Not Your Typical IT Guys

I call it the Pantry effect.  Consider this for a moment.  Your hungry and need a snack.  So you go to the kitchen to peruse the shelves for something to satisfy that hunger.  However, finding the right snack all of a sudden becomes a daunting challenge.  You have organized your kitchen into a dozen different pantries organized by type of snack.  A pantry for chips, another for pretzels, yet another for variety fruit cups… and so on. So now, you either need to open all 12 pantries and try to make a decision OR you need to decide which type of snack you want before you can even begin perusing the right pantry of choices.

This is the same challenge that companies adopting all SaaS solutions are running into.  Here is a typical employees thought process, “I need to look up a client phone number… which application do I need? what is the web address? what is my username and password?… doah i hope I picked the application with the most recent information!”

Don’t get me wrong… I love SaaS, it has MANY benefits that make it a perfect solution for many organizations.  But we need to review what history has taught us.  For years everyone said, “Pick best of breed apps.” Now everyone is retracing their steps… “Maybe I should have picked the time and billing system that integrates with our contact management system even though it was missing a few bells and whistles.” There is something to be said for truelly integrated systems.

One day, Alexander the SaaS Great is going to slice this Gordian Knot in half, however until then you are faced with many pantry’s that don’t talk to each other and don’t have the same path’s to entry or username and password requirements.

Until then Cloud Solution providers like Simplified Innovations are the better choice.  We can take all of your existing “Shelfware” apps and put them in the cloud for you.  You maintain all of the integrations and benefits of having a single pantry plus get ALL the benefits of the “Cloud.”  In addition there is nothing NEW for your staff to learn.  Everything maintains the same comfortable interface you have been using in your business for years.

Many software providers are beginning to SaaSify their apps, however before jumping into their cloud weigh the options and consider sticking with the model you already have, just get rid of the hardware burden.  Another thought to consider… how many apps do you have that you have put off an update too because of some feature change that would disrupt your business??  If you are in that vendors SaaS cloud you no longer have the power to hold off on that update until it makes sense for your business!  When they decided the update gets pushed its a disruption you have to handle at that time. 

Bottom line, embrace the cloud, but don’t jump into the SaaS bucket without considering all your options.  SaaS can’t completely replace your existing technical infrastrucure… however we can!

Everyone is always asking, “Do you have a Disaster Recovery Plan?” and the overwhelming answer is…. wait for it, wait for it… “I told our IT guy to come up with something.”

Grrrr, OK this post isn’t about why IT is only a component of DR and why there needs to be more involvement than just IT in the DR Plan.  This post is focused on how IT can take care of their aspect of things in one clean swoop and leave the rest up to the others!

So why do we call it Disaster Protection?

Well, we don’t want to rebuild after there has been a disaster!  I’d rather put systems and protections in place so that in the unfortunate case that there is a disaster we don’t have to rebuild from the ground up and hope we don’t miss anything along the way. Instead, thanks to the proliferation of internet access, advances in virtualization technologies, reduced cost of storage and memory and access to true Data Centers, we can now protect the IT Infrastructure from disaster and keep it up and running even if the office no longer exists, has lost power, or is frozen over!  How cool is that!?!

Here is the premise, by having your network hosted in a secure data center everything remains accessible if disaster should occur.  Now, keep in mind, the Data Center is only as good as its level of redundancies. Here is some information regarding Data Center Tiers.  HSI’s primary site uses a SAS70 Type II, Tier 3 Data Center that has the fault tolerance of a Tier 4.  Be careful, there are places out there that call themselves Data Centers that aren’t much more than a closet with dedicated A/C and some batteries, not your ideal protection!

While a disaster may require a company to rebuild their office, or replace furniture, or even replace some desktop computers and printers.  Businesses that have “Disaster Protection” in place won’t have to rebuild network servers, restore data from backup tapes (pray they work), and get your email back online and rebuild workstations before business can continue. Instead everyone can work from home, their neighbors, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Banes & Noble or the library until the office disaster has been resolved.

Disaster Protection is one of the many great features built into the HSI TruCloud™  Our clients sleep peacefully at night knowing their systems are safe, secure and protected in case of unanticipated events.  Can you say the same?

I have to admit…I have been apprehensive of the touchscreen on the iPhone.  I just wasn’t feeling the comparable typing speed that I could achieve on my Blackberry.  However, I have just discovered… I was wrong wrong wrong.  Typing is a breeze once you are comfortable with it… that being said, even if you weren’t comfortable with typing, it would be well worth the pain.  The iPhone is by far one of the sweetest pieces of electronics ever created!

After I got my new iPhone 3GS, compliments of a lot of hard work from Nick at the Bel Air AT&T store, I quickly jumped in downloaded many of the most popular apps and went to town.  However, my iPhone wasn’t complete until I downloaded the new Citrix XenApp Receiver for the iPhone.  Bottom line, via the HSI TruCloud™ infrastructure I can now pull up any application I want on my phone. Yes, that means Office 2007, Sage Act, QuickBooks, and any other application of choice right on my phone!  I know what you are thinking already, “There is no way it is useful on a little screen.”  Well thanks to the cool gestures that are native to the iPhone for zooming and panning you can legitimately work off your iPhone.  OK, your not going to create a huge spreadsheet on a 3.5″ display.  But you can absolutely pull up a QuickBooks file, a Tax Return, a spreadsheet in Excel 2007 or any other app that is running in your network  and review it or take a quick look to answer a question you have while away from your laptop.  It is amazing!!  Keep your eye out for some video that I will post as soon as I can get it together.

And a final “Deep Thought (for you SNL buffs out there)”, if the iPhone had existed for MacGyver, would he have been that much cooler than the rest of us or would he have just been just an average guy with a iPhone??