Results

The start of a new year is a great time to commit to IT projects thatDATA BALANCE: TAMPA BAY’S TOP IT MANAGED SERVICES FIRM will help your business succeed. These include everything from implementing network and data protection best practices to putting technology solutions in place that will reduce costs and protect profit margins. Ready to get started? Here are four can’t-lose resolutions for 2009.

Conduct an IT Cost Analysis

When it comes to technology, staying on top of TCO and ROI can be next to impossible. Available technology, product features and service packages are moving targets. Couple this with the fact that many IT decisions carry a sense of urgency, and you can see why an IT spending check-up may be in order this year.

While IT analyses often reveal opportunities to save across the organization, there are two areas that pop up frequently – telecommunications and IT staffing. When companies add employees, they often increase telecom spending. When they reach a certain volume, they become eligible for new service packages at lower costs. On the human resources front, IT analyses often reveal technology needs that can be met more affordably by outsourcing to third-party experts, including outsourcing all IT management to a service provider like Data Balance.

There are companies that specialize in helping businesses conduct IT audits, including one called Pearl Logic that offers a low-risk fee structure. It charges no upfront fees for services and instead collects 50% of the savings it locates for a 12-month period. After that, its clients retain 100% of the savings.

Build Bullet-Proof Data Protection

Chances are you’ve heard business advisors or IT leaders talk about the importance of redundant data backups. Have you taken their advice? If not, now is the time to do it. The reason is a compelling one – with a single method (or, gasp, no method) you could be out of business if the unexpected happens.

It’s a good idea to keep at least one backup off-site, preferably out-of-state. This will protect your business from theft, floods, hurricanes and other localized disasters. There are a number of remote backup services that will allow you to use an internet connection for automated backups. Data security is ensured via encryption and the use of security keys to access/unlock data. IT managed services firms will often bundle redundant data backup solutions into service packages

If you already have backup systems in place, there’s one more resolution you can make – test them. The last thing you want is to find out in the middle of an emergency that a particular database or server was never added to the nightly backup list. .

Put Your Network in Lock Down

Reliable data backup is only one piece of reducing business risk. The rest of your strategies should be designed to protect the integrity of your network and prevent data leaks. This means gaining control over how people use your network and data, from ensuring password and usage protocols are followed to building strong firewalls and monitoring network activity.

The security holes you don’t know about are the ones that make your company vulnerable to data loss. Someone with malicious intent can wipe out everything, including backups. And statistics show that typical small businesses will pay more than $14,000 to recover from each loss – if they recover. Where are the biggest threats coming from? According to a recent Deloitte study, human errors account for the majority of them, followed by technology and operations lapses, and finally third-party interactions.

If you don’t have internal IT security experts, consider bringing in an outside resource to evaluate your system and establish best-practice protocols, like putting layered security in place using something like Data Balance’s Data Balance Edge. And make a security audit an annual business resolution.

Reduce Costs Through Virtualization

The past year demonstrated major benefits from virtualization, an IT strategy that builds system efficiency and reduces management burdens. It sounds like a ten-dollar word, but virtualization is accessible to any size business, especially with newly available hardware and software solutions.

The easiest way to understand the benefits of virtualization is to use your staff as an analogy. Imagine you have two employees with basic skills handling your company’s core business needs. They share the workload, and at any given time one or the other may be handling more work based on the flow of projects. The next hire you make is someone with advanced skills who can manage the workloads of the two entry level employees. Why is this an advantage? 1) The single hire saves money; she requires only one computer and half the operating costs to keep it running. 2) One hire is easier to manage; her supervisor has to oversee only one contact instead of two. 3) A highly-skilled employee is likely to remain fully utilized because her skills are always under demand.

How does this relate to virtualization? Using virtualization may allow you to consolidate physical servers into one box, thereby reducing physical space, energy bills, management costs, and the need to try to balance workloads on separate servers. Because it operates at a more sophisticated level, it is able to juggle network demands and manage resources based on perceived and/or necessary activity. It’s more efficient, easier to manage and more likely to stay fully utilized.

To use virtualization effectively to reduce costs, businesses need to examine technical constraints, business processes and workloads to uncover opportunities to simplify IT, improve reliability and drive down costs. This is a big task, but one that will pay for itself over time in reduced spending, greater ROI and enhanced capabilities.

A piece of good news - if you upgrade to a hardware and software solution that includes Windows Server 2008 or Small Business Server 2008, you can take advantage of virtualization without any extra training or know-how. The capability is built into the system.