By Howard Podgurski

I need to circle back to a blog post I wrote a few weeks ago that addresses the issues business owners and managers should know about system backups. It seems that I have overcomplicated the requirements of backups and business continuity for nontechnical business managers.

Simply put, backups are capable of protecting against data loss, but they do not protect against downtime.

By Howard Podgurski

How do you support your variety of business applications and devices when they share resources and interact with each other?

The answer is: with the right expectations.

By Robert J. Vernam

Periodic evaluation of your help desk by an outside source to review staffing and levels of service will prevent wasteful technology spending and ensure business alignment.

To perform a meaningful evaluation, consider these five important questions:

By Howard Podgurski

Every company owner should know how much it will cost and how long will it take to recover data from a system failure.

Companies like Carbonite have oversimplified the backup process: Identify your data, schedule or hit the backup tab and everything is saved. Surely, it couldn’t be simpler!

But now try to restore the saved information — it’s one thing to restore image and document files, and it’s a whole 'nother ball game to restore application specific data files.

By Robert J. Vernam

Ever go to your Help Desk Support person to tell them about an issue only to be asked to fill out a ticket? You’re trying to tell them about your issue now — why are they asking you to go fill out a ticket?

This can be a frustrating situation for any member of a non-IT department. You now have a problem, you want to tell the IT person about it so it can be resolved quickly, yet you get referred to an impersonal ticket system.

By Howard Podgurski

Business owners often ask me why IT industry certifications are important since any question or problem can be Googled.

Sure you can search engine any question but the problem with information technology is that everything is connected – every component touches and affects every asset on the network and in the cloud. So what is the right question to ask? When you don’t know what assets are being affected, it almost always leads to other problems.

By Howard Podgurski

How long can you afford to be without your information technology?

What does information technology mean to your business? Do you know the business value with timelines of every device and application on your network? The warehouse PC with the shipping app probably has more immediate business value than the CEO’s PC with the business analysis app.

An often-overlooked aspect of information technology for small and mid-size organizations is the recovery time objective (RTO) from failures. This should not be confused with backups, which is only one component of RTO.

By Howard Podgurski

In a word, it’s “convergence.”

For years we have been hearing about the convergence of voice and data. The adoption rate was slow because the user experience for managing multiple devices was nearly impossible for all but the most tech-savvy users. Thanks to Apple, Microsoft and others, this problem mostly has been solved.

The issue that is largely unresolved is how to support these converging technologies for small and medium sized businesses. Think about it: multifunction printers/scanners, VOIP phone systems, multiple model smart phones, cloud based applications, LAN/ server based applications, support for Microsoft Exchange and POP3 email — all need to work seamlessly and have a user friendly experience.

By Howard Podgurski

If you are a principal owner or manager of a small or midsize organization and live on Planet Earth, it’s more than likely that your IT person or consultant has come to you in the last few years and recommended virtualizing your servers.

When you ask the question ‘why?’, this is very close to the answer you will get (or some variation of this): 5 Reasons to Virtualize Your Servers With VMware Server.

By Howard Podgurski

Business management’s primary goal is the sustainability and growth of an organization.

This sustainability relies on several areas of business management expertise which includes accounting, human resources, legal and information technology, to name a few.