Thank You for a Great Year

 

The end of 2011 is rapidly approaching so I wanted to take a minute to thank one and all. Our customers have been wonderful. You guys are the very best to work with and we enjoy every minute it. This year, we have struggled to hire the right person and are still working on that project. Diana attended SMB Nation conference where she made new and solidified old product support connections. She learned new tricks from experts from around the world too. Amy spoke at SMBNation on Sharepoint and she also paid it forward by travelled to 13 cities in the USA speaking to IT professionals about opportunities in small business.  Early in the year Amy spoke to Microsoft MVP’s at MVPNation on building a successful business and identifying a great idea.  We introduced MultiPoint and SBS Essentials into the mix and installed several Terminal Server farms. The trend toward more and more mobility definitely continues at an ever quickening clip. We saw tremendous growth both in number of customers and the work you are requesting of us. Our hunt for another great IT person continues so we can meet these demands.

Our plans for 2012 are modest. We just want to exceed your expectations and live up to the awards we have been given over the years. 

We hope that 2012 makes your dreams come true.

- Amy Babinchak and the whole team at Harbor Computer Services

What are we going to talk about next year?

It is that time of year when we need to get together to talk about the future. It’s planning season. We specialize in unique businesses. We don’t cookie cutter anyone. We make sure your IT fits you and enables your staff to be more productive. Your business is unique but we have a few themes that are going to be important for almost everyone next year. Here is what we think they are:

• Consumerization. For the first time, employees are bringing their own computer equipment to the office. On the one hand this development has added productivity to employees through the greater use of technology. But there’s a dark side as well. Your data is being access by computers that you don’t trust, you don’t have any control over (like is it infected or clean?) and it now has your corporate data on it.
• Mobile Security. Everyone has a smart phone. Some are owned by you and are therefore officially authorized and some are not. (see consumerization) Smart phones have data on them. At the very least they have email correspondence, business contacts and files. Did you know 93% of business correspondence is email? Do you know where it is? We’ve already seen hackers hitting open active sync ports, smart phones full of data lost and smart phones with your data going to the competition with the former employee on the phone they own.
• Backup. Data creep is again taking its toll on backup strategies. Moving data off-site has become a problem for many companies. There’s no way around it, moving terabytes of data from your office to anywhere is complicated. With the hard drive shortage it just isn’t going to be feasible to add more space for more data.
• Hard Drive Shortage. This problem is expected to continue for another 24 months. Whole countries are already unable to get replacement hard drives. This problem impacts data storage capacities, new PC purchases and server migrations. The problem is bad now. It’s only going to get worse.
• Cloud Technologies. Cloud covers everything from email to remote access, to hosted applications and virtualization. It’s become a true bandwagon. Clouds vary from puffy white cotton balls to hurricanes; some clouds are good and some clouds are bad. The issues are access and data control. We’ve already had a customer’s data held hostage when they tried to leave a cloud application. We’ve already had data disappear and outages occur. We’ve seen the promise of geographic redundancy fall flat on its face. On the up side we’ve also had great success in the private cloud arena; it holds tremendous potential for cost savings and supports today’s more mobile work force and consumerization while retaining protection for your intellectual property. We have also built relationships with trust cloud application providers. Making the right cloud decisions can have lasting benefits.
• Telephony. We have noticed that most of our you are using phone systems than are 10-20 years old. Some even have duct tape on them. This technology has turned on its head. Phones aren’t phones anymore; they are computers and we’re ready to install and support them for you. We’re working with several vendors that we think are making the best in terms of service, support and features. That they are computers now is good and bad. The cost of phone systems has plummeted; they are less than half what you paid last time and maybe only a quarter of the cost. On the downside the lifespan of the systems are much shorter too.

I hope that we’ll have an in-person meeting soon to discuss your plans for the future and a great 2012.

Hard Drive Crisis Being Felt Now

I reported earlier about how the situation in Thailand will be affecting the availability of hard drives for the next 12 months. Since that time we’ve had some disturbing news.

• There are now no hard drives available for Canadian distribution
• 70 million hard drive orders will go unfilled per quarter for the next 24 months worldwide. (note was 12 months, now 24)
• There are very few hard drives left in Australia
• Many US suppliers of hard drives are out of stock

So what do we do? We do what we always do in times of shortage:

• Reduce: We will recommend smaller hard drives and possibly SSD (flash) hard drives.
• Carefully use every drop of available space
• Use data archiving
• Evaluate whether or not stored items are necessary
• ReUse: We will be recommending that we keep drives in circulation longer.
• Older drives can continue to be used if paired. Using the buddy system we can protect from failure while reusing old drives in new systems.

This shortage is likely to have a serious economic impact as well. Businesses are more likely to keep older equipment in production and will experience greater rates of failure. Mom and Pop computer stores will be hit hardest and may not survive. Sales of IT hardware in general will be down significantly putting a big crimp in the profits of hardware dependent companies like: Dell, Intel and Apple.

We’re keeping a close eye on our suppliers and so far drives are available but expensive. We have seen some sizes and types drop off though and will be expecting more.

There’s no magic bullet solution for this problem. No one company that has more access to drives than another. I have started to hear of “amazing deals”, “my guy can get anything, no problem” as usual if it’s too good to be true, it’s not true.