How Would A Server Crash Effect Your Business?

Could your company carry on doing business if your server failed and you were unable to recover your data? If your answer is that “It’s not going to happen!” because you know that you have got that one covered, then great. If on the other hand you have just felt a chill run down your spine at the very thought of your server failing, then don’t put it off any longer. If your data is that important to you, then for heaven’s sake do something about it. 

Uninterruptible Power Supplies

If your server sits in your office, you should protect it using an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS). A UPS does 2 jobs. Its primary job is to provide you with time to shut your machines down properly in the event of loss of power. It does this by providing you with power from its batteries. Servers don’t like losing power unexpectedly. It can cause corruption on the hard drive and in extreme cases can make it impossible to read data from it. The second job that a UPS will do for you is to smooth out the power and protect you against temporary power surges which could damage your server as well as momentary loss of power which could cause the system to shut down unnecessarily.

When looking at a UPS, there are two things that you need to know:

• The amount of power that you want to pass through it.
• The amount of time that you need protection for. 

For most small businesses, you just need a few minutes as a grace period to allow you to shut your servers down safely. 

When you buy a UPS, don't forget that you will need to replace the batteries every couple of years. 

Online Backup

Most companies take some form of backup of their servers, but I am always surprised by the number of companies that still rely on tape and disk backup backup. It’s not that I dispute whether tape backups work or not. It’s rather that the only truly reliable solution for business continuity is to have offsite backup, and to automate that process rather than relying on the office manager remembering to insert the tape and take it home with them at night. The time when you will need that backup most is in the event that you are unlucky enough to suffer a fire or a flood, and the best way to ensure that you get access to your data after a fire is to use online backup. Admittedly, you need to have a high speed internet connection to use online backup reliably, but they are more widely available now. If you haven’t already made the investment in online backup, now is a good time to do so.

You can of course spend much more on business continuity than simply investing in online backup and provision of a decent UPS system, but this is sufficient for most small businesses. It’s a small price to pay for peace of mind that your business can recover as quickly as possible when bad things happen. 

Why Good IT Security Is Important For Small Businesses.

Why do small businesses need to worry about IT security? We all understand why banks need to have good security … they’ve got our money, and if they get hacked they are probably out of business. What’s the worst that can happen if you don’t have good security as a small business?

The truth is that the damage caused to a small business by poor security may not be as catastrophic as a bank getting hacked, but the consequences of poor security are still painful .. and costly. 

The first thing you’ve got to realise is that security isn’t just about getting your web site hacked. In fact, a good proportion of what we do in managing IT support for our customers involves managing network security. 

How does IT Security impact small businesses?

The problem for small businesses is internet malware. Malware is “bad” software that is unintentionally downloaded from hacked web sites that seeks out bugs in software that is installed on your PC. Unless your PC is kept updated with the latest security updates, malware can use these bugs to upload malicious software which can turn your PC into a spam sender or steal your internet passwords. The first you are likely to know that you have malware on your PC is when things start to grind to a halt, and this is the point at which bad security starts to cost you money. 

Few things are more frustrating than a PC on a go-slow because of a malware infection. It gets in the way of doing your work and causes frustration. You can try running applications such as Malwarebytes to lean it up, but you then lose your PC for the best part of a day while it runs a full scan of your system. Critically all of this is taking place when you want to be getting on dealing with your clients, costing you money with every minute that goes by … and you haven’t even called your IT support company yet!

How to keep internet malware at bay.

The answer is to make sure that your PC’s and servers are kept updated and maintained on a regular basis. If you’re a small business without a dedicated IT Manager that can be a tall order. In reality you are better off outsourcing to a managed service provide who will use automation software to run manage and update your systems remotely. Using automation cuts the cost of keeping your PC’s properly updated and in good working order. More importantly, it’s not your problem!

So don’t discount security just because you’re a small business. It’s just as important to you as it is to bigger businesses. You just see the benefits a different way. For you, IT security translates into reliability of your PC’s and servers.

What Can Small Businesses Learn From McDonalds

It’s hard to imagine a high street without a McDonalds today, but I have to hold my hand up to remembering the first time that the Golden Arches appeared on our high Streets in the 1970’s. In particular I remember going up into Birmingham with my girlfriend at the time and as it came up to 1pm we went looking for somewhere to eat. We found a busy traditional café just off New Street so we went in and took a seat.

It was a busy day and the café was clearly short staffed ; plates remained on tables for a little too long, and it took an eternity for the waitress to come to take our order. After another 20 minutes any thoughts of lust I had for the one I was with had turned to thoughts of lunch that I was now desperate to eat but which had still not arrived, so we just left and headed off down New Street and into McDonalds. 

The contrast couldn’t have been more stark. We were greeted with smiles and the familiar “Can I help anyone?”, and within minutes I was gratefully tucking into my quarter pounder with cheese. Who knows if my order in the overstretched café ever saw the light of day!

Needless to say, the café on New Street that had so miserably failed my expectations is now long gone, but McDonalds  … well, we all know!

So what has all this got to do with IT Support, small businesses, or anything that could be relevant to you and me? The answer is simple. McDonalds hasn’t grown into the megacorporation that they are today by serving the tastiest burgers in town. They managed that by being the restaurant that served you fastest, wished you a nice day as they gave you your food, cleared the tables more quickly than anybody else, swept the floor more often than anyone else, and even cleaned up the pavement outside the restaurant more often than anyone else. They also know their market better than any other company on the planet. See, I didn’t mention what I thought of their food once!

It’s called customer service, and in the battle against big companies it’s the only competitive advantage that many of us have. If you are a small business owner, I firmly believe that you need to bake good customer service into everything that your company does. If you give good service, you become a supplier of a commodity that is in short supply, and what's more you will get recommended. What's not to like about free advertising by your customers? 

So next week, just give a little more to your customers. It could repay you ten times over.

Is Google Apps for Business Right For Your Company?

“How can I use cloud computing in my business?” is probably the number one IT question that I get asked. It can be a hard  question to answer because the cloud isn’t just one technology, and it all depends on what you need from your IT. Very often, small businesses owners simply want to store files in the cloud and share them with colleagues and clients, and I increasingly find myself suggesting to people that they should at least look at Google Apps for Business.

Google Apps for Business is the cloud equivalent of the Swiss Army knife.  It has a number of components:

Google Mail

Most people know about Google Mail, but many people aren’t aware of Google Apps for Business which works pretty much the same as the personal version of Google Mail, but you use your own domain (e.g. clearview.co.uk) instead of the Google domain of gmail.com.  You can also personalise the system with your company logo (see below).

Google Calendar

Google Apps provides a  calendar to help you organise your time. You can share your calendar with your colleagues and vice versa. In addition to scheduling meetings, Google’s “Tasks” component allows you to create a “To-Do” list which I keep on the right hand side of my screen. It’s no substitute for a CRM system, but it helps me to organise my activity for the day.

Even if all you got was email and calendar, surely Google Apps for Business has to be the cloud’s biggest bargain at £3.30 per user per month for businesses, and absolutely free for non-profit organisations. What’s more, if you have grown attached to using Microsoft Outlook as your email and calendar software, there’s no need to change. You can configure Google Apps to synchronise all of your email and calendar entries with your Outlook client.

But that’s not all! You can also use Google Apps for Business to store documents online and synchronise them with a folder on your laptop / desktop PC using Google Drive.

Google Drive

Google Drive allows you to store and share your files online and integrates neatly with Google Mail. There are two ways to access your Google Drive Files. Firstly, you can download and install an install programme from your Google account which creates a synchronisation folder on your laptop or PC. You can then drag and drop files and folders into your Google Drive folder and synchronise them with your Google Account.

  

Secondly, you can upload files to Google Drive using a web browser. This is a simple “point and click” operation that allows you to upload files to your Google account from any internet connected device.

Once a file or folder has been uploaded to your Google Drive account, you can share it using a right mouse click and clicking on the “Share” menu option. Files and folders can be shared with colleagues in your own organisation as well as with clients and business partners. You get the option to send an email to the person that you have shared the file or folder with.

Word Processing and Spreadsheets for Free!

In addition to email, calendar, file sharing and collaboration, Google Apps also provides you with a basic word processor, spreadsheet and drawing application at no extra cost. They aren’t as sophisticated as the Microsoft applications, or even Open Source suites such as LibreOffice, but if you only need basic word processing and spreadsheet functions, they do the job. I tend to compose everything in my favourite Office suite and just use Google for storage and collaboration. 

Great Value Cloud Computing For Small Businesses

Having moved over from Microsoft Exchange about 18 months ago, I'm a big advocate of Google Apps for Business. It's great value for money and there are ways that you can overlay automatic encryption to ensure data privacy. If you are a start-up and looking for a low cost way to store / back up data files in the cloud, as well as share files with your colleagues and clients, it's hard to fault.

Proper IT Maintenance Is Good For Business.

Don't you just want to tear your hair out when your PC goes all cronky on you? Computers may just be a handful of printed circuit boards, a processor and a disk drive or two, but they sure seem to know the very worst time to embark on a go-slow, or even blue screen if you are one of the unlucky ones hit by a bad Windows update or some malware downloaded from the Internet. According to Brother International’s Small Business Survey, business owners now recognise that IT failure is a real drain on their bottom line profits:

• 75 per cent of small business owners indicate that a computer failure is more disruptive than an employee being taken sick.

• 77 per cent stated that a technical fault has hit their bottom line profits through missed deadlines or lost business opportunities.

• 66 per cent of small business owners say they are frequently confused by the technical tools at their disposal to run their business.

• 86 per cent additionally admitted to losing staff productivity due to technical problems.

• 31 per cent of respondents went so far as to say that they would give up a week’s worth of their hard earned holiday to make sure that they would never be hit by technical malfunctions again .

While business owners who felt the need to safeguard cash to withstand the effect of a further economic downturn increased from 44 to 48%, 52% see that investing in technology can help to give them a competitive advantage in their market.

From my perspective, I see that there are 3 key points for small businesses:

Proper Technology Management Produces Bigger Profits - Technology, and specifically proper management of technology can help businesses to increase their profits. If you can manage your technology properly, it will fundamentally fail less frequently. Taking care of technology will help you to take care of business!

If You’re Not a Tech Whizz, Find Someone Who Is! - As a business person, if you aren’t tech-savvy, you to partner with a company that is. If you can find the right IT support partner, they should be able to advise you on ways that you can use technology to best serve the needs of your business.

Technology Business Wins Start At The Top - 52 percent of people are right! You can use technology to make your business run more efficiently. The desire and the drive to change business processes for the better however needs to come from the business owner, both to make sure that your IT company produces the answer to the right business problem, as well as to promote adoption within the business.

You can download the Brother Small business Survey here:

There should be exciting times ahead for small businesses who have survived the recession, and technology can help you to become a lean, mean business machine. 

Online CRM Part 2 - Turning Leads Into Profits More Efficiently

Sales people are hungry for success, not paperwork! They want to turn sales enquiries into orders with the minimum of effort. By automating your business processes using Workbooks.com’s online Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, you can maximise the amount of time that your sales staff have to devote to serving your customers, helping them to work as efficiently as possible.

Before and After Workbooks.com!

Let me give you an example of how Workbooks Online CRM changed the way that Clearview Data Systems works. Before switching to Workbooks.com, we used Act! For Windows as a sales contact management system alongside a "home grown" order processing system. Customer support was a fairly manual affair which used Microsoft Exchange Public Folders to store customer emails and licence keys. There was no integration between any of these systems or with our web site, so web leads arrived via email and needed to be re-keyed into the system. As there was no integration with our order processing system, quotes were individually created as Excel spreadsheets by poring through our supplier price lists for current pricing and manually entering this information into the spreadsheet.

How Workbooks.com Has Made Us More Efficient

Today things work very differently. Web leads no longer need to be entered manually since they are captured directly into our Workbooks system from our web forms. There is no need to search for product pricing and descriptions since our product book is integrated into Workbooks for sales and order processing. We can also see details of all of our customer’s equipment that we are supporting as well as any contact that our engineers have had with our customers by way of support. In addition, Workbooks can automatically produce all of the sales pipeline reports that we need to monitor and predict revenue streams as well as plan expenditure and resourcing requirements.

You can see an overview of how you would manage your sales process using Workbooks.com in the video below:

Workbooks.com has cut out a huge amount of inefficiency in the way that our sales process works. Do you feel that your sales processes could be improved but don't know who to turn to for advice? If so, let me know what the issue is that you need to address and I would be happy to let you know if we can help.

Please come back next week when you will learn more about how Workbooks can help you to automate further areas of your company operations.