Mobile Web – Fad or Fact?

A recent Morgan Stanley study predicts that by 2020 most web browsing will be done on mobile devices and not on desktop PC’s.

Some web statistics have current traffic to the average website with as much at 58% coming from mobile devices.  The question becomes, do you believe in the growth of mobile device surfing options?  Do you find yourself using your mobile device to find a business, phone number or product?  Odds are if you do it,  so do your customers.

If you find this to be the case, then the next question is…is your website designed for the “mobile revolution?”  In my experience, the answer is probably not.  Here’s why:

Most websites are written for 800 x 600 screens to satisfy the average user who access websites via a 15/17 inch monitor.  Something very different than the experience the user is subject to on their mobile device.  The solution?  Employ technology so your website can detect when the user is accessing the site via their mobile device.  This way, your web page can be displayed with the same content, but in a format compatible with browsing on a smaller, mobile device.  With critical information like the company phone number and location, you can convert more mobile users into mobile buyers.

Check our your Google Analytics to see the number of mobile users on your site right now.  Need help getting more information and statistics from your website, give us a call.

Can I Donate my Old Computers?

It’s quite common for companies to donate their old technology – particularly their computers – once they’ve replaced them.  Often their desire is motivated by tax advantages or philanthropic reasons. Yet, even in their desire to do something so generous it’s important to remember that donating used technology is a good thing only if there is still value in the systems that are to be donated.  And, let’s not forget that most companies will need to ensure there is no company data on the systems before they donate them.

How to Donate

There is an inherent risk in donating computers for any company.  As such, the trick is to balance out the risk for the company with the value provided to the organization receiving the computers.  Not always an easy thing to do, however, here are 3 common ways to donate – each providing a varying balance between risk and value.

1. Remove the hard drive prior to donating the computers.  This presents licensing and “usability” issues for the organization receiving the computers, but it definitively protects the company.  This method presents very little risk, but provides limited value, as well, because the operating system and any other software that came on the computer (such as Microsoft Office) are now gone.
2. “Clean” the systems.  There are multiple software packages that can aid in this process using one of them is probably the most efficient way to prepare the systems for donation.  The downside here is that there is that preparing the systems can require a fair amount of prep time.
3. Reimage the systems.   This is really nothing more than a highly-secure way to clean the systems, however, it can be pretty labor intensive – especially if you don’t have an image already or you are working with systems that have different hardware.  An excellent approach if you can stomach the preparation time/expense.

From a practical standpoint, it may be an option to manually remove some data and donate the systems without being certain all the data was removed.  This is often an option for companies that are in non-regulated industries who have an existing, strong relationship with a nonprofit.  Of course, as an IT provider we can never recommend this approach and obviously, if your company is in a regulated industry (legal, medical, insurance, etc.) this isn’t an option.   Ultimately, the best thing to remember is that donating systems that are in bad shape doesn’t help anyone.  And that before you decide to donate, consider the costs and value of doing so.

Disaster Recovery – The Basics

More and more I see companies who are backing up their data in quality ways, using a combination of good equipment, strong processes, and industry recommended best-practices.  Make no mistake – I’m happy about this.  But I’m also seeing many of these same companies who are considering their backup to be their disaster recovery plan.  Unfortunately, no data backup, no matter how good, is a disaster recovery plan.  Now, I’m not trying to preach about disaster recovery…well, okay, that’s a lie.  I’m planning on doing a little preaching.  But truly, there is a difference between a disaster recovery plan and standard data backup plan.  Ultimately, disaster recovery is the means to an end with the “end” being business continuity.  And everyone likes business continuity, right?  So whether you decide to put together a full-blown disaster recovery plan or just stay with your current data backup, knowing the difference can save your business lots of money.  Okay, I’m done preaching.  Here’s some valuable information about what makes up a good disaster recovery plan, and how to put one together…

Note:  A true disaster recovery plan includes phones, facilities, data, and more.  I’m just focusing on the data portion of things in this article.

Generally, “disasters” come in three flavors:

• Hardware failure (bad hard drive, motherboard, network card, etc.)
• Software failure (“bluescreen” is a familiar term for a reason)
• Physical failure (flood, fire, etc.)

So let’s keep things simple.  Good disaster recovery generally includes a mix of the following components:

• Quality data backup (preferably onsite and offsite)
• Imaging
• Redundancy

Let’s explore each of these in a bit more detail.

Data backup:

• Onsite – use a hard drive backup system (preferably a quality internal/external chassis that has removable drives).  In terms of reliability, ability to restore quickly, and length of service, hard drives are simply better than comparable tape systems.
• Offsite – Offsite backup solves a number of security & operational concerns, and is very cost effective these days (about $1 per GB per month is pretty common).  Because it’s automated, you don’t need to worry about people remembering to take data offsite and you can control the amount of data that is backed up offsite.

Imaging:  Imaging is the process of taking a “snapshot” of an operating system.  When applied to server systems, the use of imaging can literally save tens of thousands of dollars in recovery costs.  Imaging fails when it comes to restoring data granularly (a single e-mail, a single document, etc.), but for true disaster recovery, imaging can’t be beat.

Redundancy:  Creating a network devoid of “single points of failure” is almost always too expensive to employ, but the concept can be used effectively to significantly reduce the chance and effect “failure” can have on your business.  Some good uses of redundancy would be:

• Quality server design (multiple hard drives, fans, power supplies, etc.)
• Use of a quality SAN (Storage Area Network) in a virtualized server environment (VMware software is great in these environments)
• Server redundancy (two servers deployed in a fully redundant architecture).  Stratus Avance is amazing software that accomplishes this at a price small and medium sized businesses can absorb easily.
• Network switches deployed in a balanced architecture with enough capacity to assume full connectivity should one fail.

The last piece of a good disaster recovery plan is the plan itself.  Now that you have all these quality pieces in place, you still need to have a plan in place should a disaster strike.  Here are a few good ways to start putting your plan together:

1. Know your operational costs (by the day, by the hour, etc.).  Granted, this is only half the equation (operational costs don’t include the impact downtime will have on your clients, nor does it include other opportunity costs you may have), but it is an absolutely necessary ingredient for creating your plan.
2. Define your tolerance for downtime.  Some businesses can handle a day or two of downtime.  Others can’t afford an hour of downtime.  Determining how your tolerance for downtime will go a long way in putting your disaster recovery plan together
3. Define a budget.  If you know your operational costs are $25,000 per day (for instance), you then have good information from which you can create an appropriate budget for avoiding downtime.
4. Design your network appropriately (data backup, imaging, redundancy, etc.).
5. Put it on paper.  Just like everything else in business, putting it on paper helps make it happen.