We included two of many news items that crossed our desk this issue that announced hosted solutions, supplier responsibilities and perceived customer expectations and values.
Opposing views within professionals
In discussing these articles internally, particularly the Google news item about lost e-mails, we had opposing opinions amongst our technology consulting professionals and thought we would share them with you.
The IT View – The IT professionals’ perspective was ‘Let the user beware’ if they are going to depend on ‘free’ e-mail services to use within their business or store important personal digital items such as family pictures. These services are worth as much as you pay for them, which is nothing!
They also commented that if you are depending on technology to run your business, you should factor in business-grade services with the required investments supported by business level processes to back up and maintain important information not on the hosted service provider’s site. This includes doing local and even an alternate back-up off site location for critical information such as financial or client records.
This view, of course, assumes that guidelines have been developed, documentation created and users trained on how to store, manage and archive digital content such as e-mails effectively. Let’s try to test all of us on this one?
The Network View – The network professionals said the external hosted applications are an effective way for people to try new technology, i.e. for services such as instant messaging, VoIP, low cost desktop video conferencing, etc.
The objective of the early testing is to understand the application and get a clear sense of the costs, challenges and benefits of deploying this next-generation technology prior to expanding throughout the total company employee base.
Depending on the size of the company, the number of locations, etc., the company can design, install and manage the solutions in-house, continue to use the hosted solution providers, or even a combination of both.
The SMB Business Leader View – Within Fox Group we use and manage multiple voice, network and IT technology applications to run our distributed consulting practice. The large majority of them are hosted externally from a cross-section of Canadian and US suppliers.
All of the applications are ‘business grade’ services, with the exception of satellite TV, due to a variety of reasons outlined below.
1.We believe that if we need business grade performance, reliability and service, we have to be prepared to pay for it.
2. We are a technology dependent small business that needs enterprise class performance and reliability.
3. We are not prepared to build and manage all of these solutions internally.
4. We believe that our technology resources should be revenue focused and not focused on maintaining back-office resources as an expense to the business.
5. Lastly, and probably most importantly, the solutions that we use (and depend upon) are prohibitive to try to handle internally from a space, skills and cost perspective.
As an example of what we mean by being space prohibitive, if we were to install the hardware and software required to duplicate our Exchange and Sharepoint offers we would have to provision, install and support up to one rack of equipment just for those two applications. If we then add the other hosted applications that we use we would perhaps have two to three racks of equipment.
The skill sets, space, redundant power grids, multiple fallback generators for power backups, multiple high speed Internet connectivity and associated costs required are prohibitive in relation to the monthly costs we pay to our various hosted providers. Instead, we have focused on having the applications hosted, but, … and a big but… we have ensured that we have ample local and even off-site digital storage to be able to download the data from our hosted applications.
Something like the Google client Gmail situation would not happen to us. Since we back up our hosted data to make sure no matter what happens to the provider’s site, our data remains safe. It also provides our clients with the confidence of knowing that we have properly managed our environment, similar to what we recommend to them.
Summary – If you or your business depends on access to information with high performance reliability and availability then you have to develop the policies, processes and procedures to properly use and manage your e-mail and hosted information.
You also have to be prepared to pay for those services, so that the telecommunications and technology industry can continue to be profitable and sustainable within Canada. I agree with our folks that said, ‘you get what you pay for’!
Roberta J. Fox is senior partner with Fox Group Telecom Consulting. She can be reached at [email protected]
