What does Financial Year 15/16 have in store for your business? Will you be affected by events in the Eurozone? Are South Australia’s record unemployment figures deeply furrowing your brow? Or has business never been more prosperous?

Whatever the coming months have in store you’ll need to make some decisions around your IT.

Such decisions come down to a fundamental question.

“Do you see IT as an expense to be minimised or do you see IT as a profit centre to be utilised?”

Over a few posts, we’ll look at things to consider if you’re in either camp that might influence a rethink of your current practices.

IT as an Expense or Profit Centre – Support Models

Managed Services vs Ad Hoc Support

Your business may be under contract with a Managed Services Provider (MSP) whereby all of your critical IT systems are under watchful electronic and human eyes. Managed Services provides your business with peace of mind that proactive maintenance and preventative upkeep activities are periodically undertaken. Your servers, for example, are being regularly patched with the latest updates to close-out security risks and improve stability. Resource consumption is monitored to identify trends that may require the repositioning of future plans or changes to the behaviour of software or the people using it.

Ad Hoc Support is precisely just that. When something goes wrong, you phone through to a Service Desk where your problem is addressed via some form of time and materials (T&M) rate. To facilitate this, your business might have an established working relationship with one or more IT providers.

We can think of the differences in how we might manage the servicing of our teeth, an analogy I’ve chewed on before in Do Computers Really Need Servicing?

Under Managed Services, you pay for regular visits to the dentist whereby proactive monitoring (x-rays, visual inspections) and upkeep activities (cleaning by a hygienist) help address and identify issues before they become bigger problems. This work is conducted on some form of regular schedule but, of course, costs money to do. And you still need to pay for things that need fixing – the fillings to address minor caries. So, it’s not a guarantee, rather a commitment to be proactive in the hope that this will avoid unsavoury aftertastes.

Under Ad Hoc Support, you’re only seeing a dentist when you have a gnawing toothache or when that handful of almonds becomes extra-crunchy with fragments of one of your rearmost molars. It could be an expensive and time-consuming visit. And you’ll need to find a reputable dentist because you’ve hardly ever seen one. Perhaps your friends know one. On the plus side, you may have saved a lot of money in the intervening months or years.

Why Managed Services?

The Managed Services model works well if one or more of the following resonate:

• Your business demands peace of mind where both proactive and reactive tasks are taken care of, allowing you to get on with running your business.
• Your business can’t afford major unplanned outages and wants to effectively take insurance to mitigate this risk to an acceptable level.
• Your IT environment is large, complex, and heavily customised to provide you with competitive advantage.
• Your business, and financial controller, finds comfort in predictable expenditure patterns where IT services-related costs are typically fixed from month-to-month.
• Your risk profile aligns with this model.

Why Ad Hoc Support?

The Ad Hoc Support model works well if one or more of the following resonate:

• Your business just doesn’t have the budget to spend on proactive IT. There may be many other competing priorities such as: a new office in Thargomindah; platinum sponsorship of the local underwater knitting club; a Tesla Roadster for the CEO; or more practical priorities.
• Your business employs someone who considers themselves the first line of IT defence.
• You know a trusted IT Service Desk that is responsive enough to your needs that you’re essentially getting the rapid response needed from a Managed Service Provider anyway.
• Your business doesn’t place business critical reliance on IT. For example: you can afford to be without your e-mail or documents for an hour or even days, if necessary.
• Your business trades in a market that fluctuates and therefore staffing and technology requirements must fluctuate with it. Consequently, spending a fixed amount on IT per month may seem excessive during those leaner periods.
• Your business can afford to make a major investment in time or technology to resolve a critical issue that has seemingly occurred on a whim.
• Your risk profile aligns with this model.

Depending on your business, and whether you consider IT a cost or profit centre, either model can be acceptable. In your case, there may not appear to be a clear win in either camp, although, generally speaking, larger businesses do find themselves under a Managed Services arrangement. And with some sectors of the economy seeing a decline in confidence – including a possible cascade of instability in the Eurozone – it’s prudent to consider the best approach for the months ahead.

The above advice is intended to be generalist in nature and it’s important to consider your particular situation.

Next Steps

• Share this article – who else might find this of interest?
• Start a chat at work – what model does your company use?
• Leave a comment below – what do you think?

Contact Us or phone 1300 LOFTUS (1300 563 887) to discover how the Loftus Service Desk can exceed your expectations. At Loftus, we’re happy to help.

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What does Financial Year 15/16 have in store for your business? Do you have growth plans that require financing to realise? Or perhaps you’re securing profits through internal efficiencies.

Whatever the coming months have in store, you’ll need to make some decisions around your IT.

Such decisions come down to a fundamental question.

“Do you see IT as an expense to be minimised or a profit centre to be utilised?”

Over a few posts, we’ll look at things to consider that might influence a rethink of your current practices.

It’s Easy Being Green – Green IT

Whilst Kermit the Frog once said “It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green”, the reality is that linking thoughts around technology and energy usage could save your business money.

Let’s say that you use desktop PCs for managing your daily finances, tracking customers, running your Line of Business application, and pottering around in spreadsheets. It’s a pretty predictable story.

Even with power management features enabled, a PC is still a hungry beast for energy. Especially an older one. Here’s some back of envelope calculations to ponder.

So, an average garden-variety PC and monitor uses about 497 KW of energy per year. Let’s say that your building has 20 PCs (with one monitor each) that you diligently turn off at the close of business. That’s 20 x 497 = 9,936 KW of power you’re using each year.

A thin client typically uses far less. In fact, some of the new models specify an unbelievably low two (2) Watts. So, re-running the calculations, even assuming 10 Watts (five times as much as those devices), we arrive at about 87 KW for one Thin Client and monitor. That’s 18% of the energy a PC uses.

Replacing those 20 PCs with Thin Clients could see you saving about 8,200 KW of power each year. I don’t know about your energy prices but if we assume 35 cents per KWh, this could be nearly $3,000 (or more) each year. Just from switching to Thin Clients.

Of course, switching computers off when you’re not at work could also save you money with no further effort!

There are additional benefits, though, to the Thin Client story:

• Thin Clients are typically cheaper to buy than a PC.
• Thin Clients have very few, if any, moving parts enabling them to remain in service for longer than a hot PC filled with fans and a spinning disk drive. This means that a good Thin Client will typically last twice as long – six (6) years versus three (3) for a PC.
• Thin Clients facilitate a centralised model for deploying and managing operating systems and software applications. Day-to-day IT servicing requirements can be reduced as a standardised platform can be rolled out, maintained, and periodically upgraded.

You can explore the projected savings for your business by downloading our quick and free PC vs Thin Client Calculator Excel spreadsheet.

It’s important to consider that Thin Clients aren’t for everyone, though. If you’re undertaking a lot of graphics-intensive work, such as drafting CAD drawings, manipulating GIS maps, or artistic pursuits, then you’re better off with a PC or Mac.

But for most of us in the corporate world, a Thin Client could be just the ticket to lowering maintenance costs, improving productivity, reducing your power bill, and doing your bit for the environment.

That sounds like wins for everyone to me.

Next Steps

• Share this article – who else might find this of interest?
• Start a chat at work – how does your company view IT?
• Leave a comment below – what do you think?

Contact Us or phone 1300 LOFTUS (1300 563 887) to discover how Loftus can help maximise your IT return on investment. We make complex simple and beautiful.

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The answer is: they won’t! Unless at least one of them can change their thinking.

Seismometers have already registered unequivocal rumblings. The scenario where the IT Manager, or Chief Information Officer (CIO), is relegated to reporting to the CFO. In the very near future, a tectonic shift is likely to occur and the traditional IT Manager role will be subducted completely.

Almost certainly long before we see Marty McFly on a Hoverboard.

I know, it stings like a Band-Aid being wantonly torn from an excessively hirsute arm. But someone had to say it so that we can prepare for the approaching extinction level event. How, then, do we prepare?

Three Tips for the IT Manager of 2017

Here’s three tips for the IT Manager of AD 2017.

1. Lost in Translation.

   “I just feel so alone, even when I’m surrounded by other people.”

   Not everyone on the Executive Team speaks “geek”. They do speak “business”, though. Quite honestly, your C-level would rather root canal treatment than the debilitating waves of nausea that come from hearing your diatribe about VMs, log shipping, iSCSI enabled data storage, and megabits per second.

   What they want to know is how much time – hence productivity and income – is lost reinstating business activities if a fire converts your office to charcoal, and what can be done to mitigate said risk to an acceptable degree.

   You didn’t ask how long your business could accept being off the air before devising your fiendishly expensive technological terror of a Disaster Recovery plan? The difference could be an order of magnitude in cost. That’s not an endearing way to relax those purse strings.

   Any time you communicate internally it must be business and outcomes focused. Relish your job as the primary translator of “geek” to “business” and, where necessary, back again.

2. A Simple Plan.

   “We don’t have anything in common, me and him, except maybe our last name.”

   It’s not the end of the world. Yet.

   It’s been said that Steve Jobs hewed a clandestine four-year plan. Whether this was a prodigious blueprint for Apple’s future is conjecture but a plan is a plan.

   You should be marching to the drum of your company’s overall business plan. Ask sensible questions to clarify aspects of it. Then your personal objective should be to foster relationships with external IT firms that share their knowledge with you and your company. Make sure you’ve configured your business to derive all the technology sustenance it needs to thrive in the years ahead.

   By doing so, your legacy will be well lauded.

3. Take the Money and Run.

   “Do you know if it’s raining outside?”

   With some IT services relegated to the Cloud and the remainder directed by some rather intelligent tin tinkering professionals, why are you still on the payroll?

   I’m sure your CFO can handle all the contractual arrangements from here on. If they find themselves in a quandary, someone will oblige. Perhaps the contact details on contract approvals will be a guiding beacon.

   2017 could be your last year so it’s time to re-cogitate, offer value, and generate GDP for the country. Or fritter away your hours on YouTube and your over provisioned home Internet. Your choice.

Three Tips for the CFO of 2017

Here’s three tips for the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of AD 2017.

1. Executive Decision.

   “That was a very brave thing to do.”

   IT needs proper representation at the Board Room table. Strategic and innovative IT is the best way to turn that technology money pit from a cost centre to a profit centre.

   Clarify both the company’s objectives and your personal goals with your IT Manager. In such discussions, invite options for paths forward. Options are the corrective lenses that your IT Manager can utilise to focus on possible solutions in support of your company’s plan. Naturally, you’ll be seeking an analysis of costs, benefits and risks within each option so make that known at the outset.

   IT gobbledygook may rear its head so politely repeal such language and maintain a steady-hand on the business language tiller. In doing so, your IT Manager will be furnished to have an enhanced conversation with external trusted IT advisors that can help do the heavy lifting.

   When you both reconvene, you’ll be poised with options and knowledge to make a superior executive decision.

2. Dial I for IT Support.

   “How long have you known this?”

   Even if you’ve taken flight to the Cloud, you still need some form of computing device on your desk. You’ll also require networking components and reliable Internet connectivity. Just who is supporting that, ensuring it’s all running as smooth as silk?

   Unfortunately, machines don’t run themselves. Amongst sudden other things, your IT Manager – or an external service provider – should be diligently patching operating systems, antivirus software, and ensuring that hardware is serviced and renewed periodically.

   The last thing you want is a blunt statement that says: “All of our hardware and software is out of date, out of support, and needs to be replaced.” How much will that cost? And how long have we known this was coming?

3. It’s a Wonderful Life.

   “Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s [woman's] life touches so many other lives. When [s]he isn’t around [s]he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t [s]he?”

   Don’t shunt IT towards the tail end of your priorities. Some worthy advice on data analytics, for example, will undoubtedly provide you with greater business insights than could otherwise be achieved with pivot tables in Excel.

   DuPont analysis, accrual accounting, and P&L sheets are here for the long haul and so is IT in all shapes, sizes, and forms. Embrace and leverage technology to help your business thrive.

   Especially, before your IT Manager leaves that awful hole in your technological capabilities.

Of course, this might not be reality at all. But time will tell. Now, where’s the keys to my flying DeLorean?

Three ways you can apply this information now

• Share this article – who else might find this of interest?
• Start a conversation at work – how has your company found solace?
• Contact Us – let’s get the conversation going!

Contact Us or phone 1300 LOFTUS (1300 563 887) to discover how we can help your business leverage its investment in IT.

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There’s something most of us use regularly that requires periodic servicing. If you said the A to B ambulatory machine – the motor car – that’s a perfectly satisfactory example but for something completely different, I’m going to say “teeth”!

Like our cars, teeth and gums require periodic inspections and servicing. By allowing dental professionals to conduct those preventative and minor restorative tasks, we are insuring against a major and time-consuming expense later down the line. The fillings now instead of root canals later. The new crown today instead of a barbaric teeth extraction in two years. You get the drill, if you’ll excuse the pun.

Do Computers Really Need Servicing?

Subtitle: Is Your IT Sustainable?

Our Information Technology – as in servers, software, and stuff – is a mandatory platform from which we participate in the modern economy. But some of us just use it with scant thought to any preventative or proactive maintenance. This could be because it has historically worked so well that we have simply not needed to draw it to our conscious thoughts. Servers have blinked LEDs and hummed away for years. Storage arrays have diligently kept data safe. Network and Internet connectivity has rarely had a glitch. If we’ve been that lucky, and sometimes you can actually be that lucky, it would seem a waste of money to monitor and maintain.

If you never saw a dentist you’re more than likely to be in for a shock when you did. Flossing might have really helped your gum line. Had you visited earlier those root canals on your furthermost molars wouldn’t be on the agenda. And, sorry, but the third tooth in quadrant two has got to go – you’ll get used to your funky new smile.

Just like teeth, then, sustainable IT requires an allocation of funds towards servicing activities, upkeep, and planning for the future.

You could argue that adult teeth are “fit for life” whereas computers aren’t. That’s true, to a degree, and so perhaps my analogy doesn’t wash. I know of some great mainframe systems, though, that are still running practically perfectly in every way. Just like Mary Poppins. I also know of software that has been in use longer than The Simpsons has been on TV. For this to even be possible, proactive maintenance has been the critical lynch-pin to ongoing success.

In the golden age of mainframe computing, during the 1950s and 60s, technicians in white lab coats diligently replaced vacuum tubes and, quite literally, removed moths and other insects nestled in their warming glow. The term “debugging” was coined. It was an era when large conglomerates had access to just one computer that was not properly understood even if it assisted in delivering a competitive advantage. Rapidly calculating drag coefficients for new car designs, the molecular makeup of chemical compounds, the orbits of spacecraft, the supposed relationship between stock market commodities. That sort of thing.

Somewhat perversely – perhaps because the capital investment and physical footprint was so enormous – the swinging 60s was a time when greater emphasis was placed on maintenance even though we now actually almost exclusively rely on computing power for absolutely everything we professionally do. An inaccessible web site could drive customers elsewhere. A knackered hard drive could bring an assembly line to a stand-still. A flipped out ticketing database may prevent planes from departing the gate. Losing access to patient records could mean medications and doses become a game of roulette. Or worse.

I’m in the industry. I’m biased. But it just makes good business sense to me that you would get your IT – even if it’s in the Cloud – on to some form of maintenance or support agreement. Especially for all that business critical stuff, some of which you might not actually know is a weak link in your technology chain. Alternately, you could squirrel cash away in a pink piggy bank for the day your teeth do need major work. For my money, though, that six monthly visit to the hygienist doesn’t sound so bad after all.

What do you think? Is your business on an IT support contract? Do you see it as valuable? What would it need to do to be more valuable?

I’d love to hear from you, so let’s get the conversation going.

Contact Us or phone 1300 LOFTUS (1300 563 887) to start discussing cost-effective management of your IT.

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Big Data. It’s certainty a trendy term but how can a small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) ‘do’ it?

We, the good people of Earth, create the equivalent of over 200 billion two-hour HD movies each and every day. It’s all generated through our human-electronic machine interactions – whether for business or pleasure. Everything ranging from the minutes of the last Board Meeting through to your Friday night beer-goggled selfie is stored and indexed somewhere. ^[1]

To borrow from Neil Young, it seems that data, like rust, never sleeps.

Yet, in a business context, unless we’re a bank or supermarket squirreling away growing mountains of rapid-fire transactional data, what we and our work colleagues create is usually more manageable. Even if it is still amassing every day.

Big Data for Small Business

Big Data has been said to be characterised by volume, velocity and variety. ^[2] In an SME Big Data is probably best characterised by customers, commerce and capital. Every Australian business, whether selling legal services or lipsticks, healthcare or hotel rooms, collects data related to its customers, sales of products or services, and financial (cash-related) movements.

To my reckoning, then, Big Data at an SME level is about drawing insight from what you have on customers, commerce and capital. And augmenting this with other data, including what you don’t have.

Insight can be derived from any data set, especially when combined with something else that you can beg, borrow, or steal.

Crucially, Big Data for SMEs is therefore more a way of thinking than it is spending wheelbarrows of cash on some snazzy software that you hope will automagically and potently leave you breathless with clarity.

Here’s a story.

Well over ten years ago, when I had a bit more hair, I was involved with a project to determine the underlying cause of premature failures in water and sewerage pipes for a Local Government Authority.

We had textual data about the pipes, their material and age, coded with unique identifiers. We had textual data on the types of failures, recorded by house number and street name. And we had a Geographic Information System (GIS) map with a layer that shared the unique pipe identifiers.

So, we geocoded the failure data to a new map layer then used a spatial join to identify the closest pipe. Naturally there were exceptions and these were tidied up manually with minimal fuss. We then obtained soil information from a surveyor as well as temperature and rainfall averages from the Bureau of Meteorology. Conflating all this data together provided the Eureka moment that related cause and effect.

Once an elm tree had penetrated a vitreous clay (enamel) sewer pipe, any treatment – including physical root removal or herbicide – would last almost exactly one year before the roots returned. Burst water mains were the result of fitting failures on plastic pipes that occurred seasonally and could be attributed to a particular contractor who worked in one area of the city.

None of this would have been apparent had we not coalesced data sources within the Council together with relevant and readily available data living outside of it.

So, how do you reach an epiphany moment staring at your disparate facts and figures? Sure, you can buy an application that purports to be an automatic seer of insights. But I reckon, this comes down to someone thinking about:

• What you have;
• What sorts of business questions you have;
• How to join all the dots; and
• How to lean on tried and true statistical techniques to expose hidden insights.

If you undertake the above first, then you will be embarking on a journey that facilitates the creation of models to unlock the hidden secrets within your data and postulate analytical insights. Your goal, then, is to manage that journey so that you can periodically refresh your models with the latest data yourself, even if you need some external help getting to that point first.

What do you think? Have I got it all wrong? Is Big Data really about letting Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 Neural Net “Learning Computer” wreak havoc on our data and spit something out? Perhaps my experience of all those years ago was a Rise of the Machines and it’s apt we’re now seeing a Genisys.

Next Steps

• Share this article – who else might find this of interest?
• Start a chat at work – how is your company drawing insights from data?
• Leave a comment below – what do you think?

Contact Us or phone 1300 LOFTUS (1300 563 887) to discover how the Loftus team can help you make sound decisions by revealing the secrets locked within your company’s data.

^[1] IBM. 2015. What is big data? [ONLINE]

Available at: http://goo.gl/zfLhEP.

[Accessed 23 April 15].

^[2] IBM. 2012. Demystifying Big Data. [ONLINE]

Available at: http://goo.gl/lHdypz.

[Accessed 23 April 15].

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2016 is shaping up to be a mammoth year for Microsoft. At the very least as far as version numbering is concerned.

If all goes to plan, by this time next year, we’re likely to see an impressive cache of new and reworked business products out of Washington State under the leadership of Satya Nadella.

Whilst those of us in the technical services industry will embrace, adopt and cast our (sometimes polarising) opinions, businesses usually need compelling reasons to upgrade.

So, let’s take a super-quick snapshot of what’s coming up and what it means.

Microsoft’s Big Year – 2016

“Our industry does not respect tradition – it only respects innovation.”
– Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO.

Windows 10

• What: You may have already seen a “Get Windows 10” icon appear in your system tray. The latest version of the Windows operating system should actually arrive by the end of August this year. The new Windows attempts to deliver what Windows 8 and 8.1 partially succeeded in accomplishing: unifying PCs, laptops, tablets, and Xboxes with a common touch-screen enabled interface.
• Why You Need It: Apparently one in four of the world’s PCs are still running the wholly unsupported – therefore increasingly unsecured and vulnerable – Windows XP. So, Windows 10 could be a catalyst to wrench the last vestiges of XP from your business. If you’re making such a jump, though, you will need to invest some time and energy into coaching your users on how to use the Metro interface.
• Cost: It will be free for existing users of Windows 7 and 8.1. Taking a leaf from the Apple tree, this clever strategy neatly eliminates the most common objection to upgrades: cost. But it’s only free for the first year. After that what will the ongoing fees be? We don’t know, yet, but some form of price was leaked yesterday at $USD 109.99.
• One New Feature: Microsoft’s ‘Siri’ inspired personal assistant, called ‘Cortana’, will enable you to interact with your computer just by talking to it. On first glance, whether this is super helpful for those chained to a desk in an office buzzing with noisy co-workers remains to be seen. More importantly, and less often stated though, Cortana promises to improve searching capabilities across content in your own files and devices as well as the Internet. As a virtual assistant, this could actually prove rather useful.

Office 2016

• What: Office 2016 is the latest version of Microsoft’s productivity suite that includes Word and Excel.
• Why You Need It: With mainstream support for Office 2010 ending later this year, it’s prudent to consider your next moves and whether this involves adopting the Cloud variant, Office 365.
• Cost: Apparently, it will be free to users of mobile devices and small tablets where it will run with some limitations. For desktop environments, the price is likely to be on par with Office 2013 (which was typically $AUD 599 for the Professional edition).
• One New Feature: Office 2016 introduces a mobile optimised version that will make it easier to view and manipulate documents on smaller screens.

SharePoint 2016

• What: SharePoint 2016, the next on premise release of Microsoft’s platform for collaboration.
• Why You Need It: SharePoint 2016 On-Premises introduces support for Microsoft’s “Cloud accelerated experiences” as the company acknowledges that not all data is suitable for SharePoint Online. For example, your business may be bound by Privacy Act restrictions that prevent you from adopting a holistic Cloud delivered environment. Perhaps you have invested in development activities that might be costly (in terms of time and money) to migrate. The good news is that Microsoft is making a commitment to on premise, Cloud and hybrid environments into the future. Also, SharePoint 2016 won’t gobble up even more hardware, so that’s a welcome bonus.
• Cost: Microsoft has not released pricing yet however it’s likely to be on par with SharePoint 2013 licencing.
• One New Feature: The patching process has been streamlined consolidating what can be dozens of patches into two or three that can be applied whilst users are still accessing the environment. This avoids patches being inadvertently applied with other Windows Operating System patches and potentially compromising the stability of a customised environment.

In future posts, we’ll talk more about each of the upcoming Microsoft offerings and how your business can best leverage them.

Next Steps

• Share this article – who else might find this of interest?
• Start a chat at work – is your company loving or loathing upgrades?
• Leave a comment below – what do you think?

Contact Us or phone 1300 LOFTUS (1300 563 887) to discover how we can help determine how and when to upgrade your IT environment and poise it for tomorrow’s business.

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It has to be said: All website hosting companies are equal. Some are more equal than others.

Just about every company has an Internet presence in the form of a website. Alongside e-mail, it’s the primary means by which businesses communicate sight unseen.

There’s a veritable sea of hands out there – all grasping at a share of your wallet to host your website. Some do it for pocket change. Others cost orders of magnitude more. You can even do it yourself if you’re game.

So, let’s explore five things to cross-examine when seeking a home for your company’s website.

Animal Farm and Website Hosting Services

1. Security.

   One of the easiest ways for a burglar to physically enter your business is by jemmying the front door or a window. They rarely drill through brick or excavate from underneath. Your website is analogous to the front door. It’s the easiest entry point. What will someone find if they break in?

   If your website is hosted externally, any such uninvited guests should be presented with a brick wall directly behind your front door. There should really be nowhere else to go. If your website is sitting on your own computers, what happens once an Internet burglar breaks in? They potentially have access to your network. What information can they see, precious files can they delete, or trade secrets can they steal?

   Your website should ideally be hosted in its own dedicated Linux-based environment that is regularly patched to the latest version. Good hosting companies individually isolate the websites of all their customers from each other. This means that if something inadvertently goes wrong with one of them, it doesn’t open the floodgates to all and sundry.

   If your website uses WordPress or other web publishing software then you will need to periodically patch it – or arrange for the patching to be done for you – to overcome any security exploits as they are recognised.

2. Bandwidth – your Internet link.

   Let’s say you’re about to launch a new product on your website. This thing is going to be huge. You’re expecting a lot of hits: clicking through your product gallery; viewing your funky video clip; and downloading the manual. There could be 10s or even 100s of people on your site at any one time.

   If you’re hosting externally, what capacity Internet connection does the hosting company have?

   Every time someone visits your website they download data. A bit for the text, more for images, a lot for videos. You actually have to pay for that in two ways: its physical ones and zeros storage; and data that’s transmitted out whenever someone visits your site.

   As you can imagine, this can add up – quickly if you’ve got a ripper of a popular site. If you’ve gone the really cheap option with your web hosting contract, you might just find that you pay a lot for it once a certain threshold is reached. That could hurt.

   If you’re hosting within the walls of your office, how is your Internet link going to cope with this? What happens if Bill needs to host a Skype conference with your sales team? Or Jane needs to submit your quarterly tax obligations? Who wins and who loses?

3. Reliability and redundancy.

   In a perfect world your website would be available 100% of the time. And your soufflé would always rise. But computers and humans aren’t infallible.

   The best IT service providers know this and make sure there is redundancy through all the circuits and wires. But there’s also floods, fires and pestilence to potentially contend with.

   In contract terms, all this rolls down into a solitary figure called “uptime”. The real business grade players talk numbers like 98%, 99%, 99.9%. No one can guarantee 100% – be wary of that. Most have lots of clauses about force majeure that could mean you’ll be off the air in the event that someone sneezes. So, beware the rubbery numbers.

   If you like the idea of your website being haphazardly available throughout the week then, sure, go ahead and host it yourself. Or on the 2004 vintage desktop computer in your friend’s kitchen closet.

   But if you want your customers to have it when they want it, you’ll need to find a reputable hosting company with all the right sounding reliability and redundancy babble.

4. Backups.

   Backups are a regular theme in these posts. It’s because they’re never needed until you critically need them – that’s what makes them so important!

   If you’re still contemplating hosting your website yourself, then you need to take backups. If your web designer accidentally deletes something important, you’ll need it back. They’re not necessarily clumsy, this stuff just happens.

   Is your hosting company taking backups? How often? How far back do they go? What’s the general turn-around time for restoration? All sensible questions to think of.

5. Domain registration and DNS hosting.

   Your website has an address that looks something like: www.loftusit.com.au. The bit after the “www”, in this case, is called the domain. You need to periodically pay for your domain. Someone will need to keep tabs on that for you.

   Whilst the Internet appears to work by human readable names, like the aforementioned www.loftusit.com.au, it actually uses addresses that look like phone numbers – and new addresses are even funkier with hexadecimal digits.

   This phonebook style translation is performed as part of the Domain Name System (DNS) and happens whenever you visit a website.

   For your website to be accessible via its human-friendly name, DNS entries need to be created, periodically adjusted, and hosted. Someone has to oversee this and make your particular entries available for the phonebooks of the Internet to lookup.

   If you’re a guru with all this stuff, you might do it yourself. Otherwise, a web hosting company or managed service provider is probably looking after it. But you do need to check and make sure that it is done so redundantly in case the primary server goes offline.

As we can see, by examining the above, all website hosting companies are, in fact, not going to be equal.

When you boil it all down, choosing where to host your website is both easy and hard. It’s easy if you use a reputable company and it’s hard if you’re a skinflint expecting silver service.

Loftus tailors website hosting to your exacting needs utilising Data Centre technology. Whether your business has one or many sites, we help to ensure that your customers can reliably find you.

Contact Us or phone 1300 LOFTUS (1300 563 887) to discover how.

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Although conducted back in 2013, the Connected Workplace survey reported that 83% of employees in businesses with flexible technology policies reported job satisfaction opposed to 62% for businesses without such policies. ^[1]

By allowing your employees to bring their own smartphones, tablets and laptops to work, you’re able to better facilitate better collaboration and productivity. Furthermore, by introducing telework (work from home) opportunities, you’re likely to raise job satisfaction to even higher levels.

There are some policy-related and technical considerations to make before allowing everyone’s favourite gadget through your doors. Loftus has prepared the following list, titled Flexible Technology – 5 Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Issues, that raises a handful of factors to consider when crafting your own policy.

Flexible Technology – 5 Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Issues

1. What devices will you allow?

   On the surface, it seems like a no-brainer. But what will you allow to be brought to your workplace? Is it any and all smartphones? Just iPhones or just Androids? What about tablets and laptops?

   By allowing any and every device, you might find yourself needing to provide IT support (or seek external advice) when someone can’t check their work e-mail, see their calendar, or open a document. Any productivity gains might be lost in frustrated attempts to get devices harmonising with your workplace. If you can’t get it working, who has final call over “formatting” the device and starting again?

2. What operating system(s) will you support?

   An Apple Mac laptop in a business that exclusively uses Microsoft Windows-based PCs might not be able to run your core Line of Business application. But perhaps the application will run smoothly on both Macs and PCs. It’s worth looking at your application software, or contacting your vendor, to see what platforms it will run on. In doing so, you should also need to check your licencing to make sure you’re compliant.

3. What level of access will you grant?

   Security should be foremost in mind. How will you stop employees loading sensitive company data onto their own laptop, tablet or phone? What if they lose that device? The first step is to ensure that all devices are protected via a password – go beyond the simple unlock pin found on many smartphones. You may also need to introduce a policy that enables you to remotely wipe any phone that is lost or stolen.

   It’s also worth implementing “office” and “guest” networks to allow visitors Internet access and/or basic systems access but prevent them from unauthorised access to company information.

   Furthermore, if you’re providing Remote Desktop Services (RDS) access, for staff to work from home, how much of your network and systems should they be allowed to access? How will you log and police this?

4. What happens when an employee leaves?

   When an employee leaves your business, what happens to their device? Do you need to inspect it to make sure that any company-related data has been permanently deleted? Or do you need to have the right to “format” it?

5. What about statutory regulations that apply to your business?

   Is your organisation bound by the Privacy Act or other legislation that prevents you from collecting, storing or disclosing of personal information? If so, a BYOD policy may be a moot point.

In preparing your workplace for a flexible technology policy that supports Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), it’s important to get the right advice.

Loftus team members are Microsoft and Cisco Networking Academy certified professionals that can help by making sure your environment is secure and auditable without sacrificing flexibility.

Loftus can help configure and secure a flexible IT environment for you and your staff. Contact Us or phone 1300 LOFTUS (1300 563 887) to discover how.

^[1] Deloitte Access Economics. 2013. The Connected Workplace. [ONLINE]
Available at: http://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/au/Documents/finance/deloitte-au-fas-connected-workplace-2013-240914.pdf.
[Accessed 23 March 15].

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It sounds paradoxical but SharePoint is, quite simply, a platform for collaboration that’s accessible via your web browser. The “platform” bit is rather important because it means that you’ve got a solid foundation to build upon.

What can SharePoint be used for?

Loftus has prepared a list, titled 9 Ways to Leverage SharePoint, to offer a few suggestions for how your business could leverage SharePoint and build upon the stable footing it provides.

Crucially, before jumping into the list, it’s important to acknowledge that SharePoint won’t be the answer for absolutely everything. That’s certainly an almost impossible ask of any software application.

What SharePoint should do is help your business in a number of ways, within one package. Sure, some companies enjoy using best-of-breed applications for everything that they do. Doing so will get you closer to your business goals but may come at the expense of initial licencing costs, annual maintenance fees, training, ongoing support contracts, and possible integration issues. These few matters may actually outweigh any incremental business benefits you’ve otherwise gained.

“Creative thinking may mean simply the realization that there’s no particular virtue in doing things the way they have always been done.” – Davey Coleman

With an open mind, then, let’s look at several high-level suggestions for what SharePoint can be used for.

9 Ways to Leverage SharePoint

1. Electronic forms and workflow to reduce paperwork.

   Many businesses have paper-based processes for leave applications, expense claims, and even purchase orders. You know the drill: Someone fills in a form then leaves it on someone else’s desk to be approved and then given to someone else.

   Creating forms and workflow in SharePoint will allow you to do all that and more, electronically. What’s more, an electronic form doesn’t get lost or thrown out therefore remains a permanent record within your business.

2. Contact details and lists.

   We all have lists of contacts with phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Frequently used ones might be on your phone, others in Outlook, and some mishmash of both probably exists in your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Have you centralised your contacts?

   SharePoint can be used as the source of truth for all your customer contact details and list information used across your business. It can act as a one-stop place for all lists – including the fun stuff like birthdays, anniversaries and takeaway menus – presented in a way that everyone can readily access and keep up-to-date. Even on their mobile devices.

   You can also use list functionality to communicate tasks and alerts to save employees opening multiple systems to see what their day looks like.

3. Document control and management.

   If your business has staff that are on the road, work from home, or work in satellite offices, you’ll probably face the challenge of controlling documents at some point.

   Do you e-mail a Word or Excel file back and forth, like a tennis match, whilst you slog away on it with someone else? Maybe you’re collaborating with Dropbox or Google Drive. They’re better but what about something that properly integrates with Word and Excel (as well as other Office applications) allowing you to seamlessly collaborate, version and branch your documents?

   SharePoint is often deployed to assist in the organisation, management and control of documents. In a way, it’s kind of “bread and butter” SharePoint stuff. It’s good at that. And it’s tightly integrated with the Microsoft Office suite.

4. Searching, searching, searching.

   You need to find things. These things might be documents, people, and media. For the web, there’s Google. For your business, there’s SharePoint.

   With a bit of expert help, SharePoint allows you a large degree of freedom for how you decide its search capability will be configured. When done well, you’ll get a real powerhouse for searching. In addition to the usual stuff, SharePoint’s search can: phonetically look up names; find skills in your business to assign to a project based on expertise; provide you with thumbnails and previews of many different file formats; make suggestions for similar content you might be looking for.

5. Business Intelligence – Reporting.

   As SharePoint is a web-based platform, using it for your intranet means that everyone in your business can readily access it.

   SharePoint is a great enabler to bust reporting out of silos and share insights with your whole business. Key information from your Line of Business software applications can be presented in SharePoint to minimise duplicated effort and disruptions caused by context switching between applications.

   Sure, you might not make sensitive financial data available to everyone – this can be controlled by security permissions – but you can certainly use it to communicate sales orders relative to targets, billable work by division, customer complaints, product returns, etc – the sort of stuff that is meaningful to everyone in your company.

6. Blogs.

   How do you communicate with your staff? Do you send out boring “all staff” e-mails when you could be writing a weekly blog that incorporates multimedia (images, sounds, videos) and encourages discussion by allowing comments to be made? Did I also mention that it would also be searchable?

7. Who’s in and who’s out?

   We’ve all glanced at an archaic “who’s in and out” peg board whilst waiting in the reception area of a company.

   With SharePoint, by drawing data from your Microsoft-based e-mail system, you can automatically update a dashboard that shows staff that are unavailable or at their desk. If you’re using forms workflows (mentioned earlier) to manage leave requests, SharePoint can automatically update the “who’s in and out” dashboard.

   All staff, especially your gracious receptionists, will be able to better direct visitors and phone calls by knowing where someone is at a glance.

8. Policies and Procedures or Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).

   Wouldn’t it be great if all your policies, procedures and processes were in one place where a new employee could see them? Wouldn’t it also be great if those that are “part of the furniture” could easily remind themselves of how to exit the building in an emergency? (Arms flailing wildly is always one option.)

   You could reduce the amount of time your HR and other team members spend answering questions by sharing this searchable knowledge using SharePoint. Once you make an update to a document, the old version can still be available if it’s needed.

9. All those spreadsheets and one-of-a-kind databases.

   Let’s say you have to create a basic asset register for your fleet of company vehicles. How would you normally do this? You could: select an off-the-shelf product; build your own; or do something quick and easy in Excel or Access. If you’re in the latter camp, it’s not really practical to have multiple people potentially reading or updating spreadsheets or Access databases simultaneously.

   These bespoke little helper inventions lend themselves to receiving a proper home within SharePoint where everyone can see them and use them. Automatic data validation – that ensures a vehicle’s registration is entered, for example – can be readily implemented. Security around who can make changes can also be incorporated. You could even then extend the concept of the aforementioned vehicle asset register to also become a full vehicle booking system.

   It’s worth blowing the dust off all those Excel sheets and Access databases and considering whether they might be ripe to bring into the world of SharePoint.

The above advice is intended to be generalist in nature. Every business varies in terms of complexity, risk profile, and budget, not to mention industry type and product offering. Therefore, it’s important to evaluate your specific situation.

Next Steps

• Share this article – who else might find this of interest?
• Start a conversation at work – what’s your SharePoint used for?
• Contact Us – let’s get the conversation going!

IT should support your business rather than drive it.

Consequently, our business exists to, firstly, understand yours and, then, plan how IT can be utilised to drive a proper Return on Investment (ROI).

The Loftus SharePoint team has designed and built environments for government agencies and private sector businesses that have varying goals and requirements.

Contact Us or phone 1300 LOFTUS (1300 563 887) to discover how we can help implement the optimum SharePoint solution for your business.

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I’m serious. It’s happened. And it seems to be running rampant in the wild yet again.

CryptoLocker is the computer version of Rabies. There’s a vaccine and with precaution you should never be infected. But if your computer system is exposed, it’s pernicious, there’s simply no going back.

It’s not my intention to sound alarmist but, without steadfast vigilance, your computer files might very well become permanently unreadable.

CryptoLocker Virus or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being Vigilant

1. Anatomy.

   The CryptoLocker strain of viruses works as follows.

   Within minutes of infection, files on your computer and network are encrypted. This is akin to someone using a WWII Enigma code machine to scramble your documents, spreadsheets, database files, and images and then destroy the originals. Without knowing the settings of the Enigma machine, how will you ever decipher your content? You can’t.

   CryptoLocker viruses are known as Ransomware because they tease of possible recovery. This is only possible by paying the extortionist creators to surrender their Enigma settings. Don’t bother, you’re actually admitting defeat to them – and they might just look for other ways into your business having learned who you are. You’ve got more urgent things to do now. Like treatment and future prevention.

2. Treatment.

   You’ll need to remove the infection then resort to your last known good backup. If that last backup was “never” it’s game over, I’m afraid.

   This will place your backup strategy under the most intense of scrutiny. Do you have a usable backup that is 24 hours old or even younger? Is your backup isolated from the network so that it too isn’t compromised?

3. Prevention.

   Naturally, prevention is less agonising than treatment.

   You’ll need two things:

   Firstly, an up-to-date virus scanner (antivirus software) that will, hopefully, halt future infections before they take hold. Your antivirus software needs to have its “real-time protection” setting enabled.

   Secondly, and most importantly, you and your colleagues need to be alert and watchful humans. Be e-mail vigilante cops. Don’t open attachments or follow links in e-mails from people you don’t know. Even if it’s a sender you trust, if you suspect an e-mail isn’t genuine, you’re almost certainly going to be correct. Destroy all suspicious messages.

   Unfortunately, e-mails from a bank, the Tax Office, Australia Post, or the Federal Police might appear genuine. They’re fake.

   If such a message has an attachment, just don’t open it. If it has a link, just don’t click it. Phone the organisation to confirm the legitimacy of any message if you have an inkling it might actually be legitimate.

   Otherwise delete and breathe a sigh of relief that you may have just stopped a heinous crime from taking place within the ones and zeros that make up your digital workplace.

The above advice is intended to be generalist in nature. Every business varies in terms of computing environment. Therefore, it’s important to consider your specific situation.

Three ways you can apply this information now

• Share this article – who else might find this of interest?
• Start a conversation at work – how is your company being vigilant?
• Contact Us – how can we help your business?

You might like to consult 7 Steps to Avoid Computer Virus Infections and 6 Questions to Ask of Your Data Backups for more tips.

Contact Us or phone 1300 LOFTUS (1300 563 887) to discover how the Loftus team can help secure your business and protect your data.

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