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.

What Value Does Virtualization Provide?

It makes no difference whatsoever how amazing a technology is if it doesn’t provide a defined value for your business.  Below are the typical values businesses can expect to receive from deploying virtualization technology:

• Agility – Virtualized environments provide an incredible platform for adapting your company’s technology quickly in support of changing business goals and direction.
• Scalability – Adding new functionality to your company’s technology almost always presents numerous, critical, and complex concerns ranging from loss of productivity to significant capital expenditure. Virtualization simplifies this issue by eliminating hardware concerns from the equation.  In fact, a properly designed virtualization infrastructure will support relatively large changes in your company’s technology with very little complexity or out-of-pocket expense in comparison to a non-virtualized environment.
• Disaster Recovery – The ability to take an “image” of your server has been around for some time.  This ability is valuable from a disaster recovery standpoint because instead of rebuilding your server from scratch, you can simply reinstall the existing image of your server on a different piece of hardware which saves incredible amounts of time.  However, taking an existing image and installing it on a different hardware platform has always been at best difficult, and at the worst, nearly impossible. With a virtualized environment, however, this concern is eliminated because virtualization breaks the one-to-one ratio between your server hardware and software.

Note:  Management – Managing your company’s technology is a significant expense regardless of the size of your company or the market you’re in.  Yet, because technology is critical to productivity for almost every business these days, it is an expense that is absolutely necessary.  Virtualization doesn’t necessarily add to the management time required, and in certain circumstances, it can help reduce management time by removing the complexity of managing different hardware platforms.  However, it can also add some processes to your existing management routine, and if you don’t have professional, in-house IT support, you may need to leverage the services of your existing IT consultant a little more.

How Does Virtualization Work?

From a very high level virtualization architecture  is pretty straight forward.  You take one very powerful server and you install virtualization software on it.  Once you have the virtualization “layer” installed, you then install any desired server systems on top of it.  This effectively creates a platform for a one-to-many hardware-to-software relationship.  Of course, all the hardware and software specifications need to be taken into account cumulatively to properly design and deploy a virtualized environment.

What is Virtualization

The simplest way to explain virtualization may be:  the ability to run multiple operating systems on a single piece of hardware.  Of course, this is my personal definition and is specific to the context of how SMB’s typically use virtualization.  For a more formal definition, Wikipedia has a pretty good one.  Anyhow, in practice, this means that if your business employs 3 physical servers running Windows Server operating systems you could purchase one server and run all three instances of your Windows Server operating systems on that single piece of hardware. 

At first glance it may not seem that revolutionary, but virtualization is changing the way technology is used across all market segments. Really.

Virtualization 101 – Is it a Good Solution for SMB’s?

Virtualization as a technology has been around for quite some time, but it has only become prevalent within the SMB community over the past few years.  There are many reasons for this including cost, market viability, network infrastructure requirements, and more, but those barriers have been mostly removed over the past few years, making virtualization one of the most interesting and potentially valuable technologies for business today.  Yet, as we enter 2011, many businesses still don’t understand the values virtualization can provide them, nor do many businesses understand how to analyze whether virtualization is a good fit for them.  Well, read on and find out the practical aspects of utilizing virtualization technology for your business.

Product Spotlight – McAfee SaaS Web Protection

More and more businesses are looking for a good way to protect themselves against the litany of harmful viruses, spyware, and other malware that comes from the web.  In my article Web & Spyware Defense I cover some of the technologies that are effective at defending your business from web-based threats.  Here, I’d like to focus on the one of the products we believe balances effectiveness with cost, the best.

McAfee SaaS Web Protection  is a service provided by McAfee (formerly MX Logic) that effectively “scrubs” incoming and outgoing web traffic to ensure web threats don’t get in or out of your network.  It also provides options for limiting access to certain sites and can generate some valuable reports on web activity (by user, device, site, etc.).  Additionally, it includes a simple, straight forward user interface and has a price point under $3 per device per month.

How it works

The architecture of the solution is very simple: your company’s Internet/web traffic is routed through McAfee SaaS’ servers and scrubbed for harmful software.  Basically, it is a standard, cloud-based solution.

Effectiveness

We have deployed this solution for a number of our clients and it simply works.  There is no substitution for seeing how a product or service works in an actual production environment and this is one that lives up to the hype.

Note: Cloud solutions are often incredibly valuable solutions, but like any technology, they aren’t for every business.  At ITP we always recommend reviewing technology solutions within the context of your specific business goals, culture, processes and people.  Of course, if you need some help with that we’ve got some great people here at ITP that can help.

Random Thoughts – Avoid Spyware by Managing your Internet Traffic

So let’s start with a bold statement: If you’re not managing your Internet traffic you’re throwing money out the window.  A pretty strong statement, I know, but hear me out before you pass judgment…

For most small & medium-sized businesses the two areas of their technology that cost the most are:

1. Managing and supporting desktops
2. Internal IT staff members and/or IT consulting

Spyware, which is more malicious and prevalent than ever these days, affects both the functionality of your desktops and the efficiency of your IT staff or consultant.  Hence, it’s a hard hit on your bottom line.  In fact, I believe that if most businesses ran the numbers on what spyware really costs them, they would be mortified.  The good news is that there are technologies available that do a great job protecting you from spyware and other threats (see my article, Web & Spyware Defense  for more).  The bad news is that it takes more than just your antivirus software.

But keep in mind that the management of your Internet traffic can do much more than defend against incoming threats – it can also help you increase productivity and reduce HR risks. 

Remember when you were deciding whether spam protection was necessary for your business?  Well, managing your Internet traffic is the same discussion, only it’s a more costly one.

What’s New…….

ITP, in a joint effort with our partner, Converged, is holding an event on February 11^th at the Chophouse in Madison that will display two of today’s most valuable technologies for business.  If you want to understand more about how you can guarantee network availability for your business; or how unified communications are changing the way businesses communicate with their customers, then you should attend this event.  Featuring live demonstrations of Stratus Avance high availability software and Shoretel VOIP phone systems, you will see how you can drive business through innovative, always available communications.

E-mail

E-mail is a business tool that may very well be more important to most businesses than phones these days.  It is so critical to business operations not only because of the direct communication it provides with customers and internally, but for many companies, it also provides calendaring, task management, and time management tools.  With the critical nature of e-mail to business operations, it’s no wonder that e-mail was one of the first technologies to be delivered through “cloud” technologies.  Gmail, ymail, and others are all cloud-driven e-mail systems.  So how does this translate to value for your business?  To see the value cloud-based e-mail provides, it may be a good idea to compare traditional onsite e-mail with its cloud-based counterpart.

Traditional onsite e-mail

For the purpose of this article, let’s assume we have a business that has 35 staff members.  The business is considering deploying an e-mail server onsite that is powered by Microsoft Exchange.  This is quality solution that many businesses use today and it’s one that I’ve recommended often.  If we take this solution and compare it to a similar cloud-based solution, we can see the operational differences between the two…

For any technology, (e-mail included), there are hard costs and soft costs that we bear, and for those costs we receive operational value (oversimplified a bit, but sufficient to derive the comparative value between on-premise e-mail and cloud-based e-mail). As is the case with nearly all cloud solutions, the overall cost of a cloud solution is going to be greater over time than its onsite counterpart.  However, there are some definitive and tangible benefits for this greater cost.

Benefits of Cloud-based E-mail

• Administration – there is still some internal administration necessary in a cloud-based environment because internal resources are used to access your e-mail (Internet, desktops, etc.), but the bulk of the administration burden is transferred to the hosting company.  This reduces risk in many cases and reduces internal administration costs
• Accessibility – The very nature of cloud solutions require them to be highly accessible.
• Availability – Most cloud solutions, including e-mail, are hosted at a data center, often with a second data center available for failover, which gives you a much higher level of e-mail uptime over an onsite solution.  Additionally, most cloud-based e-mail providers will give you an SLA, stating their uptime requirements
• Initial Investment – though nearly all cloud solutions will cost more over time, there upfront cost is far lower than an onsite solution.

There are also drawbacks to cloud-based e-mail, as well:

• Cost – greater cost over time
• Integration – many software programs today interface directly with your e-mail system to capture messages, calendar data, and so forth.  Most of these programs won’t be able to integrate with cloud-based e-mail.
• Speed – Almost every program that is hosted remotely (or in the cloud) is going to respond just a little slower than if that program is running onsite.
• Control – whenever you move functionality offsite, you lose some degree of control of that function. 
• Backup - The frequency, type, and depth of your e-mail backup is something that needs to be redeveloped when you operate your e-mail from the cloud.

Ultimately, cloud-based e-mail is something that is becoming a better option for businesses, though admittedly, it isn’t for everyone.  Yet, there are some undeniable operational advantages that will only grow as time passes.  Either way, for many businesses, it’s probably evolved to the point that it is an option worth looking into.