Cobweb

Data Security and Service Performance concerns

Following the announcement last week that HP partners are able to resell managed services from Cobweb, there's a more detailed article from datacentretimes.com on the subject.

In particular the article questions and, quite rightly, challenges data security and service availability from a customer point of view. Two key business challenges if you're considering managed/cloud services for your business. I believe the reaffirmation of Cobweb's accreditations for data security and our 99.9% guaranteed Service Level Agreement come out strong in the article.

There are also a couple of lovely pictures in the article. We don't look like that in real life ;-)

Dan - http://twitter.com/dan_germain

Rogue SharePoint deployments cause security menace

If you're a business manager and you constantly struggle getting simple & flexible solutions for data management from your internal IT guys, then the chances are you're working around this with a rogue SharePoint deployment

"Gartner estimates that 30% of SharePoint servers are rogue deployments, launched by business managers without the IT department's knowledge. SharePoint is easy to set up and easy to use, which makes it popular with the power-user crowd. That might be nice for Microsoft's pocketbook but not for IT pros. Rogue deployments are not likely to be very secure"

So what's the quick, secure and flexible solution? Simple - buy hosted SharePoint

Dan - http://twitter.com/dan_germain

The power of partnerships?

One of the things about the current economical crisis poses the issue about how do businesses adjust to being in a tougher climate to firstly steady the ship and secondly put together a plan that sees them through the unsteady period?

I have quite a few friends that are builders (good if you want work done on your house, not so good at polite dinner parties for clean jokes!) and they are feeling the strain on the economy as much as anyone at the moment. I asked one of them how as a small two person company they would still be able to get enough work to pay them both a salary when so many other people are tightening their belts and putting off having work done?

'Simple', he said, we pool resources with other smaller firms and share work between us so that we all get some work to tide us over. That way we can still compete with some of the bigger firms that have the money to ride out the lean spells and we have a good network of people that we know we can trust'.

Now there is nothing revolutionary in what he was saying but out of necessity they have to work together with potential competitors just to survive, and may actively help someone today who will take their business next month, or next year, and they have to trust them. The human need to survive, even in business outweighs the need to make money, or greed. I like that.

So, what's the point I'm making? Do firms go for the knee jerk reaction and lay off staff (normally the most expensive aspect of a business) Do they cut operational costs? Do they downsize the business to a smaller location? Or do they even think about partnering with another company and looking to use that relationship to either offer more to their own customers, or offer their services to their new partners? Is that even considered?

Partnering with the right company can have pretty compelling results. If you don't do it would a competitor of yours? Would they then have that competitive advantage over you?

Cobweb uses it's own partnerships to great effect (I think!) As a smaller company (>150 employees) we have to ensure that we gain the maximum benefits for us customers. Partnering with someone for the sake of it is never going to work. Having some reciprical services and a cultural fit between the two businesses are fundamental to the success of the partnership. I'd be interested in other peoples feedback around this and if you think you can partner with Cobweb or even that we can partner with you then please do contact me.

I think the main point of what I've said above is that we'd be fools to discard the idea without proper consideration.

Mark

 

What’s on the mind of the average Small Business manager in times of financial crisis?

Here at Cobweb we are as attuned to the world of the Small Business as anyone can be – after all we are one, not the smallest admittedly but, at 70 people we have to manage the same issues as everyone else.

The world of the Small business is a mixed and varied one, we have some customers who are busier than ever, market dynamics dictate that there will always be some winners in a downturn but, what about the rest who have to deal with the realities of a prolonged global downturn. Obviously the first and most important consideration I would guess is cash, cash flow, raising cash for expansion or investment in the business, collecting it in from debtors and trying to get the best terms from suppliers, the old adage “cash is king” is even more important in hard times.

The second one for me is Risk, choosing the right customers who will end up paying, choosing the right suppliers, who are there for the long term, making the right buying decisions and managing employment risk.

Third in my list is business efficiency, from marketing operations though to improving whatever the output of whatever it is you business produces, efficiency of staff, processes and tools, sounds easy but we all know it’s not...

I like to think that Cobweb plays it part in helping to manage these difficult activities through the services it offers to small and medium businesses. We have invested huge amounts over the last 3-4 years to be the best at what we do making the choice an obvious one when a business decides to throw off the shackles of managing expensive in-house, non strategic IT services such as email, file sharing, customer management and data backups. Improving employee and process efficiency by using Enterprise class tools is a no brainer, but when you realise there is NO upfront capital investment and your monthly charges scale down as well as up because you only pay for what you use, it seems crazy that any business under 200 employees would consider going down the route of consult-buy-build-consult-manage-improve-consult-consult-consult when those consulting billable hours just keep coming, and if you are managing IT yourself what is the hidden cost of your time or downtime?

And risk using a managed service? just use a provider who has been around for a while (Cobweb established 1996) and, most importantly is making profits that can be reinvested in better services, is externally audited preferably to ISO27001 standard, and runs a on premise UK based 24/7 365 service support centre. As a clue there is only one provider who fits these criteria!

Hang onto your cash – don’t buy servers and licensing – Pay as you use

Don’t take risks – Choose you partners carefully

Efficiency – Give you employees the best and then expect the best

I apologise if this post seems a little like an advert for Cobweb’s services I guess it is....

Mark

Gartner advises firms under 1000 users to outsource

Interesting piece about Gartner advising business to consider Webmail as a viable cost effective alternative. We at Cobweb say - great news - Gartner are endorsing the IT model that we have been delivering since 2001 - but wait a moment, are they seriously suggesting that businesses should use Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail for their mission critical communications medium? Managing mail for over 5000 business customers I think we have a good idea of the needs of the sub 1000 user organization and there are 3 things these customers need great support, great support and great support.

Of course they also need mobility options, Blackberry, Windows mobile, Iphone, also compliant archiving as well as flexible migration scenarios, simple and complex mail routing and an array of other technical features, but, most importantly they need to know that they can access high quality support in way they want to, when they want to.

It is also important to recognise that different roles in any business require different features, deskless workers may or may not need offline working, office users may need interoperability with other office systems such as CRM or ERP solutions. So yes I agree - businesses under 1000 users should not deploy internal mail systems, but, as they outsource - do the due diligence and find a provider that meets their own individual needs, and my guess is that not many of them will opt for Hotmail!

See the Computer Weekly artical here

   

"In-House Out-House" – pain, IT Consultants, migrations and TCO!

Consider this view of "when hosting goes bad" (annotated from SMB Thoughts by Brian Williams and I’ve clarified the odd point)

A ten user environment gets the advice from another solution provider, or kid, that a simple Microsoft Small Business Server with Hosted Exchange services is the perfect solution for their office. So the solution is implemented and for the first 3 months everything is working great; file sharing, automated backup, shadow copy, remote access, mobile sync…you know all the stuff that makes a business tick. Then out of the blue, the Hosted Exchange provider has an outage, the outage lasts a day and a half. OK, no problem just happened once, then a week later another outage, now the client is not happy we need to find another provider. We now get the call and are asked to step in as their new trusted advisor, I now have to give them the bad news.

·         All those shared calendars you have established, those are going to break.   They will need to be shared out again.

·         All those public folders you setup, those will need to be re-established along with permissions. We’ll need to export those public folders to .PST and re-import.

·         You use the auto-complete function in Outlook as your address book/contact list…that’s a fantastic Office feature, will need to migrate those .nk2 files

·         We’ll need to export all the Outlook profiles to .PST then re-import under the new provider

·         We’ll need to resetup Mobile phone sync, best to wipe the phone and start clean.    Just need to change the ActiveSync settings

·         As you can see while SaaS has some great benefits it can quickly turn ugly. The above example was just Hosted Exchange I can’t even imagine the CRM migration process.

So if you begin offering SaaS you better inform your client of the migration or exit strategy if they decide later they don’t like the solution or decide to move to an in-house solution.

This is an interesting post and provokes some discussion.  Clearly Brian is someone who’s picked up the pieces more than once!   The real cause of this issue is not the incorrect choice of solution for a critical function, but the quality of the solution you choose.   Of course, you can move to a disastrously unreliable in-house solution too!

He’s a US IT provider and I think this issue is becoming more common in the US with online services and the lowering cost, more competitive market and new entrants.  The entry of new, small, poorly financed and /or inexperienced service providers into the hosting market is becoming an issue and may be starting to damage the name of the industry too.   Clearly we don’t want this to become too much of an issue – even Microsoft need to be careful that their entrance into the market with Microsoft Online Services has a positive benefit for all, and they are working very hard with their partners to ensure this.

So, how do you chose a provider that doesn’t have multiple 1-day+ outages?

Look for experience & track record, scalability and resilience, accreditations and partnerships, inspect the hardware and storage vendors they use, look their company history and finances. It’s also worth bearing in mind that a service provider who’s core business is hosting will be more committed to service delivery that one who’s core business lies elsewhere.

As the hosting market matures even more, the reliability of the supplier (or even the internal systems) will improve on average all round. So the difference between good and bad hosters in terms of reliability will reduce.

Of the problems on the original post above, I believe these can be similar or worse with an in-house solution further down the line. The “bad news” Brian has to give the client is actually just time and money to them – they are paying the IT consultant to fix the issue, they aren’t actually importing their public folders or sync’ing the address book themselves!

Here the client is just spending $$$ on the migration away from a hosted solution – have they considered the TCO of in-house solution… will they spend this much again every few months/years applying Service Packs, upgrading to Exchange 12, buying more licenses, upgrading storage or performance, or installing an archive solution. A bit of pain migrating in/out between service providers isn’t that bad really, it’s not like you’re doing this every 6 months – our average customer lifetime is ~3-years and increases every month.

With Exchange and CRM – the solution isn’t to have an easy in/easy-out process, it’s to find a reliable, robust and resilient solution which balances the total costs and provides the right level of service for your business.   Find this, either in-house, from a service provider, or from Microsoft Online, and you’ve got a trusted solution for life!

thanks, Dan

Iphone

Much to the horror of our technical guys I sucummed to the marketing hype and purchased an phone. The in-store experience was a little confusing as I was told I would have to wait for a SIM card to be delivered by post, so imagine my excitement when during the sign up processm I received a confirmation text from O2. Yes, the sign up experience was every bit as slick as you would expect and the touch screen interface is the best I have used so far. But my real aim was to see how it stacked up against our Hosted Exchange service. I have used a number of Windows Mobile and Blackberry devices and I know that the functionally would not be as good. So what you get is synchronization of calender and contacts to your Outlook client via Itunes and mailbox access through something called IMAP.  My main concern was getting all my contacts on to the device, and this worked very well, I have not managed to get my diary across yet but I sure its me not the phone. Email works and synchronizes well and whilst it is not as good as Active sync its effective. So overall hI am happy, especially as the Bluetooth works in my car, Should you get one use as a business tool? there are probably better devices out there, but as a cool multi purpose device that does your email as well then, you could do worse.

Have a Happy Holiday and keep checking back 2008 is going to be a busy year for Cobweb...

Mark

The changing (dying?) face of email

We were just reading this http://slate.com/id/2177969/pagenum/all/#page_start and were wondering about the predicted doom of email as social-networking, texting and IM takes over from traditional email communications for many people.  Scary stuff, will there even be another version of Exchange?

Of course there will, but my take on the above is this... It’s not a real threat to hosters of business services in our professional lifetimes, or even in the short to mid-term.

On a personal and social level we have been texting and using mobiles for nearly 15 years now (I had my first 'analog' mobile at Uni in '94) and SMS has boomed beyond any initial expectations, but that’s had little impact to the business world (Cobweb are a business email provider, not a multi-million mailbox consumer ISP)

Alternative forms of communication only seem to serve as an increase for information and communications. It’s healthly competition and serves to promote the medium and individuals seem to thrive for more information and contact on a 24/7 basis now.

What this really is, is an opportunity to pull all forms of communications together, and allow your message to reach it’s destination regardless of the medium or location of the recipient. If my status is set as "business contactable", whether I’m at home, emmersed in online gaming, in the car or on the phone – you should be able to deliver a message to me via my preferred medium of choice, be that IM, mobile, home, car, SMS, hotmail, voicemail, audio, fax?, written, visual notification, etc.  That would be really clever! 

Combine these solutions for business, business groups, personal, home and family communications and you’ll be singing! BTW, having a status of "do not disturb" or "authorised escalations only" would be required for me to buy into any service like this...

Availability, availability, availability.

Since this is my first entry into Cobweb’s blog since we’ve started this, so I’d like to introduce myself a little first:  I am the Technical Manager at Cobweb, responsible for the Technical Team and the systems that they support.  I joined about one year ago (just coming up...) coming previously from mostly large corporate organisations.  Going from a company where I was one of 75,000 others to a company where I know something about everyone who works at Cobweb was certainly a change to what I’m familiar with!  I’ve really enjoyed the difference though and if I cannot believe that I’ve been working with Cobweb that long it goes some way to explain how exciting the last year has been.  So for my first entry I thought I’d write about a subject close to the heart of my role at Cobweb – availability.

According to the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, ‘available’ describes a thing “able to be used or obtained” and for us of course that means our systems able to be used by our customers.  If you’re interested in the numbers, in a 30-day month there are 43200 minutes, and therefore to meet an availability of 99.5%, unplanned downtime must not exceed 217 minutes, or 3.6 hours.  99.9% must not exceed 43.2 minutes, and 99.99% must not exceed 4.32 minutes.

The last three months at Cobweb have been a journey as far as this is concerned, with a heavy month in August followed by the best result for the year in September, and a very good service in October – 99.78%, 99.99% and 99.95% respectively as averages for Hosted Exchange services.  In August we suffered a hardware issue on one Exchange platform – the first in my eleven months at Cobweb, and on another Exchange platform, repeated problems with non-paged pool memory.  The former required an engineer to resolve the issue and restore redundancy, and the non-paged pool memory an initial reduction in mailbox numbers that night to bring the service within limits.

Both of these events in August served as a significant alert to me and the operational teams of Cobweb – especially speaking first hand with customers impacted and disappointed by both outages.  So what have we been doing since these events?  Well, we have made a number of changes to process and service content, from simple items such as getting up-to-date availability information centre stage in front of the Technical Team, to work with Microsoft and our own lab-research on how our platforms behave.  Last week on one platform for example, further to lab-testing, we replaced network cards in an HP server with Intel equipment to gain an immediate reduction in non-paged pool memory usage – something we know impacts stability when it increases. 

Based on the figures, this activity has paid off in September and October with improvements across all systems and these issues not repeated.  And we haven’t finished yet.  The change to network cards for example we will achieve across the other clusters, and I’m confident that there’s always going to be something else that we can do to benefit this.  And I think that this is the greatest lesson of availability, as it is in business, that no matter how good you are today, you need to be better and sharper tomorrow to stay ahead.

Maybe you do need a solution for Email Compliancy...

I'm going to revisit a previous post - Do we Need a Solution for Email Compliancy, where I said that you should understand what your business needs to do about retaining data and not be pushed by industry trends or the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) that vendors create (thanks and credit to James H due here!)

I've been seeing a fair bit of noise about MiFID recently and delved into what it's all about.   Simply, MiFID stands for the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive - Europe trying to update the regulations around investment banks, market data companies, trading platforms and exchanges that haven't worked very well to date.
The MiFID directive allows companies to provide services across borders and establish branches in other European states.   It also makes share trading easier and removes the need to use traditional exchanges.

Why the worry though?  well, businesses will have to be able to prove 'best execution' on the deals they perform.  The will be accountable for best price, venue, cost and speed... and they will have to keep records for five years.   Providing a clear audit trail is going to be important here.  Finding the right information and making it available is just as important as collecting it and retention.

So this means that new processes and systems are needed to deal with this.  Systems to calculate the 'best execution' of a deal are one thing, but each deal, trade adn transfer will have communications, decisions and reasons behind it.  Email is typically the system used for these sort of communication currently, while corporate IM will catchup fast if the auditory systems can be put in place.  All big bucks no doubt.  Given that this industry trades trillions of pounds/dollars/euros a day, you can expect the big vendor marketing departments to be working awat, and lawyers preparing their cases for the fall out when the first test cases come along!