10 Reasons to purchase:

• An encrypted ‘forensic grade’ email compliance archive with a tamper proof evidence repository that works in concert with most email solutions.
• High performance eDiscovery searching.
• Prove your organization did or did not send or receive a given email internally or externally.
• Ensure compliance to 100’s of regulations affecting email services.
• Provide forensic grade analysis on emails and attachment content for legal submission via e-discovery functionality.
• Demonstrate to regulatory bodies and authorities good corporate governance.
• Implement disaster recover processes to maintain email services.
• Manage storage for your email /MS Exchange servers and /or end user PST/OST files.
• Protect your email from accidental deletion and recover any email message in seconds.
• Implement a solution which will scale with your organization.
• Installation in 15 minutes with no policy configuration or further management.
• High performance searching and e-Discovery at search engine speed.

Cost is ONLY £3.00 per month per mailbox.

There is no real straight forward answer to this question, it really does depend on your current situation, what applications you are using, whether you have the trust, what type of company you have. All these things need to be discussed before you can make a final decision. LAN Support Cloud services could be live and business changing for your company, the best thing sliced bread. On the other hand it may not ever be suitable for you.

However, I'm being asked 'almost on a Dailey basis now' about cloud! Some clients just say "get me a price for this cloud thing, Its cheap", only if it were so simple? While completing some of my own research i stumbled upon this blog about cloud computing and while I continue to challenge and to be challenged I thought I would just share these with you, although it might back fire on me somewhat!!!!!

So many vendors are now looking to “the cloud” as the solution and growth path for business involved in the SMB space.  I mentioned in my blog post last week that Microsoft had killed EBS 2008 based on the growth of the cloud as a solution.  This really makes me think a lot about the cloud movement and what it means to us in the future.

The cloud is seen by many vendors as a great solution to oh-so-many business problems.  There are many fanciful claims about having your data and applications in the cloud, and it’s hard to tell fact from fiction at times.

The upside of cloud hosted applications and data is that it will always be available to you, from anywhere in the world with only the need for a web browser and an Internet connection.  You won’t need to invest in expensive hardware to run your business.  You won’t need to worry about maintenance of the hardware or software.  You’ll only need to pay a fixed fee per month for it all.  Sounds fantastic, doesn’t it?  In reality it is pretty cool, but let’s think a little about that for a moment. 

You ONLY need a web browser AND an Internet connection....

What connection speed will be acceptable?  What happens when your Internet connection is down, maybe due to a cable cut in the street?  How will your office survive if that is the case, given your email is all hosted externally now?  Who else will have access to your data when it’s stored in the cloud?  How can you guarantee compliance with the various regulatory bodies in respect to that data? 

You won’t need expensive hardware to run your business or maintenance...

But you will pay a portion of your fixed monthly fee towards that as will everyone else who uses that service.  Great in theory, but what happens if the vendor decides to skim on the expensive, reliable hardware to make more profit?  Maintenance periods will be at the cloud vendors choosing now, not at yours.  How will you cope if the maintenance period is at a busy time for you?

The fixed monthly fee is nice, too...

But what happens when the vendor who has your applications and data decides to increase the fee? Or decrease service levels that they give for the existing fee?  How easy will it be to get access to your data and move it to another vendor or in fact back in house?

How about some other questions...

What happens to your apps and data when the company hosting them goes bankrupt?  Who OWNS your data hosted in the cloud and what access would you have in those circumstances?  What about where your data is located? If you are not a U.S. company and your data is located on U.S. soil (which much of it is), how much do you know about the Patriot Act?

Yes, I know. I’m asking a LOT of questions in this blog post and not providing many answers. That is the point; there are way more questions than answers and we as IT professionals need to be aware of these things when we go to advise our customers of the latest and greatest cloud solutions.

With all that in mind, what do you think the risk of putting all your data and apps into the cloud?

Comments (6)

17-Mar-2010 09:17 Brian Kraemer    says:

Wayne -- some great points here. I'd never considered how a cloud application will be maintained. That's something solution providers and customers should probably address in a contract, don't you think?

17-Mar-2010 11:08 David Dadian    says in response to Brian Kraemer:

Excellent points Wayne, and Brian you are absolutely on track! A very detailed cloud/SaaS agreement/contract is required. We spent a fair amount of time having one developed and it addresses many of the questions Wayne raises, with the major point being "data ownership". Fee  increases are a concern, but many tend to understand these as they are similiar to the services they now utilize like, gas and electric, cellular phone service and cable tv (when was the last time you experience a price decrease there)?  We even had to include clauses for European end-users and Government end-users. All in all a 15 page document, not quite the size of the healthcare bill, but at least once you read it you understand and know what is in it!

17-Mar-2010 12:43 Robert Williams    says:

Although your points and questions are valid; however, you sound a bit pessimistic.  The solutions provider should be helpful and responsive enough to know how and when loads are too heavy (or times of year) to avoid the issue of downtime.  One would also assume that any upgrades or maintenance would be announced.  At least those are my thoughts.

17-Mar-2010 14:59 Old ISV    says:

Wayne,

You have hit all the obvious points but haven't addressed the 800 pound gorilla, response time.

Take this example; in house reponse time averages .25 seconds and cloud response time averages 2 seconds. A service writer (the industry for our vertical) sees this difference 250 times during the full cycle from initial estimate to finalized invoice. Working on 10 tickets a day that means that worker loses 25 minutes of productivity a day. The technicians working behind that service writer lose a similar amount of time because they get their instructions later and they spend that extra time waiting for response at their stations. If the shop has 2 service writers each handling 4 techs the net loss is 3.75 hours a day. At an all up cost of $50 an hour (top line techs make $60K plus) that is $187.50 a day for an average 240 days a year comes to $45,000 a year in lost productivity.

That company would still need the same 10 user LAN to access the cloud. The one time cost of a quad core server with dual hot swappable power supplies, redundant drives and controllers and a substantial UPS plus maintenance is far below the cloud cost. The annual cost of server monitoring and maintenance is fairly low.

People relying on home wi-fi are getting significantly slower speeds than from their fixed broadband connection, research suggests.

The study ran one million tests over 14,000 wi-fi connections in the UK, US, Spain and Italy.

On average, the results showed a 30% drop-off compared to the speed coming into the home.

However, the research also suggests that users tolerate slower speeds in exchange for the freedom wi-fi offers.

"People are voting with their feet and trading speed for the benefits of mobility," said Iain Wood, from network measurement firm Epitiro, which carried-out the study.

He said that researchers were "surprised" by the amount of drop-off in speed but that for the majority of consumers the slower connection would not be noticed.

"Most of us do e-mailing and web surfing and for these things there is precious little difference between the 50Mb/s services and an 8Mb/s service," he said.

This is because web surfing uses up relatively small amounts of data.

But for other services, such as downloading video or watching IPTV, the degradation of speed will become more noticeable.

Telephony services such as Skype could also be particularly affected, thinks Professor Andy Nix, a wireless expert at Bristol University.

"If you have a poor quality router and you are using wi-fi at some distance away from it, you could struggle to have a decent Skype conversation," he said.

But, he added, for those who invest in good quality wi-fi equipment and position it sensibly, the effects of the speed degradation would hardly be noticed.

Baby monitors

The study raises interesting questions for an industry obsessed with speed.

"There seems to be a disconnect between the ISPs striving to deliver faster speeds and consumers who are happy to accept slower wi-fi speeds," said Mr Wood.

For those unhappy with their home wi-fi, there are some simple measures that can be taken to improve their connections.

"Firstly people can change channels on their wi-fi router to reduce interference. If they live in flats or urban locations there are likely to be other routers operating on the same channel," said Mr Wood.

Other devices in the home, such as baby monitors, TV remotes and cordless phones can also cause interference.

And for those wanting to download video, the speed issue is resolved simply by plugging the laptop or other wireless device into the router, said Mr Wood.

A Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack is designed to hinder or stop the normal functioning of a web site, server or other network resource. There are various ways for hackers to achieve this. One common method is to flood a server by sending it more requests than it is able to handle. This will make the server run slower than usual (and web pages will take much longer to open), and may crash the server completely (causing all websites on the server to go down).

A distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack differs only in the fact that the attack is conducted using multiple machines. The hacker typically uses one compromised machine as the ‘master’ and co-ordinates the attack across other, so-called ‘zombie’, machines. Both master and zombie machines are typically compromised by exploiting a vulnerability in an application on the computer, to install a Trojan or other piece of malicious code.

Warning over anti-virus cold-calls to UK internet users

source bbc website; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11754487

Internet users are being warned about cold-callers who offer to fix viruses but then install software to steal personal information.

Campaign group Get Safe Online said a quarter of people it had questioned had received such calls, many suspected to have been from organised crime gangs.

Some gangs, employing up to 400 people, are known to set up their own call centres to target people en masse.

Internet users are also urged to be wary of pop-ups offering virus checks.

Earlier this year, search engine giant Google warned it had discovered massive amounts of malicious fake anti-virus software.

The UK warning on such software comes from Get Safe Online, which is backed by the government, police forces and major businesses with a stake in internet security.

It says it has charted a growth in two related scams designed to trick people into installing fake anti-virus software as a means of harvesting personal information such as credit card details.

Some of the scams involve pop-up windows claiming that the computer has been infected.

These "scareware" approaches encourage users to click through to a site hosting malicious or useless software that acts as a front for gathering personal information. Most of the time, the software appears almost identical to professional anti-virus products.

In other cases, gangs have set up call centres in eastern Europe or Asia and cold-call UK phone numbers attempting to find people to con.

In both cases, information gathered from the identity thefts can be used by gangs or sold on to other criminals through online market places.

Investigators from the UK's Serious and Organised Crime Agency (Soca) e-crime unit attempt to track scams back to the source gangs who have set them up.

Sharon Lemon, deputy director of Soca, said: "In recent cases, we have seen gangs employing 300 to 400 people to run their operations and using call centre-scale set ups to target victims en masse.

'Hefty returns'

"They can also be paying out as much as $150,000 (£92,000) a month to individual webmasters who are unwittingly advertising their fake software - this level of investment from criminals indicates that the returns are much heftier than this."

Tony Neate, head of Get Safe Online, told the BBC that one operation in eastern Europe turned over £4.5m in a year.

He said: "This is big business, and it's preying on people's fears of the internet. The internet is a great place but when somebody phones you up and tells you you have a virus on your machine, you will start to panic."

Dr Emily Finch, a criminologist at the University of Surrey, said: "The general public is more internet security-aware than it was five years ago. Malicious anti-virus scams are an indication that criminals are now tapping into this.

"Rather than exploiting our ignorance - the basic premise of common scams such as phishing - they are actively using our knowledge and fear of online threats to their advantage."

Get Safe Online's annual report says its research suggests a third of UK internet users are still victims of viruses, despite steady improvements in security. More than a fifth said they had suffered identify fraud.

ICM interviewed 1,520 computer-using adults during October for the survey.

BBC News website readers have been reacting to this story with their experiences of unsolicited calls. Here is a selection of their comments:

I have received this type of call and also the pop-ups. The pop-ups are the most difficult because they prey on the fear of being infected. The software should never be downloaded or activated. One give-away on the telephone calls is that they say they are calling about your 'Windows computer' - of course Windows is an operating system, not a computer. I have had two such calls and the caller got more pressing when I pointed that out to him. He said, "well that is up to you sir but your computer is infected." Raymond, Milton Keynes

"Richard" has telephoned me a couple of times from India informing me that I was on the computer - which was true - and that a virus had been detected. I informed him my husband was a computer engineer and there was no possibility of this being the case. Gillian, Hereford I too have received such calls. The golden rule as far as I'm concerned is to not entertain any unsolicited contact. That includes phone calls, pop-ups and visitors to your home. If you didn't actively request contact, then simply ignore it. They'll quickly move on. Darren, Barnsley We have received a large number of telephone calls from people purporting to be representing Microsoft and telling both my wife and I (who have both answered calls at different times from these individuals) that they have noticed that our computer has a virus, and offering to talk us through the removal process. In all cases we put the phone down. Ian, Newcastle

I received a call a few months ago saying that there was a problem with my PC. As I have a Mac instead, I was immediately suspicious so I said "this is a scam" and put the phone down. Kate, Leeds

The term Trojan refers to the wooden horse used by the Greeks to sneak inside the city of Troy and capture it. The classic definition of a Trojan is a program that poses as legitimate software but when launched will do something harmful similar but not the same as a virus. The difference with Trojans is that they can't spread by themselves, which is what distinguishes them from viruses and worms.

Today, Trojans are typically installed secretly in attachments, patches or other software and deliver their malicious payload without your knowledge. Much of today’s crimeware is comprised of different types of Trojans, all of which are purpose-built to carry out a specific malicious function. The most common are Backdoor Trojans (often they include a key logger, ideal from tracking those bank details), Trojan Spies, password stealing Trojans and Trojan Proxies that convert your computer into a spam distribution machine.

I get asked this question more times over a period of one month than my daughter try’s to con me for money, clothes, iTunes must-have. A virus is a program that replicates, for example it spreads from file to file on your system and from PC to PC or server to server. In addition, it may be programmed to erase or damage data.

Worms are generally considered to be a subset of viruses, but with certain key differences. A worm is a computer program that replicates, but does not infect other files. Instead, it installs itself once on a computer and then looks for a way to spread to other computers.

In the case of a virus, the longer it goes undetected, the more infected files there will be on the computer. Worms, however, create a single instance of their code. Moreover, unlike a virus, a worm code is stand-alone. In other words, a worm is a separate file while a virus is a set of code which adds itself to existing files.

A Quick explanation, the Benefits

Remote Backups work basically like regular tape backups, with one important difference. Instead of sending backups to a tape drive or other media attached to the computer it is backing up, a Remote Backup sends it over the Internet (or modems and phone lines) to another computer safely off-site. It does this (usually) at night while the business is closed and nobody is using the computers. It's completely automatic. In fact, you may even forget it's working every night.

Most small businesses put their lives on the line every night and don't realize it. With businesses depending more and more on the data stored in their computers, proper backups are becoming much more critical. Remote Backups accomplish several essential steps that are often overlooked or done improperly by other backup software - especially in the regular non-automated backup systems.

• Backups are done on schedule, every night. Most businesses don't do this. For one reason or another, they don't keep a regular backup regimen. Usually it's because the person responsible for doing backups (if there is one) is too busy doing something else, or someone is using the computer when it's time for a backup, or they simply forget. Since Remote Backups are done with automated software at night when nobody is using the computer, backups are always done on schedule.

• The correct files are backed up. Ordinary backup software is often installed with a list of files to be backed up. This set of files usually represents the state of the system when the software was installed, and often misses critical files. Further, it often fails to back up files that are added later. Compounding this problem, VERY few businesses take the trouble to reset their backup software regularly to include new files. RBS's Remote Backups solve this problem with a sophisticated system that constantly reevaluates each client's system, adding files to the backup as needed.

• Redundant copies of files are stored using a sophisticated version control system unavailable in any other backup software of any kind. This is much too important to overlook. The general definition of "proper" backups requires redundancy. That is, one must keep multiple FULL copies of the same files at different points in their development, called versions. As an example, you should have a different copy of each backed-up file for each day of the week, one for each week in the month, and one for each month in the year. Further, you should be able to easily restore any of your files up to any given point in time. Banks do it, big corporations do it, and so should small businesses. Only RBackup has such an easy to use version control system.

• Backups are encrypted for complete security. Would you want someone to be able to slip one of your backup tapes into a pocket and take it to your competitor? It happens all the time. Tape backups are not generally encrypted, so anyone can read them and gain access to your client database, billing records, payroll, tax info, and everything else on your computer. RBS's Remote Backup system encrypts its backups for complete security so nobody, not even LAN Support, can read them except the client himself.

Finally and most importantly - Backups are immediately sent off-site and stored safely away from the computer and the business. This is where almost every business makes its biggest mistake. Even if you do everything else perfectly, your backups are of little use if your building burns, or you are unable to physically recover your tapes from the premises. Most small companies who do backups leave the tapes in the building with the computer, where they can be destroyed right along with the computer.

For more information on remote backup, or for a quotation please call 01483 413360 or email info@lansupport.co.uk

London Office
LAN Support Limited
81 Oxford Street
London
W1D 2EU
United Kingdom

Tel: 0207 903 5065
Fax: 0207 903 5333

A. Reputation: LAN Support London has built up a client base of over 110 small and medium businesses in London; this has been achieved by client retention, recommendation and an excellent reputation for IT Support London.

We are continually finding new ways to support our clients in London and willing to change procedures so a personalized bespoke solution can be delivered to your exact requirements. We work with our clients in difficult times and can adapt support and service levels without fuss or delay.

B. Affordability: We understand that small and medium sized business in London demand both excellent IT support, and affordability.

We offer both; by being competitive with the Micro IT Support London companies who have 1 – 3 employees while our staffing levels, expertise and in-house infrastructure provides unchallenged 08:00 – 18:00 I.T. support London with excellent levels of customer service and care.

C. Responsive and Professional: You and your team will soon become very confident and content with the way our staffs approach new business and account management activities. We will pay attention and upon your request will advise and propose a support solution package with you and your business in-mind. You will not be unnecessarily pressured or influenced by the LAN Support team at any stage. Upon a successful tender you will find our fully qualified engineers, consultants and account managers very hard working and friendly to deal with.

LAN Support’s professional team of engineers has the expertise to provide a variety of technical skills only usually available to larger organizations.

We are a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner (the highest level of accreditation from Microsoft) and our consultants are to the standard of Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) qualified. In addition, as a Microsoft Small Business Specialist, you can be assured that you will be receiving only the highest level of support and specialist understanding available.

Call for a friendly chat now on 0207 903 5065 or email us at support@lansupport.co.uk

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