20-person real estate office chose to move to Skyriver IT because their former IT provider had let them down on several critical support issues.
As we prepared for the transition, we quickly learned that their old IT provider was a reseller of their email service. As with many businesses, email is a critical form of communication for this real estate office and they could not afford any downtime.
When we contacted the actual email provider (a major provider of email services), they refused to speak with us and would not transition our client's accounts, because the old IT provider (the reseller) was their customer, not the end user. That meant our client was beholden to the IT service provider they had just fired, who could turn their email off at any time – risking the loss of several years’ worth of emails and missing new incoming emails.
While Skyriver IT did engineer a solution by putting in many hours of night and weekend time, it was challenging, risky and expensive for our client. It cost an extra $7800 in IT support time that would have been completely unnecessary if he had not bought a resold service through his former IT provider.
How Can You Protect Your Company?
Whenever you choose an IT service provider, make sure they are not a reseller of the third-party solutions they provide, including email, virus protection, web hosting and cloud services. You want to make sure you are going straight to the source for the services you need. While it may seem convenient to have a "one-stop shop", it can make it difficult to extricate yourself from the provider if they fail to meet your expectations.
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Windows 7: Time to Upgrade or Not?
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When it comes to upgrades, every IT environment is different, and the potential benefits vs. the potential issues need to be carefully considered. You want to avoid wasting money on unnecessary or untimely upgrades. On the other hand, if you do not do it at the right time productivity can be affected using the old operating systems.
Here is our insight into Windows 7 upgrade. We hope that you find it helpful!
Who should upgrade?
- Companies that are running Vista: Vista has many problems that Windows 7 can fix and it's pretty easy to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7.
- Companies who have new hardware: It does not make sense to install Windows XP on new hardware. It's better to start with windows 7.
Who should stay with Win XP?
- Companies who have XP set up on older machines should upgrade hardware before upgrading to Windows 7. The upgrade is pretty costly from XP to Windows 7 since you need to wipe out the whole system. It doesn't make sense to do it on older hardware that you probably need to refresh soon.
- Companies who have customized applications that are not yet tested for Windows 7 should wait for these applications to be tested on Windows 7.
- Companies who are working with a very low technology budget can wait. Upgrading to windows 7 from XP can be costly. Even though Windows 7 is faster, more stable, and secure it might not add enough to your productivity compared to the cost impact of the change to a small budget.
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What Cloud Computing means and how you can use it…
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When people refer to cloud computing it is usually unclear what they mean. Even though the concept of cloud computing is often discussed, the implementation of a cloud computing platform is not tightly defined. Any single cloud computing strategy may make sense for a company to adopt, and it is important to understand the opportunities and consequences of each.
The following three approaches are all called cloud computing, and are very different from each other.
- Application hosting service: This is what Gmail and yahoo mail offer; basically you outsource an application to a third party. We use Salesforce.com, which is a hosted service. The advantages are as follows: You will not need to worry about managing and maintaining the application. You do not need to spend large sums of money on software or hardware and you benefit from the regular updates. The disadvantages are as follows: Customization is limited to the range of what is offered, so you cannot customize the CRM. You are choosing a partner and depending on them, so choose wisely. Finally, you are relying on the Internet to get access to your application and this may change what you need to budget for Internet in order to stay productive.
- Dedicated servers or infrastructure in colocation. Basically you are renting dedicated servers from a colocation facility and loading your own applications. The best thing about this service is that the facility will be responsible for the health and operational readiness of the hardware. If there is a problem, they usually guarantee one hour turnaround time. You will also eliminate the challenges of having your own small data room and investing in new hardware; you only pay the monthly fees. And if your application is supposed to be available to customers, the redundancy of power and Internet access offered by the collocation facility is far better than your own facility. The disadvantages are: Relying on the Internet or a private connection to reach your applications. A slow or unreliable connection could affect productivity. This may change what you need to budget for connectivity.
- Cloud Servers. These are big servers or farms of servers in a datacenter where a number of companies share the resources. Nothing is dedicated. Even some applications are rented instead of purchased. This approach is good for startup companies, or web based companies as your infrastructure can expand as you need it. You only pay for what you use. It's a cheap way to get started. However as you need more control of your data, you should think about dedicated servers. Cloud servers bring up the concern of "virtualized data" where your data is yours, but it isn't on your equipment. Some companies would have a hard time with this concept knowing that it could take days to transfer that data to a company owned server if necessary.
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Solutions, No more finger pointing…
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We recently met with a local company whose president was challenged with a situation that ended in finger pointing, and no solution. He was frustrated by his Internet provider and his IT support provider. When he called the Internet provider to alert them that he was having a problem with their service, they told him that the issue was internal. So he called his IT support provider, and they pointed back to the Internet provider. He didn't know who to believe, and he doesn't have the background to figure out which party he could trust. He has a business to run; he wants to focus on sales and operations and solutions, not dealing with vendors pointing fingers at each other. That's when they asked us to look into their set up.
It's amazing the number of cases we run in to like this. To a business manager, being stuck in the middle of separate technology vendors who point at each other instead of solving the problem is a significant drain to productivity and profitability. It would have been nice if the IT support provider could have called the Internet provider and got to the bottom of the issue instead of simply disqualifying their limited contribution as the problem. That's what they are there for in any case.
We strongly believe that IT support providers should take all the problems associated with technology and integration off the plate of businesses managers. We have modeled our business to provide total support, not just support for the things we've touched. We are open to know your issues and see how we can help.
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