Why would a carbon tax be good for the IT industry?

It may seem like there is no direct correlation between IT and a carbon tax. But there is. If you refer to my article on how IT systems contribute to the greenhouse effect as much as the aviation industry, you will start to realise that IT is a big contributor to the biggest single global issue of our times.

So, why is a carbon tax a good thing for our industry?

Really, it’s the same reason that applies for all industries. Certainly there will be some resistance in the short-term as it will push prices higher; but, in the medium- to long-term, it will be a good thing because it will drive innovation. Of course, innovation means better systems and reduced impact on our planet.

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a luncheon at the Australia Israel Chamber of Commerce. During this luncheon, Professor Jacob Karni of the Weizmann Institute of Science presented a technology that has been proven in the laboratory to reuse emissions from coal-fired furnaces as a source of additional energy – converting Co2 into CO for fuel and oxygen to aid combustion via a process that is driven by solar energy.

Despite being a mechanical engineer (who got into IT off the back of computational fluid dynamics modeling coal-fired furnaces), I lack the details to explain how this works. But, what I can see is that there are solutions in the early stages of development that are not getting developed due to a lack of interest and investment.

Back when I was doing computational modeling of 3D data, computer speed and processing power were limiting the ability to complete design modifications of the furnaces to improve efficiency. Delivering on new solutions will surely require further advancements in IT capabilities too.

So, if we look forward to a time when there is a price on carbon in Australia, I can see that this will drive investment in reducing carbon emissions – which is a problem faced by every economy in the world. This may be the opportunity Australia needs to make use of its established education system, in conjunction with funding from private enterprise, to produce a new generation of experts to go out into the world and develop and deploy solutions to this problem.

It is not until private enterprise has a reason to invest that we as a country will be part of the global team working on solving the problem. In turn, we will have an opportunity to reduce the impact at a generation-level, which is an engineering problem that will drive IT. We will also have the opportunity to work on reducing power consumption by looking at each of our IT devices, and how they can be designed and used to need less power, generate less heat and therefore require less cooling.

All told, having the carbon tax may well power our economy on a global scale for many years, and that would be a great thing for the IT industry and many others.

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so if your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

Are we getting the message about backup?

Australian businesses are still under-investing in the technology required to keep data recoverable, so when it comes to the subject of backup – I have a lot to say!

Firstly, I wish to point out that replication is not backup and there must be retrievable versions of data stored off-site. I’ve noticed some common mistakes being repeated on a regular basis, so I’d like to recommend some possible alternatives.

In this blog, I wish to specifically discuss server backup. If you want to backup a PC in a small office or home, there are lots of good online solutions with one external hard drive and a web-based iterative copy, that are now cheap and easy to use. If you have data on a PC that is of sentimental or commercial value, I suggest that you subscribe. If you have a server though, read on…

The first mistake is not having a backup that you can recover from in the event of systems failure. When the systems fail, you will suffer badly.

The second common mistake that I see all too often is data replicated to a second storage facility – such as an external hard drive or NAS with no version control or iterative process. This mistake will replicate data corruption and leave you with nothing! In the event of a virus, a hack or a simple mistake with file management, it will place you in disaster recovery mode with limited and expensive options.

The other mistake that I see is backup that is set up with multiple on-site tapes or hard drives to rotate in an orderly manner, which is good, but the storage media devices don’t get cycled.

There was a time when quality backup software ejected or locked tapes, so they couldn’t be used for a predetermined period. This prevented today's backup from overwriting yesterday's backup. As the backup software bundled with servers improved, the inclination to buy expensive software with these quality control features has dwindled. As a result, many servers utilised in small businesses today will keep writing to the same device every day, without reporting errors. This leads to having only one suitable data-set to recover from and, therefore, corruption is being replicated to the sole backup set.

Where the backup device is a tape, the odds of corruption caused by the frequent re-use of media increases with each use and so, after not changing the tape for a few weeks, the odds of corruption escalate rapidly.

The solution here is to have a work process in place that ensures the storage media is cycled daily and that the media are replaced often enough to ensure the efficiency of the recorded data.

Even better, spend a little more money on your backup software so it forces you to rotate the media and manage your media sets properly. Once the software is correctly installed and configured media change schedules can be drawn up, allowing the local admin team to manage the ongoing process and the remote IT department able to maintain accountability.

I’ve discussed online backup solutions that offer great backup for multiple servers, but it’s worth noting that I’m seeing mistakes with these too. Such solutions focus around scoping of the data-flows required, which leads to less than desirable lags in the currency of the data stored off-site. If you do budget to install online server backup (which I highly recommend) make sure sufficient bandwidth is allocated to ensure the technology works as it should.

It’s also important to note that there are now many of these off-site offerings on the market, but you should look closely at where your data is being held and the total quality of the solution. Unfortunately, this technology has attracted some get-rich-quick providers, who charge full price but deliver systems that are not as robust as they should be.

The message, in short, is don’t settle for a poorly designed or poorly configured backup solution that could leave your business exposed. A great case in point is Distribute IT who are now no more. Don’t be next!

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT service company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so If your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

Vlog: Office 365 is out... so what?

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so if your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

How do we fix our computers faster and reduce our carbon tax costs?

If you’re sick of waiting for your IT person to get to your PC to fix it you’re probably using the wrong team and technology to support your workplace.

When I started in the IT industry I was on a help desk before graduating to field support, initially running from place to place fixing computers in small businesses and spending hours on the road every day.

As I did more training I graduated to corporate environments and started to use complex management tools to remotely manage thousands of computers for large firms and the public service.

By 1998 that technology and the speed of data networks meant remote management technology had scaled down to sub-1000 computer companies.

Today there are companies referred to in the IT industry as managed service providers (MSPs) that offer remote support for individual PCs and to any scale of business environment.

MSP businesses still need to offer on-site support for some aspects of their work but they’re able to do more than 80% of troubleshooting and problem solving remotely, which has created big incentives for the IT companies which have adopted that technology.

They can cover significantly more computers from a central help desk because they don’t have IT staff walking around offices to visit individuals and they also don’t have cars on the road generating carbon emissions and creating hours of unbillable time.

With a carbon tax in place that is going to be more of a concern in the future than it was until this week.

Accountants have worked remotely for years, only visiting clients occasionally for account management and now it’s the same for IT.

As long as computers and servers are working and connected to the internet secure connections can be made quickly to troubleshoot, maintain and upgrade software.

Efficiencies created by remote management tools allow leading MSP companies to offer unlimited service agreements because the reduced time required to fix previously expensive problems allows a risk calculation to be run and a cap to be put in place.

It’s also driving the cost per repair down fairly quickly, putting pressure on our industry to consolidate and that is placing a lot of pressure on smaller service providers to grow or get out.

We’re seeing the creation of larger, more capable support organisations, which is good news for the SME sector but not if you’re running one of the small, inefficient service companies.

The solution is clearly greener because there’s less carbon used in a remote connection than there is in a site visit from a tech in a car who may have driven for 30 minutes to do a 15-minute job that is now done in 15 minutes or less remotely.

Jobs are done faster because there’s less formality and less social contact in a phone support call.

That’s not so good for the social atmosphere in your business but it’s much more efficient and productive, creating financial gains on both sides – and it’s a sad organization that relies on visits from IT people to create social influence in the office.

There’s also a positive effect for IT people. Instead of being an isolated individual on the road and in the offices of others they’re surrounded by like-minded technical people who they can share information and ideas with.

That is creating competitive learning environments and more rapid knowledge sharing than our SME IT support industry previously enjoyed.

We’re also seeing more technicians who don’t move from desk work to being road warriors.

So next time you’re having a face-to-face chat with your IT person about the footy scores or the weather ask yourself whether there’s a better, faster way to get on with business – without burning fossil fuels.

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT service company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so If your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.

Is it time to jump into the cloud?

This week the big news in my world is, of course, the launch of the Microsoft Office 365 cloud-based Office applications. The battle is now on between Google Apps and Microsoft.

So, does this mean it’s time to stop what we’re doing and jump into the cloud? Probably not…

The world is now going to start assessing the functionality of the tools we’ve been given. There’s no doubt that our industry has just changed for the better, as we’ve just gained access to a tool that extends Office from the desktop and into the cloud, in a way that empowers us to work in a collaborative way. This is definitely not the end of the desktop though – it’s just a step in a new direction. I’m pretty sure that those who use it will discover new ways to do old tasks and new ways to do new things. Those that don’t try it will wonder how their competitors passed them by.

Office 365 is not here to stop us working via Office on the desktop. It’s more of a set of tools that can extend the tools that we’re already using. No doubt, it will take the IT community a while to come to terms with this and really get the most out of these tools. If you have teams of people working on documents in Word, Excel or PowerPoint, now there’s a way for your whole team to work on the same document, at the same time – and for everyone to see what they’re all contributing.

This needs new thinking. I don’t expect we’ll all use it, all of the time, but there are many ways that we can begin to use it effectively.

We just ran a business planning session, with our business plan in a spreadsheet. Six of us gathered in a room with our laptops and simultaneously added components for our business unit to the plan. Rather than discussing our ideas and updating the plan later, as we spoke we created together. If we put something in the spreadsheet that the group disagreed with, we could fix it on the spot. We found ourselves clarifying intentions as they were captured. The number of times we said, “That isn’t quite what I meant when I said that…” was interesting and the rapid capturing of clarified intent was very powerful.

In this instance, we collaborated around a table but we could just have easily have done it around the world with a phone hook-up.

How else will the collaborative technology improve the way we work, to have us do more in less time, with better outputs? Of course, we now have the opportunity to consider on-line exchange, with better access for Mac users and more features with its upgrade to Exchange 2010 – but that’s more of a technical pitch than a strategic one.

There’s also SharePoint and Lync to consider, which again, will give us new opportunities to re-invent work processes.

If you have some great ideas on how to use the tools we’ve been given, please add comments below.

It’s time for all of us old dogs to learn new tricks and start teaching the people around us to embrace these latest opportunities. There will no doubt be fierce debate about how good or bad it is, but I am only interested in what this gives us that we didn’t have before. We can discuss risks and security later – certainly don’t throw out your servers and load all your mission critical data onto it just yet!

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT service company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so If your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.