Our colleagues at CompliSpace specialise in compliance in this and many other areas of continuity management. Read more here.

At Chill we take the heat out of IT. No matter what pressure you are under, we will always keep our heads and make sure you get back up and running as soon as possible. So don’t sweat – Chill IT. Click here for more information on our consulting services.

There are numerous systems out there that offer the promise of matter management, precedent searches, document control and time billing – but they rarely work well technically – and therefore cause downtime, equating to frustration and general disasatisfaction with “the system”.

This then translates into frustration with our services – even though we offer the right advice as to what is needed to fix the problem. Things such as better resources, dedicated servers or upgraded workstations. We just want to be able to offer our customers a stable working platform – at a sustainable price.

Is the answer possibly in the clouds? Cloud computing is here now and being taken up at a rapid pace by large and small companies. The large companies are doing it because they recognise that they make significant savings on their infrastructure costs.

The small ones are doing it for the same reason – however a high infrastructure cost was a barrier to entry, rather than a headache to solve. Small firms now have access to enterprise grade systems and no longer have to “make do”.

Our job becomes simpler too. We simply supply you with a working network and a rock solid browser installation. That does not cost you much to have us do and maintainting it means much lower costs to you.

At Chill we take the heat out of IT. No matter what pressure you are under, we will always keep our heads and make sure you get back up and running as soon as possible. So don’t sweat – Chill IT. Click here for more information on our consulting services.

TrialPad look like it would be very relevant to people that wanted to quickly and easily access and search trial documents and precendents. When you combine it with DropBox (brilliant file sharing), the resulting tool would be a must have I suppose? What do you think. Full article is here.

At Chill we take the heat out of IT. No matter what pressure you are under, we will always keep our heads and make sure you get back up and running as soon as possible. So don’t sweat – Chill IT. Click here for more information on our consulting services.

At Chill we take the heat out of IT. No matter what pressure you are under, we will always keep our heads and make sure you get back up and running as soon as possible. So don’t sweat – Chill IT. Click here for more information on our consulting services.

At Chill we take the heat out of IT. No matter what pressure you are under, we will always keep our heads and make sure you get back up and running as soon as possible. So don’t sweat – Chill IT. Click here for more information on our consulting services.

Backups have come a long way. They are REALLY smart now. I have been protecting companies against data loss now since the days of music cassette tapes, connected via AV cables to a Tandy TRS-80. Then we went to diskettes (the size of dinner plates). Then we went to the momentous Tallgrass unit which was a 20Mb hard disk paired with a 1/4″ streaming tape drive.

It was all pretty basic really. State of the art at the time – a new acronym SOTAATT.

At the same time, the mainframes were developing removable hard drives that were the size of garbage cans. The reel-reel tape drives were bigger than a fridge and held hardly any data at all.

Now though….crikey! There are two main players in the backup software space of note (yes there will be comments I know), Symantec (BackupExec) and CA (ARCServe). Both have brilliant backup products that match each other feature for feature. It’s difficult to slide a piece of paper between them in terms of functionality, so it makes it very hard to pick.

So the advice is – just pick one – it will work.

But what a feature set they all have! For instance, one of the LARGE headaches we have when backing up data is to choose what gets copied. It is a constant that a large amount of the data stored in computer systems is duplicated. For instance, a 20Mb video that was sent to one of your employees gets forwarded to 20 others. At that point the 20Mb video is now taking up 400Mb. That’s almost half a gigabyte. In reality, you only need to back up one of those (if at all). Both ARCServe and BackupExec are smart enough to spot the duplication and make a note to copy this one file back 20 times if a restore is requested for the mail database.

Another neat feature of these products is their ability to work out what was backed up last time that doesn’t need doing again this time. You can set up rules like “If a file has not been accessed for the past 12 months, only back it up during the archiving backup run”. Wow..cool! So, the software can work out that only 30% of the data is actually volatile. A well thought out backup schedule will actually cover all bases here.

All of these features are aimed at driving efficiencies into the storage of data. Just because you have 750Gb of data stored on your server doesn’t mean it should all be backed up. every night. That would be a nightmare. And what about generational backups? Ideally you should be able to go back through the backups and restore data to a point in the past. So if you were keeping 30 days’ data, you would need to cater for 22Tb (22,000 Gb) of data storage. So, thinking about backups is pretty important….they need to be done smartly.

But there are other options…..imaging. In the past couple of years, a relatively new player has entered the global marketplace – Acronis. This company is the leader when it comes to taking image copies of hard disks. BackupExec and ARCServe are good at copying files, one by one, but Acronis just uses a brutal approach to backup….and it does it VERY quickly. It is the equivalent of “photocopying” the hard disk to another hard disk.

Why is this important? Well think about when you install a new PC. You boot it up and load Windows or Ubuntu or whatever flavour of operating system you like. This takes an hour. You then install your office software from Microsoft or OpenOffice or similar. You then install the Acrobat reader and some other applications that you use on a daily basis. Once you are done, you can kiss 4 or 5 hours goodbye. If you are paying your IT contractor to do this, you have run up a decent sized bill. Wouldn’t it be good if you could protect that? Well with Acronis, this is possible.

If you take an image, just after you have the PC set up just the way you want it, you can keep this image in a library in case you need to do it all over again. For instance, if the hard disk fails in that PC, you can replace it, load Acronis and then copy the image back. It all takes about 15 minutes, depending on the disk size, saving you hours and dollars.

Think about this….if you are a business with 20 PCs, you only need to spend the 5 hours ONCE and then use Acronis to photocopy the hard disk 20 times. This is a substantial improvement in time. Old way is 5 x 20 = 100 hours. New way is 1 x 5 and 20 x 15 mins = 10 hours – 90% REDUCTION!! Brilliant.

It gets better – when you combine imaging with virtualisation…..! But that’s a story for another day.

So, yes you can “photocopy” your hard drive.

I can’t promise that thrill each time you look at your business dashboard, but you will find it gives you the same sort of up-to-the-minute readout on how well you are doing on your business journey.

A business dashboard presents visual displays of data pulled from different business systems, and tells you at a glance how things are going. A dashboard can provide real-time intelligence that includes your key performance indicators (KPIs), and can generate ad hoc reports to support decision-making. The display might include red-yellow-green lights, graphics such as bar charts and gauges, summaries, and drill-downs, all to provide consolidated information.

A well-designed dashboard is customizable and usually role-driven, so that the dashboard displayed on the company president’s screen will be different from that of the CFO or the middle manager. The good news is that the source data for a dashboard is probably already sitting in your system right now. With a bit of planning and design work, the information living down in your digital records can be given visible form and made to work for you in new ways.

Employees benefit from having the information they need to do their job right at their fingertips, and dashboards generally allow for customization to the individual’s likes and interests. For the CFO, accounts receivable aging status can be displayed in a bar chart, but the same data could appear as a pie chart for the CEO. The Sales Manager can see the comparison of monthly goals to actual performance, and then drill down to each salesperson’s individual performance. And for the Project Manager who has customized his desktop with widgets for weather and surf conditions, it’s a simple matter to add KPI information to tell him which tasks are on, ahead, or behind schedule and which are running over budget.

In your car you have spread before you all the vital information to get from where you are to where you are going. Fuel remaining, speed, distance traveled, engine function, warning lights, perhaps even compass direction as well as time and distance to destination. On your computer screen, the digital dashboard does the same for your business.

Gentlemen, start your engines!

At Chill we take the heat out of IT. No matter what pressure you are under, we will always keep our heads and make sure you get back up and running as soon as possible. So don’t sweat – Chill IT. Click here for more information on our consulting services.

The concept is simple – plug your phone into the Internet, and talk to the world as if it were all next door. And the reality is almost as easy: VoIP service converts your voice to a digital signal, and that can be sent over the Internet. On the other end, it comes out as your voice in a signal that the receiver can process – cell phone, wired phone, whatever. VoIP does require a broadband (high-speed Internet) connection for your computer, but these days you need that just to conduct business effectively anyway.

Since the service starts with your computer, your desktop computer can actually make calls directly from your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. Now, while you talk to a customer you can also be reviewing their information on your computer, entering orders, checking schedules, or even writing a confirmation of your phone conversation. Sure, you could do that before, but what was that phone call costing you?

As simple as the VoIP concept is, the main attraction has always been the potential cost savings. Installing a traditional wired phone system for your office with multiple stations could be an enormous investment. But a VoIP PBX system with up to 16 extensions costs under $2,000. And if that got your attention, how about calling from Sydney to Perth for just 10c? Period. Now your mobile phone can become an extension of your PBX, and a call to a mobile can cost only 20c/minute, regardless of the carrier.

During the early days of VoIP there were stories of dropped calls, just as there were with the early cell phones. But the technology has advanced rapidly, and these days VoIP is highly reliable. You do need to understand how the system works and what services are available, because there will be differences from your old style wired phone system. But that brings us to another advantage of a computer-based VoIP phone system – one service provider can install and support everything for you. That provider will be able to advise you about the best service choice for your business.

So give VoIP a look and a listen. With the cost savings and increased efficiency, I think you will soon be saying, “Now we’re talking!”

At Chill we take the heat out of IT. No matter what pressure you are under, we will always keep our heads and make sure you get back up and running as soon as possible. So don’t sweat – Chill IT. Click here for more information on our consulting services.

The Tallgrass Technologies TG-3020. These were so cool

When PCs started getting popular in the mid 80s, there I was drooling over a massive 20Mb hard drive with an integrated tape backup unit. Yes, the Tallgrass system was just awesome. Still weighed the same as a large house brick though.

Today I got the papers and there was a brochure with a 2Tb USB drive for $300. A 2Tb drive……that’s right….2,000,000Mb….AND it only weighs the same as a SMALL house brick this time.

How good is that? We have enough room to hold everything now! Hope those single hard drive units don’t fail though. Even 10% of 2Tb is still 20Gb…a lot of data to lose.

But that’s ok, we have tape units for backup, we’ll be fine won’t we? Well that’s not strictly true, is it? The largest current economically available tape drive at the moment is a 3Tb LTO drive. When I say economic, the street price for an external one of these is about AU$5,000. Hmmm. How much was that 2Tb drive? The inference from this is that it is an easy choice to store more data, but a much harder one to protect it.

So, how about we just buy another hard drive to backup the first one? Great idea. How will you keep track of that? Will you store the second drive in the same physical location as the first? What about fire or theft? How does that help?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just push that data off site somewhere? I mean, what’s all this could stuff about?

Both Microsoft (MSN) and Google offer free storage on their servers. They will give you 5Gb or so……that sounds like a lot, until you put it in the context discussed here. For more, you need to pay. Do you think they know something?

That’s where people like me come in. When people mention “computer security” they automatically think of passwords, hackers, clandestine stuff like that. It’s not that glamourous…..really. Data Continuity Planning is a big part of it. We ask questions like what data exists in an organisation? What risks does it face and how do we mitigate against them? And the biggest one of all is “let’s test the plan”. It’s is really stupefying how many organisations just don’t do this.

So ask yourself this question. If you lost the data sitting in your systems, could your business survive? Surprisingly, a lot of organizations say no to this and still do not address the problem.

If you need help, contact me!

Knowledge Management can bring order to this chaos and help you find the nuggets buried in your data stores. Many small businesses simply do not realise that they have been building an unstructured collection of valuable data. Applying knowledge management tools can organize and mine this storehouse, and also make it possible for the information to be shared across the organization.

Too often, customer billing information is in one file, purchasing history is in another and client contact information in another. Project information including the skills needed, who worked on what, how long they took, and how much it cost compared to the revenue, all that is somewhere else. Imagine how valuable it would be to look down into your data stores and discover connections and relationships you might not have noticed before. What could that mean to building and enhancing customer relationships? To your company’s strategic planning? What might you change if you discovered patterns of buying that you had not seen before?

In many ways, knowledge management is a living thing. As humans, we are constantly renewing ourselves. We recognise changing conditions, draw on our memories of what has served us well in the past to deal with change, visualise alternative outcomes, and make decisions about how we will proceed. We carry our database on our shoulders and make connections and see relationships that change continually as we gather new data from our experiences. That’s very much like what a knowledge management system can do for a business.

In today’s increasingly high-speed, competitive environment, businesses cannot afford to waste resources or miss opportunities. I’ve found that a frequent benefit of knowledge management is an increase in internal collaboration and sharing of best practices. As a company, you already know more than you think you know. And now you know that knowing is not enough; you have to be able to share knowledge and eliminate duplication.

Know what I mean?

At Chill we take the heat out of IT. No matter what pressure you are under, we will always keep our heads and make sure you get back up and running as soon as possible. So don’t sweat – Chill IT. Click here for more information on our consulting services.