Author Archives: bsaadmin

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SMB: Making the transition to the Cloud

Over the last couple of years, Cloud computing has become more and more of a mainstream technology tool for businesses – both small and enterprise. For many businesses, though, the play for cloud-hosted services is more obvious than others. For smaller customers, the potential for leveraging a host of services off site is larger than ever, and offers a variety of choices which continue to evolve.

There are a number of forecasts for the growth of cloud services over the next five years: some say a 44% annual growth in workloads for the public cloud versus an 8.9% growth for on-premise computing workloads is expected in that time. By 2015, they say, end-user spending on cloud services could be more than $180 billion.

There are four basic deployment models for cloud computing: Public (available to the general public over the Internet), private (within a corporate firewall), community (shared between organizations) and hybrid (a combination of the three).

Cloud computing is a broad umbrella under which many sub-divisions fall. Cloud computing can include Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) where a specific application or service is offered to a customer as a subscription. Citrix Sharefile, Microsoft CRM Online and Office 365 are all examples of SaaS. These examples, offered through BSA Data Solutions, can bring a lot of value to small and mid-sized customers who don’t always have the IT administration resources to maintain these applications on their own.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) allows businesses a platform on which they can create and deploy custom apps, databases and line-of-business services integrated into one platform. Examples of PaaS include Windows Azure. Similarly, through Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), businesses can purchase infrastructure from providers as virtual resources. Components include servers, memory, firewalls and more. One of the most recent, and prominent examples of IaaS providers is VMWare’s vCloud Hybrid Service.

What is exciting about VMWare’s vCloud Hybrid service, is it has the potential to be the best of both worlds – to bridge the gap between locally hosted virtual hosts, and the flexibility to move virtual workloads where they need them, when they need them. Using VMWare’s hosting services to provide cloud-based, disaster recovery is one key use where smaller customers can find a lot of value in the cloud.

Traditionally, customers have hosted these IT services in house – creating their own ‘private’ cloud. Some have said that private cloud infrastructures are becoming more and more the province of larger companies that have their own IT resources – staff, data centers, and have the money to invest in robust infrastructures. Smaller customers don’t always have access to those same resources, be it staff or money. Cloud services offer those same community based clients a respite from those requirements.

However, all of this is not to say that the SMB client can’t host on-premise infrastructure. Many are doing it quite successfully. And for those that like the idea of a ‘private’ cloud, companies like Microsoft can give small businesses their own dedicated equipment on a dedicated network; yet still host it offsite.

What these evolving cloud offerings provide is the ability for SMB customers to start making some strategic choices about where they invest their IT dollars and what kind of flexibility they can deliver to their users. BSA Data Solutions can show you how.

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Virtualization for the SMB: Not too late!

Virtualization has become a household word among IT professionals these days, and certainly has come a long way since VMWare launched ESX Server in 2001!  Despite that, many busy entrepreneurs have yet to migrate to the virtual world: to see the value in moving their applications from the old physical server model, to virtual workloads.  That begs the question: Why?

Well, that question might be answered with the story of a small, 10-person law client running a single Microsoft SBS server.  It does what SBS is supposed to do – consolidates file/print, email and database services and a relatively inexpensive cost at a low cost of ownership to a firm with no in-house IT expertise.  What would virtualizing that server bring to the table for this client?

The answer, lies in a key benefit of virtualization: Disaster recovery and business continuity.  What happens when this 5-year-old server fails?  Or when this client tries to restore from backup (if they are lucky, and prepared enough to have a current backup of the server) to new hardware?  Rarely do these restorations go off without a hitch.  Turning the physical server OS and applications into a virtual workload gives you the ability to copy a folder containing a few files from one location – say, the server itself – to an external hard drive or USB drive for offsite storage.  It gives you an uncomplicated way to back up on a regular basis.

While this might be the most obvious benefit for these business owners, it is by no means the only one.  What if this same small firm wanted to invest a little bit more money – say, in a second server.  Virtualization would allow for even more business continuity by providing a seamless way to move a running server from one physical machine to the next in order to allow hardware maintenance to be performed.  Or what if this client wanted to run more than one operating system or MS server?  With a small investment in virtualization, a single physical machine can support several independent, virtualized operating systems without wasting valuable computing resources.

The benefits of virtualization grow as customers adopt this model of computing – exponentially as the size of the customer grows.  Let BSA Data Solutions show you how!  It’s not too late!

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SMB Security is Crucial!

 

Is your small business or home office using the right security measures?

Having worked for years with IT infrastructures of all sizes, one overriding principle has been invariably true: very few IT managers make security investments of any significance proactively. No where has this been more true than the small and medium business market.

A recent, unfortunate example comes to mind. One of my business partners here in Indiana had a client experience a relatively large loss. For confidentiality purposes, we can’t share the company’s name here, but it is a small, community firm with a handful of users.

A hacker penetrated their firewall and gained access to one of their main Microsoft servers which housed their data. The attacker proceeded to encrypt this customers data with 256AES (acknowledged by the FBI as “uncrackable”, even with today’s computing power) and sent them an email demanding money for the decrypt keys. This type of attack is called ‘ransomware’. Given than the data this hacker encrypted was all this customer’s critical business files – including their accounting files – they proceeded to PAY him in order to get their files back: to the tune of  thousands of dollars.

In the past, it was easy for SMB clients to dismiss the need for enhanced security – that old Linksys or DLink home router was enough, based on the belief they had nothing significant to protect. Such is not the case today. These types of ransomware attacks are becoming more, and more popular as hackers specifically target the smaller clients who just can’t survive without their data.

Several security vendors are recognizing this need – like Check Point Software. They are making enhanced security protection available, affordable, and easily integrated for the SMB. Let BSA Data Solutions show you how.

 

 
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Sample Screen of a CheckPoint appliance interface. Security should be simple and easy to understand. CheckPoint is a solution with an easy setup and an affordable option for small business owners.It is also ideal for home offices. For a free evaluation of what security option would work for you, email us at info@bsadata.com