What do I need to be able to 'see' in order to manage my IT environment properly?

For over a decade, large companies have had their IT departments using monitoring software to keep watch on their IT systems. I first deployed systems for this purpose in 1999, and it wasn't new technology then.

This monitoring software was not cheap, and the network traffic it generated was expensive. So, either this monitoring stuff was going to be a waste of time and money, or it was going to provide a benefit to the companies that used it.

I'm pleased to say that the latter proved to be true – with the monitoring driving massive benefit to those organisations that set it up well and made good use of the technology.

I'm amazed that 11 years down the track though, many businesses (small and large) still lack basic visibility of their IT environment. This means that businesses fail to predict problems before they happen, and fail to remove them at their root cause.

Over the last few years, technology has emerged that lets any small business gain the advantages of monitoring. With your computers monitored and managed, you'll have visibility of the following factors:

• Server temperatures and fan activity
• Power supplies
• RAID sets (disk pre-failure, loss of redundancy)
• Free disk space
• Use of disk quotas
• Mailbox sizes
• CPU and memory usage
• Backup Success/Failure
• Antivirus software currency
• Security logs (for unauthorised access attempts)
• Network traffic
• Internet connection outages
• Uptime of PCs and servers

Once these factors are being monitored and any changes tracked, it is possible to see where things are going wrong before they have an impact on your systems.

With good solutions, connectivity, and automation, the management of your monitored computers can be done efficiently in a way that drives your business productivity. When things do go wrong, the history recorded by your monitoring tool can also assist in solving the puzzle and lead to a better (and much faster) solution.

If you don't want to run the monitoring tools in house, it is possible to achieve all of this over a cheap internet connection. This means you can have a local support company doing the monitoring for you, and then they respond every time an alert pops up. It's a bit like having your office alarm system going to a security company, so that they can check what is going on if the alarm goes off.

A good support company will have automated systems that capture these alerts, and generate job tickets to ensure a technician is assigned to the job long before it reaches a critical level for your business. This automation will mean you'll never get nasty surprises from your IT system without warning.

Click here to read more IT Systems expert advice.

David Markus is the founder of Combo - the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth.

How do we reduce the amount of time our systems are down?

The short answer to this week's question is simple: get better systems. But before you kick me or groan out loud, let me give you some metrics, some causes and some strategies for getting a better result.

Metrics

I'm often asked, 'What can we reasonably expect of PCs and servers, and how much should we put up with?'

This is a question of quality of equipment and maintenance. With good equipment reasonably maintained in a standard office environment, you should only need to re-boot a PC very occasionally (certainly less than once a week, assuming you shut it down each night – which extends life, reduces power consumption and lessens environmental impact). Once a month would be more desirable – if at all.

For a server, re-boots should be scheduled events for necessary upgrades, and your downtime should be almost none. These days, server uptime of 99.9% and above is considered reasonable for a small business. In a corporate environment the ideal is 99.999% (five nines) uptime, but that is too expensive for most small companies. If you achieve 99.9% uptime, that implies that 0.1% of the time your server may be down (over a year, this equals about 8.5 hours).

Causes

Aging IT equipment – or as we call it, 'creaking infrastructure' – is more likely to falter. This can be caused by a number of things: moving parts in hard drives, wear and tear to cooling fans and dust collecting inside various devices. Electronic boards and connections also seem to suffer from degraded performance.

Other causes include:

• Fragmentation of data on hard drives leads to reduced read write activity, and increases the workload for the drives (which increases failure rates).
• File corruption by viruses and other forms of data degradation leads to reduced computer performance.
• Updating patches from software vendors is a double-edged sword, as solutions to known problems have been known to cause new unanticipated problems. This requires a carefully managed process of testing patches before deployment to assist with stable performance.

In small businesses, accountability for proactive management is also often an issue. Unfortunately, it is one of those jobs that we all intend to get to, but run out of time to do because it does not pop up on our list of urgent or important daily tasks.

This lack of proactive work leaves your team members constantly putting out fires, and fixing broken computers, rather than enjoying stability and performance.

Strategies

To get on top of IT in small business, it is important to have a strategic plan that outlines where IT fits into the needs of the business. This will give you the ability to set realistic budgets for IT infrastructure, software systems and ongoing maintenance; and allow you to assign resources to the task or hire the right skills to get the work done to a suitable standard.

Once you have the clarity to assign a budget, your priority is to determine the most valuable functionality and get that working. An investment in infrastructure is essential, as you can't build stable systems on creaking infrastructure. Consider finance if cash is out of the question. Good vendor finance is often available at favourable rates from large companies like Cisco and HP.

Once you have a stable platform, maintain it proactively to get the best performance out of it.

Then you can implement time saving productivity, creating applications to drive your success. There are systems for just about every industry, ranging from service delivery, manufacturing, production management, document management and medical practice management. For architects, plumbers, handymen, lawyers, doctors and so on, there are productivity systems that make it easier to deal with more work and more clients. There are also marketing and communication tools that can increase your reach and help you compete globally.

As with most things, it all starts with a plan...

Click here to read more IT Systems expert advice.

David Markus is the founder of Combo - the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth.

I am ready for Windows 7, but is it ready for me?

This week's question is one that many people are asking, but unable to answer.

Windows 7 is the latest version of Microsoft Windows, and was released on October 22, 2009.

Unlike its predecessor, which introduced a large number of new features, Windows 7 was intended to be a more focused, incremental upgrade to the Windows line, with the goal of being fully compatible with applications and hardware with which Windows Vista is already compatible.

All the early reports are that – after the disaster of Vista – Windows 7 is all we were hoping it would be. But, my recommendation is don't run out and buy it just yet. I really hate to keep you from the joy of a new toy, as I like a good toy as much as the next kid. So, let me explain why – in most cases – I have to be the kill joy on this one...

If you're buying a new PC for home because it is time and you just have to, now may be the time to consider Windows 7. Make sure though that you have relatively new printers and other peripherals, and that your software for tracking your home finances, games and so on, is supported. If it's not, make sure you upgrade it at the same time.

If you run a micro business with only a few PCs, you may even get away with it.
However, if you run a larger business and have one or more servers, you need to wait a little longer. Unfortunately, we are seeing issues with what will and won't work on a Microsoft Small Business server with Windows 7. It is not clear whether it is officially supported or officially unsupported at this stage, but what we are definitely seeing is that there are gaps.

Some business applications are supported – but many are not. Some are supported by Windows 7, but not by 2008 Server, so you run into issues with not being able to upgrade the server to support the PCs.

In large companies with thousands of PCs, a lengthy testing process will be followed by the IT department to ensure compatibility with existing applications and infrastructure; and that will take many months to perform. As these companies do the testing, requests will go to printer manufacturers for updated drivers, and demand will push manufacturers to provide the solutions smaller businesses don't have the clout to ask for.

So – my recommendation – be patient and wait for the other players in our complex IT world to decide whether Windows 7 is worth supporting in business. We need to keep asking IT experts if it is time, and then believe the answers we get.

If you fail to heed the warnings and upgrade your PCs for some perceived benefit or just because you like to have new toys, it is likely that you will add significant cost to your network support over the next few months.

Whether you do the support yourself, or have others do it for you, jumping ahead to Windows 7 – before Windows 7 is small-business ready – will distract you from your core business and reduce your effectiveness in the months ahead.

In these improving economic times, now is the time for business growth. It is not the time for messing around with immature technology. The best path forward is to have a strategic plan that takes the current state of technology into account. This will let you implement the right components of your IT system at the right time, and get you the best return on investment over the longest sensible period.

David Markus is the founder of Combo - the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth.

What is the right solution for the data backup in an SME?

The bottom line is this – if you have data, there is a risk that you will lose it. And that loss may be catastrophic for your business. Hence, the need for backup.

This week, I have been asked a question which has reminded me to discuss the importance of backup from a strategic viewpoint – an important decision for all SMEs.

The question came directly from my newest client, who came to me after a disaster – caused by poor IT systems set up – removed 13 YEARS of business data from her server and “backup” system.

It must be made clear that a duplicate set of data with regular replication to a single place is NOT backup – it is replication or synchronization. The client in question was sure that her IT guy had set up a “backup” system, and she slept well – not realising that he had set up a network attached storage system (NAS) to which her server was being copied regularly.

Her IT guy had also set up her server to be a web server, and gave relatively open access to the web.

When files were removed from the server, the “backup” system copied the server to NAS and wiped out the only copy of 13 years worth of company files. Scary stuff.

This particular story has motivated me to discuss good backup at a strategic level for the sake of misled small businesses, who think they have backup, but are actually at huge risk of losing irreplaceable business data.

Good backup involves creating multiple versions of your company data so that you can go back to previous versions of files on separate media. This means that if one version of a file is corrupted or lost, others will still remain. It is also prudent to take a copy of this backup off the primary site to ensure there is a recovery path from a flood, fire or lockout.

There are many ways in which you can ensure a successful backup of your data. The simplest of these is to dump the data and system information to a tape or external hard drive, on a regular basis. If this is your preferred solution, you should have at least five tapes or hard drives in rotation, with at least one going offsite regularly (if not all of them). Some organizations use 20 or even 30 tapes or hard drives to keep end-of-week and end-of-month images for longer periods.

It is also important to consider the time it takes to recover a failed server from the information that is backed up. All too often we find we have the data, but no system information. This means that recovery can take several days – sometimes more. So, save yourself a whole lot of time by keeping up-to-date images of the both your data AND your systems, so that both can be restored in a minimum timeframe.

If you have a larger server environment, it may be worth considering virtualising your servers so you can move them between physical servers – or even from site to site with a minimum of fuss. You might also want to invest in an automated backup solution that sends your data to offsite electronic storage. I’ve written about good automated backup systems previously in my article, ‘The breakthrough backup system.’

It upsets me to think that businesses are still getting bad advice about backup from glorified PC technicians who think they are doing the right thing. Until SMEs realize that replication and synchronization are not backup, they will continue to be at risk of losing irreplaceable business data. And it’s not worth taking that risk – just ask my newest client.

David Markus is the founder of Combo - the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth.