Cobweb

"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!

Get Safe Online Week

Get Safe Online is a little know campaign that's been running for a few years, and aims to be a single source of security information and advice.  Most of it seems to be aimed at small businesses which is a good thing.   

Get Safe Online Week runs from 12 to 16 November and there will be some online events and webcasts coming out soon i'm sure.  http://www.getsafeonline.org/

I'd recommend you take a quick at the "ABC 10 munute guide to security" which is on the front page currently.   It states the obvious, but you really should be using Windows XP by now, patching with Windows Update, turning on Windows Firewall and.... securing your wireless networks!!

Hosting and being in the public eye...

Oh dear - when someone gets it wrong it's all point and shout time.  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/11/bbc_news_website_down/

The BBC news web site had a few technical issues with it's main front page yesterday, other links and pages worked.    As we're all fascinated by other peoples misfortune (admit it you are... we've all watch people getting hurt/humiliated/crashed on You've Been Framed!) it's natural to dig about a bit and find out what's been going on with the BBC news site.   In addition i have an interest in this as we host some big sites too and use Akamai like the BBC.

Netcraft has some good information about what really happened with that site yesterday.   They also have some great tools, data and history about the internet - did you know that the internet grew by 7.6million websites last month!  http://news.netcraft.com/

Are we behind the curve in the UK?

Just having returned from a conference in the USA, I was once again surprised by the differences in the US and Europe hosting markets. There is no question that the sectors are facing the same challenges on both sides of the pond, issues such as Data Centre availability, mainly because of power restraints, the advance of the jumbo players in the market such as Google and Microsoft and the varying rates of adoption of Managed Services, by businesses, large and small. What puzzled me more is that is that there seems to be so much more innovation coming out of the US in terms of onlining the applications that currently sit on-premise, on the desktop. Is this is because the US investment money is chasing the “hosted” business model once again or the College system is churning out young guns with great ideas and execution skills? This is the first college year that the graduates have the internet all the way through school and college. The message from the analysts was loud and clear that the revolution is here and the time frame within 12 to 18 months to see a step change in the way businesses consume technology. For a Manages Service Provider in the UK, who has over 4000 business customers taking varying degrees of technology from us, it does not feel that way. Consult, buy and build still seems the norm for most businesses, although whenever I talk to customers this business model rarely delivers the results expected and it seems that they feel it is the IT consultants that benefit the most. Out of that comes the most important point for all Managed Service Companies, for at least the 12 months, the real competitor is not Google or Microsoft, or any of the new innovative solutions that we are all developing but the traditional on-premise solution of consult, buy and build. As a business dedicated to IT as a Managed Services are we alone in the UK or is anyone else looking forward to the "revolution"

Mark

It's only going to get worse

After reading the following article it seems like it's steadily getting to be more and more of a risk being online and carrying out any kind of transactions. When I read about the phising sites and how people are caught out by them it just goes to show how many naive people there are using the internet.

Here's some basic tips on making sure that you aren't the next credit card on that list they are selling!

• Use anti-spyware and anti-virus programs
• On at least a weekly basis update anti-virus and spyware products
• Install a firewall and make sure it is switched on
• Make sure updates to your operating system are installed
• Take time to educate yourself and family about the risks
• Monitor your computer and stay alert to threats
• Don't click on links in emails until you know exactly where they are going to
• Never open attachments in emails that will run things on your computer (.exes etc)

You can stay safe on the internet but you have to make the time and effort to be aware of whats going on around you.

Mark

Work is an Activity, not a Location

Becoming a dad for the first time in the last month has really brought it home to me the value of being able to work whenever and wherever.  Little Carter is fabulous but predictable he is not and when he wants attention he has to have it - whether his dad is trying to working or not. 

The flexibility to be able to work at a time that family life allows means that I am able to stay productive and respond to the needs of my team, partners and customers quickly and efficiently - whether it is via an ADSL/WiFi connection at home or sitting in Starbucks with a Windows Mobile device whilst he is sleeping.

Allowing and trusting your teams to work when and where the opportunity allows really does increase job satisfaction and helps me maintain a healthier work-life balance.  One of the main reasons I got into IT over 20 years ago was the potential I saw for how it could help make people's lives better - and now I am finally the beneficiary of the advances in mobile working technologies.

Let me know about your experiences of balancing family and work life and how technology helps you stay on top of things and how Cobweb could help improve the way you and your teams work.

 

Do we need a solution for email compliancy?

There’s been a lot of noise over the last year or so about “email archival”, “data retention”, “Sarbanes Oxley” etc. and there’s good reason for this, Radicati Group are telling us - “Compliance and Policy Management Market Poised to Grow to Over $2.4 Billion by 2011.”   So, you can see why the big guys want a piece of the action! 

I have a view about this.  I believe that this is mostly PR activity and hype being generated by hardware and vendors whom are seeing significant returns on the high-margin hardware and software solutions being deployed to address these “areas of high risk”.   

There are some legal compliance issue in the US, this is true.  Meeting the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley, or being SOX-compliant, is a real issue for some organisations in the US, but not all of them.  Certain types of organisation are more open to this than others.  There are some providers of data and email services that are running scared of the whole compliance issue because they are unable to take on the legal burden of responsibility that comes with providing compliancy services to US customers.

In the UK and EU we don’t have such tight regulations which is a relief, however we’re still subject to the media attention and marketing surrounding this. I won’t say it’s scaremongering, because it’s not, it’s PR.  By focusing on the negatives and the legalities, companies are unable to see the real value that archival services can bring to a business.

What’s interesting is that often the regulations are self-imposed internal rules within the organisation and not a government legislation.  This is important – only do what your business needs to do and don’t be led by media-hype or vendor advertising to deploy a solution that’s more than you need. 

Ensure that you are addressing the real business drivers within your business.   Think about the roles within your organisation and the data that those people are sending and receiving.  If you FD was to leave your business, wouldn’t it be useful to have a copy of the emails from 3 months ago when that £2m leasing agreement was agreed?  What if there are some issues with the payments and previous conversations are called in to question?  How about your Sales team – who’s word will you trust if your biggest customer says “before Jimmy left he’d agreed a 25% discount if we renewed our contract”.   Being able to find and recall these emails in would be beneficial to your business in both of these scenarios and there’s no mention of legal or compliancy here!

I have an archived copy of all my email for the last 2 years and a copy of all mailboxes for previous members of my team that have left Cobweb for greener pastures.   We use an email archival solution inside of Cobweb that works well with Exchange.  You can take it as read that it’s seamless to the end-user, secure, robust and reliable – it works.  I can think of a few occasions where I’ve had to find an old email from an archived mailbox, or find a document from Sent Items that was missing from a colleagues handover before they left.   On one occasion we just wanted to see the background email conversations between a key staff member and a customer of ours that was having business difficulties of their own.   None of this was due to pending legal action or pressing compliancy issue, but I was glad that information was there, and I take comfort knowing that everything’s stored away should I need it one day.

Hosted, Managed Applications is Green Computing?

One too many Software as a Service computing fits very well with the requirement to drive environmental improvements in any companies operations. We are already holders of ISO9001 and ISO27001 to ensure process and data security standards and now the business is now implementing ISO14000. This standard addresses the growing need for international environmental management standards and covers all aspects of environmental management systems including auditing, life cycle assessment and performance evaluation.

We serve many 1000s of small and medium companies messaging and data management requirements from our multi tenanted infrastructure. I believe a major part of ensuring that we reduce the negative environmental impact of IT is multi-tenancy. Our platform right now operates on about 1-100 ratio, which means for every server we have deployed we are replacing around 100 on- premise servers and it gets better, our servers optimally operate at around 60% utilization and around the clock due to our worldwide user base. In a smaller business environment, servers are often only utilized during core office hours but are drawing power all the time, so replacing those servers adds up to significant savings in Kw Hours.

We have become more and more interested in green computing over the last two years for a number of reasons and the adoption of the international quality and process standards requires us to take a hard look at all aspects of our operations. We started to realise that at the scale we are doing this we are replacing 1000s of on-premise servers and this has to be a good thing, environmentally, we also realized that power consumption is going to be a huge deal in today’s and tomorrows connected world.

We have also reviewed our own internal IT operations, and when we moved into bigger offices to combine our to two office locations at the end of last year we had a problem, the data room in the new space was not up to taking the 60 or so servers that are used to internal systems and test and development environment. We needed to find a better solution than spending a small fortune on upgrading the power and air conditioning in the new building.  We looked at the options and got very excited about the possibilities of emerging blade and vitalization technologies. This was the next logical step for us and knew that these technologies would be an important part of the production platform strategy in years to come and will deliver even better server-saving ratios and save us power cost as well as being far more flexible. The move to the vitalized environment went better that could be expected and we are down to 3 blades and a few physical servers, easier to manage and great for the polar bears!

We also have a strong social and environmental culture, and worked hard to ensure the new office is as green as possible, Mark, our Quality and Security Manager is leading the effort. We have a young workforce who are all keen to work for a socially responsible company, so getting buy in is not a problem for most, but for some turning off their PC every night means a change of working practices, but they will get used to it! There is lots we can do.

What about your organization, I know it’s hard in a small business, but what are your thoughts?

Email Compliance

Following a recent study released by Radicati that showed very strong growth prospects for the email compliance market for the next 4 years, it is worth considering the impact of the trend towards greater control over email communications. For small businesses I am sure the management of email is generally considered a lower priority than the constant day to day business challenges they face. Responsibility is often divulged to individuals to maintain good practice. Like Cobweb, many businesses will have policies in force, often buried in the company handbook and often do not give any guidance about which e-mails should be kept and for how long. But it cannot be presumed that employees realise the implications of deleting e-mails, or even which e-mails need to be retained, and this task should not be left in their hands. Total email management needs to be much more than a policy and, with the quantity and importance of emails in today’s busy business increasing all the time, automation has to be the key to a successful strategy. Incorporating spam and virus management, long term store, search and retrieve capabilities and if appropriate, content management, as well as robust written policies are all vital components to a comprehensive email compliance strategy and will ensure that when the worst happens you will be ready. Of course, the situation gets more serious if you are lucky enough to work in a regulated industry!

I am pleased to say that all of the technical components are already available in our business email solutions and many of our customers are already sleeping soundly knowing that they are doing all they can to minimise the business risk.  I would be interested to hear about the challenges in you business and how you have tried to address this tricky area.

Mark