How lessons learned from the Gulf Oil Disaster can Save your Company from financial ruin

At 10 PM on April 20th, 2010 an explosion on the Deep Horizon drilling rig for ever changed the lives of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people.  BP is now hemorrhaging money in the billions of dollars,  facing huge law suits and government penalties.  Their reputation is in peril.    Smaller companies would have failed billions of dollars ago.

What if your company sprung a huge leak?

Not in the oil business?  The leak I am talking about is not from the earths crust.  I am talking about your sensitive data, intellectual property and customer information.

Customer data, intellectual property and trade secrets all hide behind your tenuous firewall maintained by very bright people who are expected to multitask as security experts, data miners, programmers and general IT support for the enterprise.

These same bright people are no doubt monitoring the network and providing regular reports to management regarding the security of the network, the number of attacks, the breeches, viruses, and worms that have penetrated the firewall.  They are probably even expected to provide a disaster recovery plan outlining exactly what to do if things go wrong. This is Good.

As the saying goes:

Prior Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance

But we’re not just talking about performance here are we?  We are talking about survival.  Unlike the slow migration of oil to the continental shores, if the data drillers on the Internet penetrate your firewall, your leak will hit foreign shores at the speed of light.

Just so you know how fast that is, at the speed of light your unrecoverable data would circle the globe 7 times in one second.

BP Oil had plans too.   Unfortunately, their plans were not nearly so robust to deal with disaster that befell them.

How robust are your plans?

So what are the lessons learned?

• Every firewall is penetrable, even the earths’ crust 5 miles deep in the ocean
• The more valuable resource, the greater the damage
• Unlike, the relatively small number of people or companies are capable of getting at the deep ocean oil reserves, there are
• thousands of very qualified data hackers just looking for the next deep well of data.
• There is no way to get the oil or your valuable data back into the hole from which it leaked
• All of BP’s vast resources have been insufficient to stop the leak

If you are relying entirely on your internal IT resources to plan and manage security, you could find your company woefully unprepared to prevent or respond to a significant breech of your firewall. But there is good news, you don’t have to go it alone.

Don’t go it alone

You are probably aware of the swarms of IT people who are out of work that suddenly hung up a shingle declaring themselves as the answer to all your network security issues.  Many of them are probably quite good at what they do, but when you think about it, they have less resources than you do.

If you are on an extreme budget, you may want to thoroughly review some of these individuals credentials and hire them so your IT staff has a little back up.

On the other hand, if your data is really valuable or if you don’t think you could afford the legal issues and law suits associated with a loss of private customer data or credit card information, you will want to research and select a top notch Managed Service Provider (MSP) that specializes in network security.  A good MSP will have staff resources in the hundreds or thousands with all the latest software and hardware dedicated to protecting your network 24/7/365.

Remember, your IT staff, as efficient as they are,  is but one department fending off thousands of daily attacks.  They too, are probably using  excellent hardware and software to assist them, but unless you stop multitasking them and assign them exclusively to network security, your network is a golden invitation to the data drillers looking for a new well.

Remember the lessons learned from the terrible Gulf disaster.  Your networks are vulnerable, and all the disaster recovery plans in the world pale in comparison to the potential damage that lurks beyond your firewall.

The shores of the Gulf are a mess and the leak has yet to be plugged.  Don’t let your most valuable resource gush out of your network and flood the shores of the Internet.  Take real preventative action, expand your team of engineers, experts and IT professionals so you can rest at night knowing you actually have a what it takes to stop any leak.

David S Hayden is a freelance writer with degrees in Business, Computer Information Systems and Technology Management.

Sound Business Principles, Not Panic is the Key to Surviving this Economy

Boy, when the economy is good, everybody is a marketing genius. Seems it is impossible to fail.

We even begin to believe in our own business acumen. So we expand, take unusual risks, borrow money for expansion, relax our credit terms and so on. Whatever it takes to grow, we do because, after all it’s grow or die. . . right?

Then there is what I call the Hamlet effect. To quote Hamlet “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, But in battalions:” – William Shakespere, Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Claudius, King of Denmark at IV, V)

Well now careless optimism has come home to roost. What was once a stroke of marketing genius may be starting to look more like reckless gambling. And rest assured, the carpet baggers have shined their shoes, put on a new face and now stand outside the door offering their help.

Since the turn in the economy, has your phone been ringing off the wall or your email filled up with “free advice” to help you succeed? At every turn is there someone telling you that if only you did better SEO, made a video, had a website make over, bought this marketing plan, or whatever, you will will over your competition?

Stop. Take a breath, slow down and think for a minute. If you had the money, and time, to take advantage of everyone of these offers, would the added success even cover the cost of the services? Somethings obviously will improve your business more than others and some are probably just a waste of money.

No amount of marketing, SEO or website improvements are going to save a company that is not running on sound business principles. We had a joke at one company that seemed to engage in endless price wars. The joke was; “who cares if we sell at a loss, we will make it up on volume.”

Here are some solid strategies that you must implement if you are going to survive:

1. Get your Cash Flow In Order. Bill Douglas, CEO of EssentiaLink, has a saying “Cash Flow is Oxygen” and boy truer words were never spoken. Bill’s careful and incessant attention to cash flow has helped EssentiaLink survive and grow.
    
2. You have to understand and adhere to basic financial principles. For example, a $1000 expense is far more than a $1000 burden on your company. If your margins are 10%, you have to boost sales by $10,000 just to recover the $1000 spent and who wants to just break even. Not to mention an extra $10,000 in additional sales also puts an extra burden on cash flow. And when that happens, the cost of money comes into play. Things can get very expensive.
    
3. Not all customers are worth keeping. Some customers just don’t quite fit into the niche of what you are offering. Maybe you can never quite keep them happy, or maybe they never embrace all that you can do for them. These customers can bring down your business and image and they often consume far more of your resources than they are worth. Do some research, find a company that can serve them better and bring the two together. Your reputation will rise as a result.
    
4. Stop stepping over dollars to save dimes. In light of point 2 this might seem counter intuitive, but it’s not. If you are the main mover and shaker in your company and you are wasting time fiddling with IT, or spending 15 minutes to save a few bucks on a box of paper, the little you save can never make up for your lost time. The same is true if you are paying for a purchasing staff. If they are wasting time pricing pencils when they should be tracking down better prices on raw materials, you are losing money.
    
5. Technology is a tool to use, not the object of the game. If your technology is getting the job done and not incurring excessive maintenance cost, let it ride. remember, every dollar you spend on technology will cost you $1 / margin rate.
    
6. Focus on your core competencies. If you are an Engineering or Legal firm for example, your efforts should be to increase billable hours. So if billable people are working on IT problems, marketing, buying office supplies, consider outsourcing the non-core tasks and put people back to work on core projects. Having them do busy work while waiting for business to come in is draining your cash flow and hurting your business. Notably, sometimes this leads to a tough decision.
    
7. Get close to your customers. Before you spend a fortune on SEO or website overhauls, make sure you are speaking to your customer’s current needs. The reason they signed up a year ago, may not be the reason they are staying with you or would sign up with you today. Marketing is like fishing, if you use the wrong bait, you will get the wrong fish or nothing at all.
    
8. A million hits means nothing if you are not converting. Wouldn’t 500 highly motiveted buyers be better than 1,000,000 drive bys? Focus on revenue per hit, not hits per day.
    
9. Running a business is like writing good documentation. You want exactly enough to cover the topic, and not a word more.
    
10. Document, document, document. If you do not document your processes and business, you can suffer from the effects of vanishing technology. What do you do when your star worker leaves for another opportunity? You have a great sales proces that works, but does it stop working when you go on vacation? Document everything, so you can remain successful even when good people leave or you go on vacation. Try selling a business for what it is worth if it is not documented.

At the end of the day, good busienss practices go a long way towards securing your survival. And yes, you must market and sell. But if your house is not in order, throwing a lot of money an time at marketing will do little to help you survive in the long run.

Why Ignoring These Opportunity Costs Will Destroy Your Balance Sheet

CEOs make tough financial choices every day.   Every capital expense requires a combination of fact finding and polishing the crystal ball.  On the one hand, CEOs need to know the acquisition cost, the operating cost, depreciation cost, useful life and so on for every asset purchased.  On the other hand they need to look into their crystal ball and make some educated guesses and intuitive leaps as to what the future may hold.

Award winning entrepreneur, Bill Douglas helps his customers uncover high opportunity cost that typically get missed. He put it this way. “I see it every day.  C-Level managers get so focused on external drivers and cost cutting; they often overlook the high opportunity cost of a seemingly simple cost reduction.”

Mr. Douglas identified these very expensive cost cutting mistakes:

• Assigning routine computer/network maintenance tasks to professionals that should be working on billable projects.
• Overstaffing of highly paid IT employees for general maintenance and security tasks that their competitors have learned to outsource at reduced cost.
• Tying up working capital in computer hardware and software purchases when they could leverage the assets of a managed services provider and have scalable hardware and software to meet current demand.
• Directing highly paid purchasing staff to waste time trying to save a few bucks on non-strategic consumable items when they should be putting all their energy into reducing the cost of production supplies.

Bill Douglas is the founder and CEO of EssentiaLink and specializes in delivering managed IT and procurement BPO services to Small and Medium Businesses.  EssentiaLink has earned 13 growth awards for providing exceptional services and support.

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Who is monitoring the monitors?

Wikipedia describes Operational Intelligence (OI) as “providing real-time monitoring of business processes and activities as they are executed within computer systems, and in assisting in optimizing these activities and processes by identifying and detecting situations that correspond to interruptions and bottlenecks.”
 
I am reminded of the end of the 1998 movie Enemy of the State. Will Smith plays a lawyer whose life is turned upside down by government corruption,  monitoring and tampering after he unintentionally receives a video showing the assassination of a sitting Senator.  

His wife played by Regina King admonishes him throughout the movie about the perils of excessive government monitoring.   After the drama plays out, a Senator is on TV stating that the offending agency will be monitored more closely. 

Regina’s final line is “ya but who is going to monitor the monitors?”

Herein lies the crux of a common business problem.   Gathering Operational Intelligence (OI) is usually the providence of the IT department.   The question is, how introspective is the gathering of data?  Or in Ms. King’s words, “who is going to monitor the monitors?”

There are many vulnerabilities and sources of waste in most IT departments, including but not limited to:

·         Using highly trained (read highly paid) professionals to monitor and maintain in-house backup systems.

·         Sending tapes filled with confidential data home with employees as an offsite back up plan.

·         Buying blocks of software licenses in anticipation of future need.

·         Using expensive professionals to perform routine server and workstation maintenance that can be inexpensively outsourced.

·         Using billable hours of non-IT professionals to maintain workstations or other routine tasks.

·         Buying and Supporting Microsoft Exchange servers when those same services can be purchased for an insanely low per user, per month fee.

The list goes on, but that is not the point.  The point is, when an IT department is tasked with building Operational Intelligence, exposing IT inefficiencies often is counter intuitive.  Or as Dr. Deming so eloquently put it “a system cannot know itself.”

Unfortunately for many C-level managers, the Information Technology department is a “black box.”  Money and resources are poured in and voila’ out comes some result.   Not being able to see inside the black box makes it very difficult to evaluate operational efficiency.

With the potential savings in capital expense and the ability to have IT operations scale with business cycles, it is important that upper management has useful metrics to measure cost and effectiveness of their IT operations.

For the CEO Information Technology poses a number of challenging questions.

·         How can Information Technology best support current and future business initiatives?

·         How can we get the maximum benefit from IT at the least cost?

·         How does investment in IT stack up against other opportunities?

·         How can IT investment be held accountable to ROI initiatives?

·         How can non-productive IT maintenance expense be minimized?

·         How can capital investment in rapidly depreciating IT assets be minimized?

Answering these and other business specific questions define the relationship between CEOs and their IT departments.   Since most of what goes on in the IT underworld is invisible to CEOs, they often feel held hostage by the very Information Technology that is intended to help them.  Important financial decisions are frequently based on barely understandable jargon presented by department experts with a sense of urgency and intellectual authority.

It does not have to be this way.  It should not be this way.  CEOs should have no less discretion over decisions related to Information Technology than they do any other department or operation.

The first step for the CEO is to expect and have absolute clarity regarding IT operations.  Clarity does not mean stacks of technical documents describing every bit and byte of data, every piece of hardware, memory boards, monitors etc.  Clarity, means having useful reports that speak to their objectives.  These reports should include:

·         Backup reliability reports.  The backup reliability report should clearly outline backup system uptime and results of restoration tests.  It is not enough to believe you have a backup plan; you need to know you can depend upon it.

·         Hardware, software and IT staff utilization. 
This may or may not include slightly technical reporting regarding CPU, memory, storage and other benchmarks that will warn the CEO of impending need to invest money in hardware.  The benchmarks will also tell the CEO when IT resources are underutilized.

·         Security reports that show the effectiveness of hardware, software and procedures at keeping data secure.

This report should highlight the number of attacks fended off by their security systems, how many attacks made it past the first line of defense, how quickly the intruders were eradicated and so on.

·         Downtime/Uptime/Response time reports. 
These reports will show the overall effectiveness of their IT resources.  Anything more than a very small percentage of downtime is abnormal and very costly.  At minimum, down time may seem like a minor annoyance.  But in reality, any downtime is a disruption to the flow of business.   Employees lose track of what they are doing if not the actual files they are working on.  Frustration breeds contempt and lower rates of productivity. 

On the high end, ecommerce businesses with very active business sites have reported that they can lose over a million dollars for an hour of downtime.

The other significant piece of information in this report is the response time.  When events do happen, how quickly did the IT department notice the problem and get it fixed.

·         Periodic cost analysis.
This would be based on the number of users, the amount of hardware and so on.  The cost analysis should include Internal IT department cost, software licensing cost, hardware costs, and any other metric the CEO deems necessary to evaluate the total cost of their IT resources.

Ideally, the CEO will assign a team to determine the true cost of downtime events.   Factors entering into this estimate would include lost productivity cost based on salary and benefits, lost revenue due to missed opportunities, IT resource cost and so on. Many companies however find it equally useful to use a rough estimate of $X / hr.  For the CEO, knowing the cost of downtime enables them to more confidently assess IT expenditures and projects.

When CEOs have enough clarity with respect to information technology, much of the mystique and confusion about IT operations goes away.  Having meaningful measures of IT effectiveness enables them to make more appropriate decisions.   CEOs have the information they need to control the IT operations that once controlled them.

5 Essential Tips for Selecting a Managed Services Provider

For nearly 10 years EssentiaLink has been providing outsourced procurement and IT services to companies across the country.

During that time, CEO Bill Douglas has seen a trend.

When unemployment is high, there is dramatic increase in startup businesses selling IT services. To compete many existing IT shops are forced to start offering managed IT services they previously felt unqualified to offer before.

As more new and existing shops rush to offer Managed IT Services to grow their businesses; the more there is a need to establish good criteria for selection. Picking the wrong Managed Service Provider (MSP) can spell disaster for a business.

According to Bill Douglas, founder and CEO of EssentiaLink, “With so many layoffs, many unemployed people are opening up shop as Managed Service Providers. And now, a whole lucrative industry has spawned just to help inexperienced people market MSP services. So regardless of size, anyone can have very slick websites, post cards, and fliers. It is getting harder and harder to tell who has the requisite experience and who does not.”

EssentiaLink recommends companies take important steps to protect their business when selecting a Managed Service Provider. Here are some of Mr. Douglas’ suggestions for selecting an MSP:

1. Look well beyond the Websites. There are so many boiler plate websites and they all extol the benefits of the managed services. However the provider must be investigated.
     
2. Ask how long has the company been in business. They may be great at IT but inexperienced at running a successful business.
    
3. Ask what services they do and do not provide. Pick a company that offers the right mix of services that provides the most bang for the buck.
    
4. Ask for customer references for the company and for their MSP services.
    
5. Do not sign any agreement under pressure. Ask them to leave a copy of their Service Level Agreement (SLA). Read it carefully and then ask them to come back.

Successful businesses have enjoyed the financial benefits of outsourcing a large portion of their IT maintenance for years. Now, there are more MSP choices than ever.

Asking these and other important questions can save a company from the disaster of choosing the wrong managed services provider.

How Does Business Process Outsourcing Simplify IT Operations?

Business Process Outsourcing is a proven strategy for CEOs to simplify operations and reduce cost. 

For most companies, Information Technology is something they rely on to enable them to function as a business.  But, while IT is vitally important to their operations, it is not what they do or why they are in business.  Supporting an IT department just adds unnecessary complexity and expense.

Whether it is accounting, legal, marketing, janitorial, grounds maintenance, or IT services, BPO plays important strategic role.  Businesses simply do not have the resources, financial or otherwise, to insure they get the best professionals for no non-core tasks.  Nor do they have sufficient demand to justify entire departments to support intermittent needs.

Business Process Outsourcing gives businesses access to professionals and expertise they could not otherwise afford.  In the case where a person is wearing two hats, for example one of part-time accountant and part-time IT support person, both jobs suffer.  To do an excellent job at accounting requires the exclusion of the IT tasks.  Outsourcing IT, puts the responsibility of IT maintenance in the hands of experts that do nothing but IT maintenance.  

When IT outsourcing frees employees from maintaining IT operations, accountants, lawyers and other subject matter experts can get back to what they do best.  Similarly, dedicated IT staff can be reassigned to data mining, process development and business intelligence tasks that improve competitive position.

Properly outsourced IT simplifies IT operations by focusing on 4 key principles.

1.       The value of transforming speculative IT capital expense into variable operation expense that easily scales to fit current business needs.   Budgeting IT expense becomes a simple matter of matching the expected number of users with a known cost.

2.       The fact is, CEOs cannot effectively control their business if they cannot control IT operations.   The lifeblood of most companies is their Information Technology.  It is simply too important to relegate control of IT operations to brilliant technicians that lack the CEOs strategic perspective.

3.       Compliance issues are to businesses what icebergs are to ships.   CEOs must know their IT operations are in compliance with acceptable standards, without being bogged down in technical details. 

4.    For CEOs to control IT operations, they must have clarity.  CEOs need metrics by which to measure the effectiveness of their IT operations.  To be useful, metrics must speak the language of the CEO, not the technician.

MaintenanceFreeIT was designed around the four principles of Cost, Control, Compliance and Clarity.  Every aspect of MaintenanceFreeIT is rooted in giving CEOs a simple means by which IT operations are transformed into scalable commodities that are only consumed and expensed as needed.

 

 

Simplify Information Technology to Improve Cash Flow!

Cash Flow is king. Or, As Bill Douglas, CEO of EssentiaLink likes to put it, “Cash flow is OXYGEN!  No company can survive long without it”

In our current economic environment, managers at all levels in an organization must be part of a cash flow solution.  In particular, effective management of Information Technology (IT) resources, whether by the CEO, CIO or IT department manager, can immediately help a company’s cash flow position.

IT resources often require significant spend well in advance of proportional need.   Imagine the situation where your IT staff is over loaded, but by the same token there is not enough work to support another body.  What do you do? 

You can do nothing, you can hire a permanent employee or hire a temporary employee.  All of these solutions have pluses and minuses.  Doing nothing is very risky.  As soon as you stop maintaining your systems your company is at risk.  Even if you keep all the systems up to date, the mere fact that your are under utilizing your IT staff, is costing you opportunities. 

Hiring a permanent employee is never without its risks and expense.  Anyone that has ever hired more than a couple of people knows it is an imperfect science.  A person may appear to have all the right skills, seem to be a good fit within the organization and may appear as if they may last a while.   How many times have you thought those things only to be disappointed within months.

Temporary and contract hires are a little better.  But you still have to spend time and money to get them up to speed.  They never quite fit within the organization.  And often, if they are a great fit, you can’t afford to hire them.  Even if you do hire them, you often do so before there is a full time need for them.

Managed IT services have simplified the above options.

IT security, IT Backup and Disaster Recovery, remotely managed Servers and Workstationsno longer require on-site staff.  In fact, it is rarely cost effective to use high paid professionals for these mundane tasks.  What makes even less sense is maintaining and supporting Microsoft Exchange.

Your IT staff often comprise some of the brightest and best employees in your organization.  They are far more capable than the demands placed on them by managing unreliable back up tapes, or worrying about the endless stream of Microsoft patches.   When you relieve them of the burden of chasing viruses and stopping spam, they are free to help you with your business intelligence projects.  They can actually contribute to the bottom line instead of just draining the black ink.

In a perfect world, more cash flows into a company than out of it.  But we don’t live in perfect worlds.  In order to grow we need to hire employees and make large capital investments.  Effectively run companies are now looking at ways to minimize capital expenditures with respect to Information Technology.

The new paradigm is Information Technology as an operations expense.  Transforming IT operations from capital expense to operational expense has a number of benefits.

1. 1. Simplification.  As an operational expense, IT spend can be more easily budgeted and controlled.
   
2. IT can be a variable operational expense, not a capital expense. 
   
3. IT as an operational expense means predictable cash flow.  As a company goes through its business cycles, they don’t pay for wasted capacity. 
   
4. IT costs can be directly correlated to the actual number of users.  Financial projections are simplified and accurate. 
   
5. As IT capex goes away depreciation expense, therefore, is also be reduced and eliminated.

Maintenance Free IT, is not just a dream.  For companies that intend to survive the current financial storm, it is a necessity.  Throwing money at servers, employees and software, in advance of the business to support them, just does not make sense.  Pay as your grow is simple, practical and good for cash flow.

How to Effectively Manage IT Resources

The role of the CEO is never without challenges. Since the introduction of computers, the promise has always been that Information Technology would make the CEO’s job easier and companies more profitable. But, these benefits are not without significant costs.

What do IT departments and Teenagers have in common?

At EssentiaLink we recommend our customers look closely at managed IT services. Naturally we prefer they choose our MaintenanceFreeIT suite of services. However, there are a number of quality managed service providers available to choose from. The key is to do a little research and pick a provider based on their ability to help you reach your strategic goals.

Some of the available Managed IT services include:

• They spend your money on things you can’t understand.
• Your projects always have to wait for their pet projects.
• They make you feel you cannot possibly understand them.
• They talk in a secret language, especially when you ask them a direct question.

As CEOs wrestle with rising costs, they often feel held hostage by the very Information Technology that is intended to help them. Often Information Technology (IT) is viewed as a”black hole” that sucks up financial and other resources. Very little light is shed on how those resources are used.

“There is no single correct way to manage IT resources. The key is finding the correct blend of in-house and outsourced solutions that maximize utilization and cost reductions.”

CEOs speak their own language. ROI, ROE, EBIDA, ROA IRR, etc have great meaning to the CEO. Information Technologists also speak their own language riddled with mysterious acronyms like BDR, SaaS, DaaS, NAS, LAN, SAN and so on.

It is no surprise that CEOs often feel uncomfortable making decisions related to Information Technology. When an IT manager presents a plan to expand the department, increase spend, manage security or whatever, the CEO often takes that recommendation on faith.

Until recently, as companies planned for growth, the expansion of Information Technology often was disproportionate to the return. Cash would be tied up in equipment and staff that would be underutilized until some future date.
In today’s economy, credit is too tight, cash flow too hard to come by, and market conditions too volatile for CEOs to feel comfortable throwing money at Information Technology.

Imagine knowing ahead of time the IT cost to add a new person, a new workstation or server. No disproportionate spend as a result of crossing some mysterious threshold, just predictable spend for accurate forecasts and budgets.
Fortunately, current technonogy enables CEO’s to treat their IT spend as variable cost. So as conditions change, they can adjust their IT spend withinn 30 days without any loss of service or performance.

 

• Managed Security
• Managed Backup and disaster Recovery
• Managed Server
• Managed Workstation
• Hosted Microsoft Exchange
• Remote Software Deployment

All of these services can help CEOs effectively manage their IT resources. A secondary benefit is that CEO’s can change the focus of their existing IT staff from mundane maintenance tasks to more stretegic business development projects.

 

 

Often, some of the brightest minds in a company are wasted on routine maintenance tasks. Instead of developing Busienss Intellegence programs, they are tied down to catching viruses, fighting spam, or managing back up devices.

Another common problem is that mundane tasks only get partial attention regardless of how critical they are. Worse yet, these tasks get lost in a pile of prioritized projects and never get completed.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. For example. We have a customer that is a $100M company with hundreds of employees around the globe. All their workstations, servers, email, security back up and disaster recovery are easily managed by just 2 IT staff.

If you are concerned about cutting costs in this dynamic economy, take a little time and look into what managed IT services can do for your company.

 

MaintenanceFreeIT is a proprietary mix of managed IT services that help CEOs lower their total cost of IT operations. Becasue of it’s flexibility, MaintenanceFreeIT enables CEOs to find the ‘sweet spot’ that results in the highest and best use of their IT resources.

The Strategic IT Department

Does it seem like your IT staff spends all their time running around with the proverbial fire extinguisher; instead of working on strategic projects that help you gain more clients, satisfy your current clients, or cut costs.

Gartner, an industry research firm, estimates that up to 80% of IT resources are spent on maintaining your existing technology. While your competitors are driving business forward by responding to clients quicker, capturing more leads, and shortening their sales cycles, your IT staff is on the technology treadmill trying to outrun the machine.

Companies need to look at their IT staff as a strategic business group. Bring them in to your corporate planning sessions instead of running around with a box of Band-Aids. Most IT professionals want to help your business grow, and they do not enjoy the mundane day-to-day tasks required to maintain your network.

So, who is going to take care of the aforementioned tasks?

These tasks do not require an individual with knowledge of your business, nor does this need to be done by someone sitting at your office. IT staff at your office should be supporting line of business applications and helping create and implement a technology strategy that drives new business, increases revenues, and increases profits.

The mundane day-to-day tasks can be done better and less costly by a managed service provider, such as EssentiaLink. They can provide these services in a much more efficient way than you could if you tried purchasing all the different software packages required to automate these tasks. Even with all this software, you would still be paying a person to sit and watch the system to make sure it’s working. The managed service provider uses its economies of scale and specialization to make sure these tasks are completed much more thoroughly.

Unless your IT person is a robot, he or she will have to sleep, take sick days, and take vacations. With managed services, you do not have to worry about who is watching over your network when the IT staff needs to take off. Your systems are monitored and maintained 24x7x365.

With these tasked taken over by a managed service provider, your IT staff can now focus on the new customer relationship management system project, the accounting software upgrade project that will allow for faster receivables, or the document management system project to allow remote access to critical documents for your traveling staff.

Some of the services referenced above include, workstation maintenance, server maintenance and monitoring, security monitoring, hosted solutions (ex: Microsoft Exchange), and backup and disaster recovery.

At EssentiaLink, we offer these in our MaintenanceFreeIT suite of services.

We have seen companies regain the talents of their IT staff by outsourcing the mundane. They have less exposure to data loss, and their IT staff is much happier now that they are not sitting around waiting for the other shoe to drop.

In today’s economic struggles, it’s time to unleash the power of your technology. It’s time to let your IT staff help drive your business forward. It’s time cut your IT related energy costs. It’s time for The Strategic IT Department.

Could your business survive a disaster?

How would your company cope if you lost all the data on your network? If you think it wouldn’t be so bad, shut your servers down for an hour or two and see the chaos that ensues.

Disaster recovery isn’t sexy, but it’s one of the most important IT functions within any organization, from a one man shop to an international conglomerate.

Many times I have been called out to new clients that have just experienced some type of failure or catastrophe that requires recovering their data only to find out they were not properly backing up their data. Most businesses either (A) don’t have their data backed up like they are supposed to or (B) thought they had it backed up to tape or some other medium only to discover the tape is bad. As you can imagine, stress levels skyrocket, and wallets open widely to get back what they can.

Analysts estimate that 40% to 70% of tape backups fail when restores are attempted. Considering the cost of tape drives, tapes, and the software to back up your data, this is a horrific statistic.

How much would it cost an engineering firm if millions of dollars in drawings were lost to a failed server or a fire? Even if hard copies were available, the man hours needed to recreate those drawings could be enough to put the firm under.

Not only do you have to worry about your backup failing, you also have to worry about your tapes falling into the wrong hands. Your entire company’s data is backed up to tape if you are backing up to tape.  If your IT guy is worth his salt, he probably has you taking the tapes offsite in the event of a fire, flood, or some other disaster. The problem with taking them offsite is most the time they are taken home with an employee, which opens you up to the risk of the tape being lost or stolen.

How much would it cost your company if you lost a tape, and someone used it to get all of your clients’ social security numbers, bank account numbers, etc? How long would your clients stay with you, and how much liability would you be exposed to?

Tape is a thing of the past, and it should go the way of zip drives and floppies. Newer technologies are now available from companies like EssentiaLink that can provide continuous backups to a fixed storage device, and the data can also be sent via the internet to an offsite datacenter. All data is encrypted, so there is no exposure to theft and liability.

EssentiaLink’s MaintenanceFreeTM BDR (Backup/Disaster Recovery) service includes the hardware, software, and services to keep your network backed up and ready for any disaster. While tape backups usually only take place once a day, MaintenanceFreeTM BDR can back your servers up as frequently as every 15 minutes. In the event that your server completely dies, you can have a virtual copy of your server back up and running in minutes. Users can function as if nothing happened, and your data continues to be backed up.

If disaster would strike your building and all your data and equipment was destroyed, EssentiaLink would have a new device with the latest data delivered to any location you choose the next business day.

With MaintenanceFreeTM BDR, small and medium sized companies can now have enterprise level disaster recovery plans in place at a cost that is as good as, if not better than, tape backup systems. Having this backup will allow you to sleep better and could save your business and your job.