In This Issue
1.
What is new at Automation Concepts?
2.
What to do about Windows Vista?
3.
Controlling outside access to your
data.
It is 10:00 pm do you know where your
data is?
4.
Keeping your business running even
during an outage or disaster.
Business Continuity Planning (BCP)
5.
The pain of tape backup and what to do about it.
1)
What is new Automation Concepts?
We’re
back. We will again have full time coverage in the Boston area
starting this June.
Have you seen our new website (www.actco.com)?
There is a lot to see
and learn on our site. We are continuing to add content and links to
help solve your problems on a daily basis. Be sure to add the link
to your favorites.
Do you have a website?
We have in-house web development expertise - we did our own site. We
may not be a web-development power house, but we can deliver a great
basic site at a reasonable fixed cost.
Vacation Coverage:
Is your key IT person planning on taking a vacation this summer?
Many of our clients depend on us for coverage during this time.
Please be sure to give us a heads-up so we can supply the proper
coverage.
Periodic Reviews:
Have you scheduled a system review with us? These reviews help our
clients understand their system needs in regards to long term goals
and budget planning. Scheduled equipment upgrades and replacement
are much cheaper than emergency repair.
Times are tough:
Most of our clients are telling us that their budgets are stretched
to the breaking point. Our margins are far too thin to do much about
equipment costs but we are working on a
“free-trip” incentive program
where we pay the mileage on billable visits of 3 hours or more.
Scheduled Visits and Discounts:
It is much easier to prevent a problem than clean-up after one.
Regularly scheduled, proactive maintenance visits with our clients
can help minimize these problems. To help make these visits more
affordable we are offering
a discount program
for regularly scheduled visits booked and billed in advance. We have
clients booking a few hours a week to clients booking a few hours a
month.
Thank you for referrals:
Like any small business we rely on referrals to generate new
business. Almost 100% of our client base has come from referrals by
existing clients. We want to say thank you for a referral that
generates revenue by either rewarding your company with a credit on
billable hours or rewarding you personally with a gift card. You
choose which is best.
2)
What to do About Windows Vista?
Vista
has been a huge disappointment delivering much slower performance
than Windows XP. Vista also has a long list of compatibility and
usability issues. Both Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 have
radically different interfaces than their predecessors, costing
businesses hundreds of hours in lost productivity.
In
the final weeks of April, 2008 Microsoft has made some major
releases of software. The first was Vista Service pack 1 designed to
address a myriad of issues with the ill fated Vista. The second and
more significant release was Windows XP Service Pack 3 which will
bring new life to Corporate America’s favorite operating system.
Originally the Vista service pack was going to take priority over
the XP service pack, but Microsoft was hit with so many protests to
get XP SP3 out first that the two service packs were rolled out
side-by-side. A large percentage of corporations have no plans to
implement Vista anytime soon due to a slew of compatibility issues
and just plain poor performance.
According to tests by Devil Mountain Software comparing the
release candidates for the last Windows XP service pack and the
first Vista service pack, XP SP3 performs twice as fast as Vista SP1
on the same machine.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was quoted
as saying; "Windows Vista (is) a work in progress." at Microsoft's
MVP conference recently. Windows XP was slated for “end-of-life” on
June 30th of this year.
But,
Infoworld is reporting that at an event in
Belgium, Steve Ballmer said that the company might reconsider its
decision to stop selling Windows XP on June 30. An Associated Press
report quoted him as saying: "If customer feedback varies, we can
always wake up smarter."
Infoworld
has been leading the Save-XP campaign with an online petition that
has garnered 180,000 signatures urging Microsoft to continue
support.
To
sign the petition go to --
http://weblog.infoworld.com/save-xp/
According to a subsequent report from Reuters, the second
half of Ballmer's quote was: " ... but right now, we have a plan for
end-of-life for new XP shipments." A Microsoft spokesperson later
confirmed that the June 30 end-of-sale date was not going anywhere.
We are urging all or our clients to
look ahead at any planned system purchases and try to get them
ordered before June 30, 2008 or to confirm that any new systems will
come with “downgrade” disks so they can
upgrade
back to XP.
3)
It is 10:00 pm do you know where your data is?
Are you controlling the access to
critical data by employees and vendors from both inside and
outside
of your company?
With
maturing mobile technologies, booming global markets and heightened
focus on disaster preparedness, remote access control has become a
business imperative.
Many of our clients have been
providing secure remote access to employees and vendors via
software-based VPN client’s and their SonicWALL firewall. The
problem is software-based client VPN's can be cumbersome to use and
manage. Each user needs to be setup on the firewall and assigned a
password. Software needs to be installed on the remote computer
often by unskilled users. Once the user is through the firewall they
have free reign on the network.
The solution is SSL based VPN technology.
Based on the same technology that allows you to securely use your
credit card on the internet with a simple browser, an SSL-VPN allows
remote users secure access with no user installed software client.
More importantly, you
can control what the remote user is allowed to access based on who
is logged-on and from where they attached. You can even make sure
the client is running anti-virus and anti-spyware software. Once the
initial profiles are built, the administration of the users can be
done via the normal Windows account management tools. Security is
verified via your Windows user profiles so records are not
maintained in two places.
This
solution is SonicWALL’s new Aventail E-Class SSL VPN -- a line of
enterprise-class solutions offering outstanding protection and
performance and unparalleled value.
4)
Business Continuity Planning (BCP)
Business Continuity is the logical
extension of Disaster Recovery Planning. While a Disaster Recovery
Plan (DRP) is a blueprint for recovering access to hardware,
software, data, and other facilities
after some
sort of disaster (natural or otherwise), Business Continuity
Planning (BCP) is aimed at keeping a business or organization
running during and after a disaster rather than recovering from one.
We have been working with several of our clients to identify key
components of their operation and develop a plan for either
redundancy or rapid recovery of hardware and/or data. You can get
more information from our website (http://www.actco.com/BCP.htm)
or call us for more details.
5)
Are You Still
Using Tape Backup?
Up until very recently, tape backup systems were the only
affordable alternative to backing up today’s large amounts of data.
But tapes are unreliable and prone to human error. Data recovery
from backup tapes fail more than 50% of the time, and can be up to
400x slower than recovering data from a disk. Most taxing is the
cost and effort it takes to administer tape backup systems -
rotating tapes, checking them and transporting them offsite. In
addition, these offsite tapes violate many new regulations regarding
privacy and data protection unless they are fully encrypted. Why use
tape backup when there are now devices that provide continuous data
backup as well as automatic off-site storage? Call us about these
exciting new products. According to SonicWALL’s website:
·
On average 5 - 20% of nightly tape-based backup job fails
·
80% of SMBs that have protection use tape-based backup
·
64% of SMBs only backup data onsite
·
70% of companies that experience a backup disaster, go out
of business within 3 years
Automation Concepts – Share the excitement.
The same great service,
New products and services,
A renewed spirit.