Cloud IT

Last chance to join today’s complimentary webinar

Michael — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 15:00:54 +0000

Last chance to join today’s complimentary webinar:

Discover how you can leverage YouTube to market your business and increase your overall profitability!

Join us today at 12:30PM

REGISTER NOW: “Lights, Camera, Action! How Your Business Can Use YouTube to Direct Customers to Your Door and Dollars to Your Bank Account”.

We’ll discuss:

The top 5 business benefits of YouTube marketing
Challenges business face when using YouTube
FAQs and common misconceptions about video marketing
How to create a compelling video that engages buyers

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Yes, Cloud Storage is safe – if used properly!

Michael — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 00:18:48 +0000

Marvin Waschke has nice post at CA Technologies talking about the safety of cloud storage in the context of reports of exposed cloud data. You can find his post here:

Is Cloud Storage Safe? – Cloud Storm Chasers

I try to pay close attention to breaches of data security in the cloud and I’m pretty sure I’m up to speed on the latest in cloud security. In the three years we’ve been using the cloud, starting with Google Apps in 2010, I’ve seen and followed more cloud breaches than I’d like to admit. However, I have yet to find a security breach in the cloud that is inherent in cloud technology.

The cloud simply centralized computing by making resources available through the Internet. Our data and our client data is more secure in the cloud in our contracted Tier 4 data centers than we, or our clients, could ever make it locally. In Marvin’s post he talks about the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and notes (my emphasis added):

The Amazon document on protecting data on S3 spells out the facilities available for protecting S3 data and recommendations for use. The document indicates that Amazon’s facilities support compliance with some of the strictest privacy standards in the industry: PCI (Payment Card Industry) and HIPAA (Health Insurance and Accountability Act). S3 default settings are secure, not open. In other words, to expose S3 data to the public, the S3 user must intentionally release the data. As someone on Slashdot put it, Amazon handed the user a gun that clearly said, “Do not pull trigger while pointing at self.”

That pretty much sums up my experience in watching cloud security breaches. The client or vendor pointed the gun at themselves. That’s actually true of most security breaches. Seldom does a hacker manage to breach security solely with his brilliant technical knowledge. She almost always has help from the users – either with some kind of social engineering (I lost my password, I left my passkey in my office…) or by laziness on the part of someone with security (porn, gambling and free game sites have the most malware – but people keep clicking on them and opening attachments from spammers!).

Building a secure cloud environment is actually easier than building one with holes – so why doesn’t everyone build the secure one? We’ve been asking ourselves that about technical security since we started in the business last century and have yet to find the answer other than a lack of knowledge.

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Customize your company Gmail page in Google Apps

Michael — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 22:26:13 +0000

If you’re using Google Apps and still see the Gmail logo on your mail page, you might want to customize that with your company logo.

It’s a simple process for an account administrator. Log in and manage the domain.

Click Domain settings then Appearance.

Upload your company logo and you’re all set! Let me know if you have any questions.

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SMB Marketing with YouTube [Webinar]

Michael — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 22:05:07 +0000

There’s still time to sign up for our upcoming educational webinar!

Join us for free on April 16th at 12:30PM:

Lights, Camera, Action! How Your Business Can Use YouTube to Direct Customers to Your Door and Dollars to Your Bank Account

Get this—Americans streamed 15 BILLION videos in May of last year!

Like the rest of us, you’ve probably watched your share of silly YouTube videos. But were you aware that YouTube has become a serious marketing tool for savvy small businesses?

Join us for a live webinar and we’ll show you how to use the popularity of YouTubeto promote your products and services, deliver a great customer experience, AND position your business as a trusted source of timely information and insight.

Topics will include:

The top 5 business benefits of YouTube marketing
Challenges business face when using YouTube
FAQs and common misconceptions about video marketing
How to create a compelling video that engages buyers

Call us (949) 243-7498

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Step 1 of a Disaster Recovery Plan – Online Backups

Michael — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 19:57:04 +0000

This is another popular post from our old blog at On-Site Technical Solutions. Although the pricing in the list of online backup vendors may be dated, the information contained here still applies to any business, no matter what size. Technology 101 for business dictates having data backed up off site for disaster recovery!

This is the first in a series of posts discussing disaster recovery or business continuity planning for SMBs (small to mid-sized businesses). Today we’re going to talk about backups.

Business Continuity Plans

What is a business continuity plan (BCP)? Businessdictionary.com defines it as:

Set of documents, instructions, and procedures which enable a business to respond to accidents, disasters, emergencies, and/or threats without any stoppage or hindrance in its key operations. Also called business resumption plan, disaster recovery plan, or recovery plan. See also business continuity planning.

Up until a few years ago we called them disaster recovery plans (DR), but CEOs were probably frightened enough by our worst case scenarios that they didn’t also need disaster in the name of their recovery plans.

On-Site Technical Solutions (now Cloud IT) provides free disaster recovery audits for businesses.

On-site Backups Are Not Enough

For small businesses the easiest and probably most important component of BCP is a backup of network data for the business. I don’t care how you do it, but you must backup your data and keep it current and stored off-site. Ideally far enough away that a natural disaster will not destroy the existing network and the backup.

Even if all you’re doing is backing up your data (weekly) to an external hard drive and taking it home. If the correct data is backed up, this at least creates the opportunity to recover from anything that happens at the office that doesn’t affect your home. The most that will have been lost is one week of work entered into the network.

A valid on-site backup (not sent off-site) will allow recovery in case of

A hardware failure
Virus or other malicious activity
A localized flood (as in localized to the network hardware but not affecting the backup)
A localized fire (see 3).

The on-site backup may be useless in case of

An earthquake, flood, tornado or other act of nature
Fire
Employee theft and sabotage

Online (Internet) Backups

Like exercise regimens, the best backup process is the one that will actually be used. Once setup and configured, a good online backup process can almost be forgotten until needed. Almost.

The beauty of online or Internet backups is that they run automatically in time-frames selected by the business and also automatically store the data off-site in real time. These backups are also an example of cloud computing, which we talk about in other posts and documents. How a business utilizes cloud computing will also affect the way the business backs up data.

Ensure that any Internet backup vendor storing business backups is using at least a Tier 3 data center. In reality they should have multiple Tier 4 sites for redundancy. Anything less than multiple Tier 3 sites will not be providing sufficient insurance, protection and guaranteed uptime for Internet backups. As the market for online backups continues to expand, the difference in price between products using Tier 3 and Tier 4 data centers is becoming negligible or non-existent.

From Wikipedia:

Tier Level	Requirements
1	Single non-redundant distribution path serving the IT equipment Non-redundant capacity components Basic site infrastructure guaranteeing 99.671% availability
2	Meets or exceeds all Tier 1 requirements Redundant site infrastructure capacity components guaranteeing 99.741% availability
3	Meets or exceeds all Tier 1 and Tier 2 requirements Multiple independent distribution paths serving the IT equipment All IT equipment must be dual-powered and fully compatible with the topology of a site’s architecture Concurrently maintainable site infrastructure guaranteeing 99.982% availability
4	Meets or exceeds all Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 requirements All cooling equipment is independently dual-powered, including chillers and heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems Fault-tolerant site infrastructure with electrical power storage and distribution facilities guaranteeing 99.995% availability

At On-Site Technical Solutions we use a handful of vendors that have tools to manage multiple backups for our customers and price breaks for bulk storage. We include the cost of as well as the management of backups in our managed services offering. Our tools are typically not cost-effective for single business backups.

Here is a table with some of the more popular backup vendors. We have not confirmed the types of data centers used by any of these vendors, their customer service or how well their interfaces and scheduling work. Pricing for backing up SQL or other types of databases including Microsoft Exchange Server will probably be more.

Vendor	Annual price – Multiple devices & data size for 1 Year
Carbonite	$229 for 250 GB
SOS Online Backup	$299 for 175 GB
Mozy Pro Desktop	$3.95 per month per desktop + $0.50/GB per month
Mozy Pro Server	$6.95 per month per server + $0.50/GB per month
iBackup	$499.50 for 50 GB
Crash Plan Pro	$349 for 100 GB

Using the right vendor and creating the backups per that vendor’s instructions will mean that a business will be able to take that backup and load it onto any hardware with the applications loaded to use the data. It will not include the applications – that’s a completely different article! Not included here are cloud data services like Dropbox because they do not include sufficient automated tools for backing up and restoring data.

Configuring and Managing Backups

Backups should run at least every day that the business updates data. As an example:

Acme Manufacturing typically updates data Monday – Saturday from 7am to 6pm, although some employees may work late or on weekends. The backup is therefore configured to run late at night seven days a week. This ensures that if someone does work outside of normal hours, their work will be backed up off-site.

This also means that if Acme has a hardware failure late in the day on Tuesday, the last backup was the late-night Monday backup. Everything entered on Tuesday will be lost and employees will need to recreate that data. If this level of risk is not acceptable, additional backup steps must be taken, from 15-minute snapshots of data to 100% mirroring and real-time replication of data. These additional steps can be quite a bit more expensive and require a higher level of technical expertise to manage than the daily online backup.

Versions of the backed up data should also be kept so that, for example, a version of a file can be restored from last week that has been updated/modified and backed up daily since then. The ability to maintain a version history will vary by vendor. More complicated version control schema may increase the cost of the backups.

If Acme is using cloud-based applications for email, CRM, line of business as well as accounting and finance we will be backing up cloud data rather than on-site network data. Backing up the cloud data may be less critical than on-site data depending on the cloud vendor. Most of the standard online backup vendors do not backup cloud data.

The backups should be checked at least weekly, but preferably daily. Again, checking them weekly (or even less often) is simply a higher risk. Every technology decision is a business decision. The best decision produces the highest return at the lowest price with the lowest risk.

Restore Tests and External Hard Drive Delivery

In addition to confirming that the backups are completing successfully we conduct quarterly data restores from the backups. We don’t restore the entire network, but a subset to ensure that we actually can if we do need a restore for any reason.

If large amounts of data are backup up online the business will want to ensure that the backup vendor will overnight a hard drive with backed-up data in case of a failure. Attempting to download many gigabytes or terabytes of data can be an extraordinarily time-consuming process.

Coming up: How to put a plan on paper including naming those accountable for activities in the plan.

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How Your Business Can Use YouTube to Direct Customers to Your Door and Dollars to Your Bank Account [Webinar]

Michael — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 21:53:55 +0000

There’s still time to sign up for our upcoming educational webinar!

Join us for free on April 16th at 12:30PM:

Lights, Camera, Action! How Your Business Can Use YouTube to Direct Customers to Your Door and Dollars to Your Bank Account

Get this—Americans streamed 15 BILLION videos in May of last year!

Like the rest of us, you’ve probably watched your share of silly YouTube videos. But were you aware that YouTube has become a serious marketing tool for savvy small businesses?

Topics will include:

The top 5 business benefits of YouTube marketing
Challenges business face when using YouTube
FAQs and common misconceptions about video marketing
How to create a compelling video that engages buyers

Call us (949) 243-7498

Contact Form

Monthly tech news & tips from Cloud IT

Michael — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:34:17 +0000

Email Etiquette for a Busy World
How to be a graceful and effective communicator in the digital age.
Continue reading »

5 Tips for Better Digital Productivity
Quick and easy tips that’ll make you more productive at work.
Continue reading »

You’re Doing It Wrong: How to Really Research Online

You can find out anything on the Internet. At least it seems that way. Truth is, when you’re doing research online, you’re liable to stumble onto information that looks true but actually isn’t.

And that can scuttle your research quickly. Fortunately, Lifehacker.com recently provided several tips on how to conduct better research on the Internet. Follow these guidelines and you’ll soon be finding the truth online.

Watch for your biasesLifehacker’s first tip? Watch out for your own biases. We’re all guilty of something known as confirmation bias. We want to find information that supports our preconceived notions. For example, if you’re a lifelong liberal, you’ll be more likely to believe studies showing that poverty is the real reason behind low school test scores.

It’s important when researching online to recognize your own biases and to make sure that you’re not selectively sourcing studies that confirm it. It’s important to acknowledge research that contradicts your beliefs.

Quality of informationOnce you’re searching online, be wary of articles that aren’t backed up with references or scientific facts. Lifehacker says that poorly researched articles, which often end up online, are the only things that can screw up your online research faster than can confirmation bias. So be sure to only include articles that come from legitimate sources such as government agencies, accredited universities and well-respected researchers in your online research.

Fine-tune your searchWhen searching for online information, it’s OK to start with popular search engines like Bing or Google. However, when you want detailed information, it’s time to rely on more specialized searches of journal articles and reference items. Try such engines as Google Scholar, Scirus and PLOS for scientific and scholarly resource that can provide more meat to your research.

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Cloud Broadcast Content Storage Service Legality Upheld by U.S. Court (and why you care)

Michael — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 05:18:58 +0000

Image via tblc.org

This is important because it reaffirms your right to store your data in the cloud without arbitrarily having to pay copyright fees.

Here’s a link to eWeek’s article on this decision by a Federal appellate court Cloud Broadcast Content Storage Service Legality Upheld by U.S. Court.

From eWeek:

Aereo provides a service that features individual internet accessible television receivers, each with its own “antenna” and each with access to cloud storage. Aereo lets subscribers view shows in real time, with a slight delay, or for replay at a later time. Subscribers use Aereo as a way to time shift television shows and as a way to skip commercials, just as they might do with a DVR (digital video recorder) at home.

The difference between Aereo and a DVR is that customers don’t have to buy the DVR equipment, which is expensive. The fact that the system uses individual receivers and antennas means that Aereo isn’t considered a cable television service, which also is covered by copyright rules. Instead, the only significant difference between Aereo and an over-the-air television receiver with a DVR attached is that Aereo uses the cloud for storage and has the receiver a distance away from the user rather than at the user’s home or office.

eWeek actually does a good job of explaining why this is important to the rest of us (my emphasis below):

But the decision has implications that reach far beyond just the practice of having television receivers at a distance. The copyright lawsuit sought to strike a distinction between storing program material at home on a VCR or DVR, which is already allowed, and storing it in the cloud, for which there hasn’t been any clear precedent. Now there is.

But the decision also means that it’s legal to store lawfully-obtained copyrighted material in the cloud. You’re probably already doing this with a variety of cloud services ranging from Skydrive to iCloud. Had this decision gone the other way this practice might have been illegal.

“This case was not just about broadcast television; it was a test of the legitimacy of the cloud computing industry,” said Ed Black, president and CEO of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, in a prepared statement. CCIA filed a brief in support of Aereo. “Today, the Second Circuit agreed with us that users should be able to access their own, lawfully-acquired content in the cloud without the fear of being branded pirates.”

When Google Play launched the media kept talking about Google not making deals with (i.e. paying money to) the studios and record companies for letting me store what I already own on Google servers. My music is all in mp3 format – I paid for the DVDs that were ripped and the downloads that created those mp3s. In what sane world would a third-party need to be part of my agreement with Google to create what is essentially and external drive on their servers? By the way, that’s one of the reasons I never buy through iTunes – I like to own my music, not rent it.

The telecommunications companies want to kill the Internet so they can take more money from and the entertainment industry, as is its history, is trying to block any new technology even though it will end up making more money by embracing it.

Privacy and your right to use technology without paying dinosaurs for an old model in a new world – two areas in which we’ll be fighting forever.

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Google+ and Hangout Keyboard Shortcuts

Michael — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 15:22:36 +0000

Are you using Google+ for your small or mid sized business (SMB)? If not to attract and interact with customers, as a business tool for connecting remote employees? Google+ Hangouts is a great way to communicate, with video, with not only family members and friends but clients and associates. All it takes is a Google+ account and a webcam and viola, instant video communication for 2-12 people!

We have recommended Google+ Hangouts as an alternative to Skype for some of our clients – and I encourage everyone to join Google+ to see what it can do for them. I’m still a heavy Facebook user, but that’s only because I can’t get all of my Facebook friends to switch to Google+.

Whether you’re using Google+ or thinking of starting, Google+ has its own set of keyboard shortcuts which can make navigation much easier for those of who like shortcuts.

Here are the general shortcuts from Google+ Help:

Google+ Keyboard shortcuts

Google+ supports the following keyboard shortcuts. To see the full list from any screen in Google+, press ?.

Shortcut	Action
/	Select the search box at the top of the page
←	Navigate to the icons on the left (such as Home or Photos) Scroll between icons with the ↑ and ↓ keys Press enter to open the selected page
→	Navigate from the icons on the left side to the main page Scroll the main page with the ↑ and ↓ keys
j	Move to the post above the current post
k	Move to the post below the current post
n	Move to the next comment on the current post
p	Move to the previous comment on current post
r	Comment on the current post
?	Open the full list of keyboard shortcuts

Google+ Hangouts has its own set of keyboard shortcuts

Here is the link to Hangouts keyboard shortcut help page

To see the full list from any screen in Google+, press Shift + ?.

And of course there’s a Mac help list:

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Google Cloud Connect deprecation – use Google Drive instead

Michael — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 19:05:46 +0000

Wondering what the heck deprecation means? From Wikipedia

Deprecation is a status applied to a computer software feature, characteristic, or practice indicating it should be avoided, typically because of being superseded.

In other words, Google is killing Google Cloud Connect because Drive now works better:

Two years ago, we introduced Google Cloud Connect as a free plug-in to help people work in the cloud by automatically saving Microsoft Office files from Windows PCs to Google Drive. But installing Google Drive on your desktop achieves the same thing more effectively—and Drive works not only on Windows, but also on Mac, Android and iOS devices. Existing users will no longer be able to use Cloud Connect as of April 30.

If you’re using Google Drive and you use a computer, be sure to install Drive on the computer for an automated backup and easy access to your files without the Internet. This is true for both home users and very small business users – not so much for the small to midsized (SMB) market.

Google has been on a killing spree of its products lately, but at least this time they’ve killed one with a clear, more functional alternative.

Here’s the post from the official Google Apps blog: Cloud Connect deprecation.

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