Tag: information assets

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Optimize Costs of Business IT With Cloud Hosting on Azure

Small business owners, like managers of enterprise workgroups, face daily challenges in keeping business information secure yet available to co-workers and business partners. Each type of user has a different need when it comes to applications and data, and users often work from different locations.

For a small business owner, this may mean keeping a set of books at each of several business locations or maybe packing up the information and bringing home the data to work on at night. For a business enterprise it may be the challenge of providing centralized application and data access to multiple branch offices or a distributed workforce.

The problem is in providing affordable secure access to keep people productive. A great solution is moving from local IT to cloud IT on the Microsoft Azure platform with Noobeh.

QuickBooks on Azure from Noobeh

Anytime, Anywhere Access

Managing business data in a distributed environment or multi-location business is very difficult. When data files are stored on local PCs or on multiple servers, the organization may be spending quite a bit of money to backup and protect only some of its information assets. The data that rests on desktops, laptops and tablets is often overlooked and left unprotected.

Noobeh’s cloud service is a better alternative, hosting business applications and data on the massively scalable, agile and secure Microsoft Azure cloud. The service puts the business information and applications users need where they need them, allowing users to work from any location at any time.

Lower Cost of Supporting Productivity and Uptime

The #1 motivator for cloud adoption is cost optimization, according to the Microsoft Survey SMB Cloud Journey 2018. This is especially true for small and midsize businesses who are often running their businesses on lean budgets.

Compared to the costs traditionally associated with owning and maintaining a business network, managed hosting services can represent significant cost savings while improving the stability and security of the network overall.
It may seem that buying equipment and running it until it can’t go any more is the most cost-efficient way to handle business IT, but the real investment gets realized when businesses face the costs of lost productivity, incompatibility with modern technologies or services, and the risks that outdated systems introduce.

No Penalty For Going Back

Perhaps the most important element of application hosting services is the reality that the business aren’t penalized for making a different choice in the future.  Business conditions change and most small businesses want to know that they could return to localized operation if desired, and much more easily than if they had invested in a purely cloud-based or SaaS solution. When a business migrates to an online application, the process of converting back if it doesn’t work out is a daunting and costly task if it can really be done at all.

With the application hosting approach, you continue to use the applications and data you already have investments in… you simply use them from your cloud environment instead of running everything on your local PCs and server.

Application hosting services from Noobeh allow you to continue using the desktop products your business relies on but to also take advantage of modern platforms and cloud service. Noobeh delivers the applications and data from the Microsoft cloud platform, keeping it all managed and working.

But if you don’t want to keep working that way, you can always discontinue the service and pull your data back to your local computers where you simply install your software and keep working.

Noobeh cloud services help businesses get more from their investments in software, associated data assets and personnel training. Users get all the benefits of managed IT service and anytime, anywhere access to their applications and data plus the security of knowing their systems are running on a highly redundant and robust platform. Even with all of that, if the working model is not to their liking, they still have the option of taking their ball and going home.

Make Sense?

J

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Cloud IT: Hiding Complexity and Risk

jmbunnyfeet

Cloud IT: Hiding Complexity and Risk

Cloud computing and Internet technologies have delivered previously unimagined capability for even the smallest of businesses – capability to compete, build brand recognition, and reach markets in remote geographies.  The mantra for businesses used to be “location, location, location”, but it’s become connectivity – perhaps even more than location – which now delivers business opportunity.  As technology has evolved, allowing businesses and consumers to connect regardless of time or place, the complexity of the systems and networks have also increased dramatically.  Where a business could once easily identify their various vendors or business service providers, the identification of those involved in the service ‘delivery chain’ are no longer so easily recognized.   Among the benefits of cloud computing technologies is the ability to reach beyond traditional boundaries.  The risk for many businesses is in not fully understanding how, and with whom, those boundaries are being crossed.

For many an enterprise, the convenience and efficiency introduced with cloud computing models overshadows the increased risk potential.  Service level agreements and vendor contracts are assumed to be sufficient to protect the business and its information assets, yet recent events (such as the recent reveals of PRISM and the actions of the National Security Agency) should cause businesses to look a little deeper at their entire provider network.  It’s not that the average business should be concerned about government snooping of their emails, but they should be aware of who has access to their systems and data, and which entities are responsible for which parts of the system.  It’s only prudent to know the details, and it is the best first step to mitigate business risk.

Enterprise Clouds are complex, sophisticated entities which invariably rely on a daisy-chain of third parties and contractors to help build, run and maintain their Cloud provider’s systems. The organizational and technical complexities are additive, resulting in increased systemic risk. Systemic risk is the least visible and hardest to eliminate, and those risks become real when the providers’ systemic risks become [yours].

The question is, how well does your Cloud provider manage the ecosystem of contractors and third parties that are farther down the food chain? This is even more relevant in the globalized workforce, where, paradoxically, Cloud and related technologies have greatly facilitated the outsourcing and offshoring of work to low-cost countries. http://www3.cfo.com/article/2013/6/data-security_prism-national-security-agency-edward-snowden-cloud-implications-vendor-management

Before executing a service agreement with an outsourced provider, make certain that the details of facility, connectivity, network, equipment, and other elements of the delivery and system are spelled out.  Business subscribers should know where the various points of failure exist, and which company is responsible for dealing with each.  If a carrier fails and connectivity to the data center is lost, the hosting service provider may be powerless to impact the situation, even though access to service is part of the SLA and requirement.  If a hosted software product has a vulnerability or fails to perform, the developer of the product is likely responsible, rather than a hosting service provider.  The point is that there are often multiple players in the delivery chain, and customers should be aware of this reality prior to engaging with the service.

Ultimately, the business with mission critical data in the possession of a 3rd party service provider should have a healthy helping of doubt as to whether the provider has full control over their environment.  Business owners, managers and CFOs should recognize the increased necessity of evaluating risk within their provider systems and in provider/vendor relationships, to keep trade secrets secret and prevent intellectual property from becoming the property of others.

Joanie Mann Bunny Feet

Make Sense?

J

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A Holistic Approach to Cloud IT

holistic: a. Emphasizing the importance of the whole and the interdependence of its parts.

The Internet and cloud computing solutions can help businesses create an environment which allows team members and clients to work together more efficiently; where information can be generated once and used in a variety of ways by different users.  With this new capability to share documents and files in real-time, many businesses are finding that they are generating more electronic information today than ever before – and they’re having a hard time keeping these information assets organized.  With paper documents being digitized to allow for electronic distribution, OCR, and intelligent connecting to transaction data – lots of stored data is being produced and stored in a variety of places.

There are many technology models available, so there are a lot of options for businesses today – options which address the fundamental requirements to convert, store, secure, and distribute the various data types within the enterprise.  When a business elects to use a variety of cloud solutions or providers to address a number of business problems, how does that enterprise wrap its arms around the content which represents, in all actuality, the sum of business intelligence in the enterprise?  Keeping tabs on the business data is critical, but tracking all the data when it is stored with a variety of providers may be very difficult.

Example: If your business uses an online CRM such as Salesforce.com, runs QuickBooks on your local PC, and uses Gmail for email service… exactly where does your business data live?  With Salesforce?  On your local PC?  At Google?  In all 3 places?

Containment of distributed data isn’t the only issue facing businesses today.  Longevity and long-term access to data is a concern, as well.  Solutions and providers that exist today may not exist tomorrow.  If you have data invested in a solution with a short life span (and you probably won’t know this is the case until it’s too late), you may orphan your data and not be able to access it later.   And, if you can get your data from the provider, is it in a useful form or did you lose functionality when you lost the solution?

Example:  Intuit once introduced a paperclip (attached documents service) in QuickBooks, and offered the attached document feature at no charge.  The “free” service from Intuit encouraged a lot of users to migrate from other QuickBooks-connected document management solutions. Then… Intuit announced that the attached documents service would no longer be free.  Users with the service could still get to their documents via a web portal, but not from within QuickBooks, and certainly not as attachments to transactions or other records. Then the attached documents feature was once-again changed, allowing only storage to local PCs rather than on Intuit’s servers. Then, it went away entirely. 

Another issue facing businesses operating in the cloud is one of vendor lock-in (or lock-out), and being able to address the total business requirement.  Point solutions and vendor-specific solutions may address certain business problems, but generally aren’t able to handle all of the needs of a given business.  If your online solution doesn’t address the needs of the entire business, you risk increasing production costs and reducing productivity through duplication of data entry and other activities.

Example: An accounting firm with an insurance division uses Thomson Reuters Virtual Office service, which delivers certain accounting applications along with Microsoft Office on a remote desktop type of connection.  Unfortunately for the firm, the users operating in the insurance division use applications that aren’t supported or available via the Virtual Office solution.  So, certain users have completely disconnected services – a remote desktop serving up their Office apps, and a separate browser-based solution – neither of which integrate or work together.  The complexity and confusion caused by this situation has done little more than increase the burden of duplicate data entry, recreation of documents, and constant download-save-upload activities.

In each of these cases, a “holistic” approach to cloud IT services might have produced better results than by looking at each application or functional “solution” individually.

As an example, consider that a business with in-office and mobile employees needs to use accounting, office productivity, contact management, documents storage, and several browser-based solutions in order to provide the functionality and operational support necessary.    While many of these solutions are individually available online, the business opts to work with a single outsourced IT provider to create their own “private cloud” environment.

The solution includes remote/virtual desktops, hosted accounting applications, hosted Office applications, hosted browser (to allow browser and Internet-based apps to integrate with Office and other apps on the remote desktop), hosted CRM, and hosted document management… all applications that the business selects and might even have been using for years are included.

All  applications are delivered on the remote desktop environment, providing users with the ability to open documents instantly, save and share files seamlessly, and participate in a central company-wide document store.

All applications are licensed to the business, so they have the flexibility of returning to local IT operations simply by implementing their own software in their own network and taking the data off the host.

Because all of the business data resides on this single hosting platform, the business is able to not only keep control of all information assets, but is also able to back up and protect (preserve) that data in its entirety.

Now doesn’t that make sense?

J

Learn more…

 

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“Business as Usual” Isn’t Cutting It

“Business as Usual” Isn’t Cutting It

For a lot of businesses today, “business as usual” just isn’t cutting it.  Competition is getting more aggressive, and clients are demanding more while margins are shrinking and the cost of operating the business just seems to go up.  Business owners and their CFOs must recognize that it’s time to change the way they operate.  By leveraging innovative technologies and cloud solutions, it is possible to transform the way critical business decisions are made and to radically improve how the business serves their customers, empowers their sales force, and keeps mobile workers working.

Business intelligence comes from all aspects of the business, not just accounting and finance.  Particularly in volatile economy, where uncertainty weighs heavily on each and every business owner, it is essential that the business make the best possible use of its information assets to eek out every bit of insight it can in order to not simply survive, but to find a way to identify and capture opportunities which will propel the business forward.

Data is just data, but information is power.  It takes skill and experience to turn raw data into instant insight, and this is where accounting and finance professionals should be placing their focus.  With a wise and intelligent approach to “enabling” businesses with tools to help streamline and improve process effectiveness, and structuring systems to capture and integrate data throughout the operation, CFOs and accounting professionals can assist their business clients in turning operational and financial data into actionable information supporting better decision-making.

Make Sense?

J

Read more… What will my business be worth when I need it to be worth a lot?  Your Exit Strategy