Business has taken off and our IT team is stretched – what do we do now?

In a small business with less than a couple of hundred staff, scalability in IT is a really difficult thing to manage well. Over-resourcing in equipment or staff is expensive, and now people are looking seriously at elasticity in the supply of IT. Cloud computing is being hailed as the solution. Turn it on, turn it off as required, get just what you need and pay the right price for it. Sounds simple right?

However, moving to this holy grail of IT solutions is fraught with issues and does nothing about the scalability of your IT support services. Each move to the cloud is a project that requires resources to find the right solution, build the business case for the move, design the project, run the test case, do the work, and clean up the fall out.

If your business is growing and your IT systems need refreshing, waiting for your limited resources to have spare capacity for updates and expansion or evaporation (as I like to call 'migration to the cloud') is possibly not the best course of action. Many businesses, ours included, are finding hiring new IT staff is getting harder as the war on talent heats up, with only 5.1% unemployment and limited immigration of skilled professionals. Hiring the right person is becoming less of an option as it is harder to offer an IT person the right environment in a non-IT related business.

In the cloud, we already have Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). There are now elastic offerings in IT; specifically, the next trend on the way is Technology as a Service (TaaS), where a single company will offer hardware, software, hosting, connectivity, mobility and IT services as a monthly fee type of solution.

As a result, owning any hardware may become old hat. You will run off virtual servers on virtual desktops, off mobile devices that work anywhere. But when any component of this stops working, you will call your TaaS provider and they will resolve it for you. Simply put, you will have a one-stop-shop providing everything you need in technology for a monthly fee.

This is something like a telco service offering you traditional fixed-line phones, then adding the fax, then the mobile phone and then the internet connection, then leasing you all the equipment you need to run the connections. The next step is to add in the other servers, PCs and IT support. Twenty years ago when the fax machine was high tech, who could have imagined all these other services?

Today, the TaaS concept is a little sci-fi, but it is not too far off. The question is – can you find these technology partners of the future who will cover some aspect of your elasticity problem today? There are many IT service providers who have the capability to work with your business or your IT department to offer resources that compliment and expand your skills and availability. Bringing in specialists from these companies can help us skill or cross-skill your existing staff, while helping you to get past your bottlenecks in a timely manner. Outsourcing part or all of your support load may alternatively free up your internal resources to apply their local knowledge to projects that improve productivity for the rest of your team.

It's essential for small businesses to remain nimble to take advantage of new technology as rapidly as is sensible to ensure they get the jump on their larger, less flexible competitors. Having elastic IT resources to go with elastic licensing and platforms may be the key to this for many businesses struggling to come to terms with the rapid pace of change in the IT industry.

If you're stuck with insufficient IT resources, or lack the strategic plans that tell you where to move next in terms of technologies or resources, now is the time to partner with the right people to get the advice and people you need to solve your problems quickly and effectively – ensuring that IT is not impeding your business growth.

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

Is it true that Windows XP has been pulled from the shelf?

I believe it is true. If you're a big fan of Windows XP, and want to stick with it, you should run out and buy it today. We're seeing the last of the Windows XP machines being sold off right now. As of October 22, Microsoft will not allow the distributors or OEMs to have any more of it. Given that XP was released in August 2001, the program is now over nine years old.

So, my question back to you is – is it okay to upgrade to Windows 7?

I'm pleased to say that we are very comfortable with Windows 7 now that it's one year old, and no longer a fledgling operating system. We're seeing it work well in blended domains with some machines running XP and others running Windows 7, or even the ill-fated Windows Vista (which we are removing as fast as we can).

Microsoft is planning on continuing support for XP until April 2014, so you can still expect to get over three years of support for the systems you set up now – as long as you keep it up-to-date with patches.

Interestingly enough, reports are that Windows 7 is selling three times faster than Vista and has already been installed on more PCs than Vista was. While Windows XP is still the world's most popular operating system, it holds between 50-60% of market share. Windows 7 is noted as having 80% share in the netbook space.

So, what should the strategy be going forward? As I see it, there are a few choices:

• Change nothing and keep using XP
• As PCs are replaced, replace them with Windows 7
• Upgrade all machines to Windows 7 now

I am not a fan of upgrading software on old PCs, as it takes a lot of work and seldom gives good results (because new software places demands on old equipment that are not well met). The time that goes into the upgrade process is often more valuable than the equipment and leads to a very short life cycle, so it is an investment that ends up delivering no ROI.

Keeping Windows XP is probably not going to give you any benefit unless you have very special applications that will not shift across. If you do have very special software, you need to start planning and testing your migration now and push the software vendors to update. Otherwise, 2014 will be here in the blink on an eye and may mark the end of your business that is dependent on the very special software. If it's code you wrote yourself, start writing again or find a new solution soon!

So, upgrading as PCs are replaced seems to be my preference for small and medium businesses (for corporate environments, my advice would be different). No hard sell in that, but that is the way I like it. Given how slow hardware sales have been in the past two years of economic turmoil, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of PCs out there that need upgrading, so start budgeting your PC and operating system upgrades soon so that the cost doesn't catch you out.

Of course, having a good advisor to help you navigate this upgrade phase and make sure you're retiring the right equipment, and putting the right software on your new equipment, will help you get the best return on investment possible. Do consider your finance and warranty options too. It can make all the difference to your cashflow and sanity.

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

Keeping IT simple is not an option as complexity emerges from the cloud

Keeping IT simple is a luxury most growing businesses cannot afford. Today, every business needs to communicate and keep track of finances on computers. Many also design, order, build or manufacture, track or test some aspect of their products or services on computers. We not only need to store our information, we also need to manage interactions between different locations and tools.

Right now, we are seeing a fast uptake of new technologies that set businesses apart. In Australia, there are businesses growing in many sectors and it is the companies shaking off the turmoil of the past couple of years that are leading the way in technology decisions. More and more, I am seeing businesses choose cloud-based technology for aspects of their operations, and more applications are now coming to market in a “connect me” model rather than an “install me” solution.

We have been talking about cloud solutions for two years now, but it is really only in the last few months that we’ve seen real take-up of these technologies in businesses other than the early adopters. Even Microsoft has announced the early release of its Office Online solution this week – Office 365 – along with the release of hosted Exchange Server 2010 to replace the 2007 offering now available.

In any business, IT must be about productivity, efficiency and communication – with a strong focus on cost. We are starting to see cloud-based solutions that are cost-competitive with installed software, and the pace of change is faster than I have seen in our industry before.

People are talking about cloud solutions as a “disruptive technology”, meaning that it will change the way an entire industry works. I actually believe it will change the way all industries work. This means that there are lots of opportunities for new solutions. It also means lots of jobs are about to vanish. I, for one, would not like to work in the tape backup industry this year. As backup moves to online solutions, or vanishes altogether, tapes will become almost obsolete.

With so much happening, it is time for all businesses to assess their IT strategy and ensure they are discovering the new tools, and the benefits, that are becoming available to solve their problems. Doing IT just like you did last year is probably not going to cut it for much longer.

Of course, we need to think about who is providing the hosted technologies we select, and be sure they’re not about to go out of business and take our data with them. We also need to ensure that data remains our property and that we can take it somewhere else if we want to (or at least be able to reduce the cost to a hosting fee, and have read-only access to what is there).

We also need to be certain that the solutions we choose are secure. While that sounds obvious, how does a non-IT business test security? That is a difficult question to answer, so branding, reputation and scale all play a part in building consumer faith.

So, is there a bright side to all this chaos?

I think there is. Once we’ve all adopted cloud-based solutions for our applications, we’ll have lower ongoing IT costs, reduced management needs and better data protection than we have today. We just need to get through the turmoil of the next few years and see who emerges as the global dominator (or dominators) of this space.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think it will get simpler – in fact, quite the opposite. We’ll have more devices connecting to more systems, and integrating more information from more places. Our networks will be more complex, our choices will become broader and the skills we need will become more specialised. Finding good people to manage this change in your business is going to be a massive challenge, as old IT skills become outdated faster than ever before.

Perhaps the best business to be in right now is IT training, as we need somebody to train the new wave of IT professionals who will all be perpetual students (my team included). Sorry, but I don’t see an end to this any time soon…

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.