This article is specifically tailored to small businesses.  You've poured your money, sweat, blood and tears into making you business a success, but every time the mail arrives you dread seeing another bill from the people that provide you IT support on an hourly basis.  Maybe this month you used 10 hours or maybe 50 hours.  You remember seeing someone at your office working on things but just can't recall how much time was spent on the computers.  After all, you were busy doing your primary job, running and growing your business.

What if you could get 30 years of combined expertise in running company's IT departments at a stable monthly rate?  You outsource your entire IT needs, and pay only a fraction of the costs of hiring a full time employee.  Each month, your bill is exactly the same as the last.  

I feel the stress rolling off your shoulders.  You have reached a state of knowing no matter how messed up your software and network get, you will pay the same money each month to get it fixed.  If this is something you really want, call Strickland Networks today.  (817) 224-2020

Biggest problem with the great cloud migration: getting there.  

I am a HUGE fan of moving what makes sense for your business to the cloud and letting others worry about the maintenance and upkeep of equipment and software.  But here's the catch, what happens to the average company when their Internet goes down?  You email, you backups, your accounting software, and everything else that you have trusted to be moved to the cloud is now inaccessible.  Do you send all your employees home and have them work there?  Can you trust your employees to not just goof of the rest of the day?  

How to minimize your risks:

Get redundant Internet!  Don't be lazy about it and buy two T1 lines from the same vendor, because those will most likely both go down at the same time.  Buy a backup DSL or cable line into your office.  It will be worth the minimal monthly investment.  

Buy a router / firewall that can handle it.  We love SonicWALL products at Strickland Networks.  Most of the models automatically handle dual Internet connections.  Meaning if the primary is unavailable, outbound traffic is automatically sent through the second connection.  But it gets better, many models you can add a high availability unit as well.  This gives you 2 SonicWALL firewalls working in tandem to prevent downtime in the event of a hardware failure as well.  Now you could lose 1 firewall and 1 internet connection before becoming unproductive.    

Need some more help:

Email or call us today.  817.224.2020

Quick poll, how many of you still own a VCR and still use it regular?  Most of you are using DVD / Blu-Ray or streaming it over the Internet.  So why do you hold your data backups in the prisons of tape?

There are a great deal of solutions out there that are disk based and store your data in a secure spot in the "cloud."  But why settle for just backup when anyone can provide that?  How much better would a total solution that covered recent backups, disaster recovery and business continuity be for your company?  Our solution at Strickland Networks is called TotalProtect because it keeps you protected in all of these three categories.

Backups

An initial backup is done and then continuous incrementals follow behind.  The first destination of backups is to local storage at your site.  That can be a Strickland Networks recommended NAS device or your own storage.  The next destination for your data is off to our data center.   There, the base image plus 1 month of your most recent data is kept.

Disaster Recovery

Let's assume worse case scenario, your entire office is destroyed by an act of nature.  Strickland Networks can virtualize your most recent backup sent to our data center and help you make changes to allow you and your company to keep working remotely until a new physical location can be found for your office and new equipment purchased.  Then we'll help transition back to the new hardware - all with minimal downtime.

Business Continuity

We've all heard the horror stories.  Or maybe you've experienced it first hand.  Your Server RAID has failed beyond repair, memory fails and the parts are out of stock, CPU's over heating ... whatever the issue, with TotalProtect you have the ability to turn your backups into a running virtual server or do a bare metal restore to new, dissimilar hardware.  Your down time is now hours, not days.

Read more here.  http://bit.ly/SN-TotalProtect, or call (817.224.2020) /  email today for more information.   

Here's the situation.  I have a corporate email account on hosted exchange (Microsoft BPOS) and this is my work email, calendar, and contacts.  I also have a Google apps domain for my personal email, calendar and contacts.  I am a Google voice user and share my Google apps calendar with my wife.  It is essential that these calendars and contacts are the same.  I also have an iPhone that uses the exchange active sync connection and have to Goggle apps account setup for email only.

In the dark days of owning my blackberry, I tried to sync everything using the Google app on the phone.  The results were disastrous.  I had to undo the sync and restore from a backup.  I also received errors all the time saying that the contacts and calendar were being synched by another program (Enterprise activated) and could not complete or a duplicate would be created.  

This time around, I said that I need the application to reside my desktop to handle the issue.  I searched and searched for something free to do this but could not find it.  Add to the complexity that I am running office 2010 x64 edition.  This only further narrowed my options.

After searching for a while, I found Gsyncit. (http://www.daveswebsite.com/software/gsync/).  I read all about it and decided it was going to do everything I wanted it to.  The app is $14.99, but very much so worth every penny.  It took about 10 minutes to setup, and then I had some de-duplicating to do in contacts because the contacts between Google Apps domain and Outlook were already out of sync from me manually doing it when I remembered to.  The de-duplication process to about 20 minutes.  I have almost 300 contacts so not to bad.

But here's where I ended up after my $14.99 purchase and 30 minutes of work.  All contacts and calendars are synched between the two accounts.  If I make a change on my phone while I am on the road, it gets updated to corporate exchange.  Then when I get back to the office, I load Outlook and all those changes are synched back to the Google side.  I can also accept invitations from either of my accounts in any method I want.  Then changes are synched later when Outlook is loaded on my desktop.  Finally, since all my contacts are in sync, Goggle voice calls are very rarely unknown callers any more and I am no longer required to press 1 to accept the call of an unknown caller.

To be a complete nerd for a little bit, I have been trying to accomplish this for a very long time.   I have seen Gsyncit for a while but really didn't want to pay $14.99.  It has been a frustrating uphill battle to get these all in sync but now that they are, I feel major satisfaction.  

I have switched all my person email to a Google Apps account.  I wanted the email control and the customized domain.  Only problem was that I couldn't use most of the other Google products.  In particular: blogger, picasa, and voice.

I searched for some time trying to figure out how to do this.  Nothing useful was coming across my screen.  I accidentally discovered how to do what I so desperately wanted Google to do when I was trying to setup adsense.  

Here's how you do it:

Create a new Google account.  Here is the link. 

https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount.  

Use your Google Apps domain email address and follow instructions.  Once complete / confirmed, you can use most of the Google products.

Bonus tip:

If you want to transfer your Google voice account from your Gmail.com account to your Google Apps domain, click this link.  

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=cjlWRDFTWERkZEIxUzVjSmNsN0ExU1E6MA.  

You must complete the Google account setup first though.

My definition of CLOUD:  The most over used buzz word of recent times.  Putting that aside, some IT solutions just fit better with someone else hosting and maintaining that part of your business.  Today, I am focusing on email.  

Money: Yes, money talks.  You can host email offsite for as little as $4.17 / month / user and a maximum of $10 / month / user.  This isn't with some fly by night company either.  We are talking about Microsoft and Google.  Let's case study a company with 30 employees needing to upgrade their email server and say that the company replaces equipment precisely every 4 years.  Option 1: Purchase new server and replace.  Cost: Approximately $7500.  (Server + Software + Licensing) .  Option 2: Google apps domain: Yearly cost $1500 and total cost over 4 years is $6000 plus initial setup (man hours). Option 3: Microsoft hosted exchange: Yearly cost of $1800 and total cost over 4 years $7200 plus initial setup (man hours).  Option 4: Microsoft BPOS: Yearly cost of $3600 and total cost over 4 years $14400 plus initial setup (man hours).

With the last 3 options, the best news is that after the first four years, your company is purchasing new equipment.  You continue to pay your monthly fee and upgrades and improvements are added to your hosting solution in the cloud with out any intervention from your IT staff.

Maintenance:  I am in no way saying the cloud is maintenance free, but I am saying that your IT staff will spend much less time maintaining the email hosted in the cloud once the initial setup is done.  Think of this, the burden of backups, uptime, equipment and so on is now rolled up into a nominal fee you are paying.  

Reliability: Service Level Agreement!  What would it cost your company to place a redundant email system to a data center that offered very high speed internet and redundancy.  I have recently priced this and $20k - $30k for hardware alone.  Add on a $500 - $1500 monthly fee for the data center and internet.  All this exercise was to get your SLA up to 99.9%.  Or, when you buy a hosted solution, it comes with that SLA bundled in you low recurring fee. 

Eat our own Dog Food: Not only do we recommend these solutions, but we use them too. Our corporate email is hosted with Microsoft BPOS.  Personally, I have a Google apps domain for my family.  I like both products and they both are reliable and quality products.  

Ready to buy yet?   If this peaked you're interest and you are ready to switch, give Strickland Networks a call.  Not only can well help you chose the right solution, we can help you implement it as well.

Ever wanted to know how much internet bandwidth your company is actually using?  Does your internet come to a crawl at about the same time each day?  Do you really need as much bandwidth as you're paying for or could you survive a slower connection?  How much internet traffic are we actually using.

Many of our clients were asking us these questions.  The problem of evaluating how much bandwidth a business needs can be quite a dilemma.  Of course, you can throw money at a big internet pipe, but what if your connection is sitting unused most of the time?  What if you could save a couple hundred dollars a month?

We've put together a bandwidth monitoring website to answer these questions for our clients.  This website analyzes the current traffic utilization for your connection every five minutets and then creates graphs of internet usage.  It will show statistics on inbound and outbound traffic over the course of time.  The graphs scale from hourly usage stats all the way up to yearly traffic stats.  We've been able to use this software to identify patterns in client's bandwidth usage and resolve issues like computers downloading updates in the middle of the day instead of overnight, or users streaming video all day long.

If you're interested in finding out more, call us at 817-224-2100.

Here are some examples of the graphs:

5 minute average

Monthly Average

Drill Down