Essential Technology: A GCS Blog

The FBI released this Fraud Alert back in April and the situation has only degraded since then. It has long been the case that viruses and trojans penetrate even advanced defenses with ease. When an accountant at a small businesses logs into the online banking system the username and password are compromised. Frequently even challenge questions ("What is your mother's maiden name?") can be recorded. The attacker then uses this information to move as much as $100k to an overseas account. 

Unlike with credit cards the business bears 100% of the liability. Banks have been sued repeatedly with businesses charging inadequate security. Usually the businesses have lost. 

What can you do?

• Purchase a Cyber Crime insurance policy that specifically covers this attack
• Access your banking website from a computer off the network (GCS can help with this setup)
• Implement Positive Pay so that only pre-approved transactions can be processed (call your bank about this)

The tattoos, piercings, or rap sheets won't be obvious, but the outcome of dealing with a bad cloud provider can be as bad as trusting a thief. Recent experiences have confirmed my long held suspicions.

A new GCS client was attempting to retrieve their 3TB of data and related applications from an Infrastruture-as-a-Service company. Slow performance and frequent outages had convinced our client that change was necessary. Though the cloud provider was very helpful when moving the data in, they presented a huge challenge in moving the data out. No physical access. They were booked for months and couldn't help until then. Only available during business hours and for brief periods. Not a comforting situation!

And what could be done? This justifies the fears of many business owners, executives, and managers. "If I give up control of my data, what do I do if I need it back?" In shared, multi-tenant environments the cloud provider holds all the cards. 

Thanks to all of you who came out today for my presentation "How to Create an IT Budget Your CFO Will Love." Thanks to Bill Harrison and Epicom. They were out in force with the video camera. They recorded part of my presentation and an interview afterwards. I enjoyed the conference again this year!

Guest blogging today is JP McInnis, GCS' Network Operations Center Manager.

With Linux based operating systems such as Ubuntu growing more user friendly, the popularity of Open Source software is on the rise - but is it ready for your business?

The main misconception of Open Source is that it provides a lower total cost of ownership. Almost all Open Source applications are free and lack the normal licensing fees that come with traditional vendors. While this can initially result in reducing overhead, it will likely be overshadowed by support and administration costs. Documentation for Open Source software is generally of poor quality or non-existent, which can easily double the amount of time an experienced technician needs to resolve the issue.

Reliability and compatibility are two other areas of concern.  Most Open Source software is written by hobbyists and low budget developers who are looking for a way to "fight the system” and accomplish the same tasks that expensive applications would achieve.  In doing so, the outcome is usually an unstable product that has limited or no compatibility with normal file formats or standards.

Open Source is not ready for the SMB market and should not be seen as an alternative to commercial software. Your business deserves software that developers can stand by and that technicians can support.

The Houston Chronicle reported it recently here. And it's not the first time. Here the suspect posts about it on Facebook before he is arrested. Identifying the exact location of a wireless radio is REALLY EASY. The FBI is placing their agents lives and their investigations at risk by doing this. The worst part is the FIX IS VERY EASY!!!! 1 minute, tops! 

Now you would hope this is just a hoax. I hope so but this bit of data has popped up in some unusual places. There certainly is grounds to be suspicious. Can we at least hear from someone over there that they don't do this?

The Austin Business Journal recently released their annual ranking of the Top 25 Network Integration Firms firms in Austin. GCS came in at #5! Last year was yet another successful year with growth of about 30%. We're fortunate to be able to continue doing what we love in this great city. Thank you to all of our clients, employees, vendors, and supporters that make this happen!

GCS is sponsoring the 2011 Dash for Dad’s to help in the fight against prostate cancer. Our client, Urology Austin, is the primary sponsor. Dash for Dad’s is a 5k race or walk on October 22, 2011 at 9AM at Camp Mabry. It is $28 per runner with all proceeds going to the fight against cancer. If you’re interested in running, sign up here: 

http://greatprostatecancerchallenge.com/races/austin/

Remember you must bring your ID with you to get on Camp Mabry!

I will be presenting at Innotech Austin this year. Come out to see my presentation titled "Create an IT Budget Your CFO Will Love!" The presentation is on October 20^th from 2:30pm – 3:30pm in room 12B. Stop by and say hi!

Create an IT Budget Your CFO Will Love!

Flexibility in Uncertain Times 

The impact from the ongoing recession is felt more heavily in some organizations than others. For those most impacted maintaining flexibility in IT budgeting is critical. Avoiding mandatory expenditures such as equipment leases and long term telecom contracts are essential to cost reductions that impact the operation. Understand key opportunities in IT budgeting that maximize flexibility year-to-year and month-to-month.

At Zero Cost There Is Infinite Demand

End users and business units alike place demands on IT without incurring any costs. Basic supply and demand models predict at zero cost there is infinite demand. This leads to expectations of immediate problem resolution and rapid project turnarounds. Learn how to manage these expectations with superior management tactics.

Aligning Expenditures with Income

Most IT budgets are classified as General and Administrative costs, “overhead”. Cloud computing advances enable email, data storage, backup, and more to be direct costs. Direct costs are tied directly to organizational income, and far preferred by financial analysts. See how other organizations have cut costs rapidly in lean times, and easily scaled to meet increased demand in boom times.

About Joe Gleinser

Joe Gleinser is the founder and president of GCS Technologies, Inc. GCS is a leading IT services and consulting organization offer virtualization, cloud, and telephony solutions. He is a contributing author to the IT Security Manual for Financial Institutions. He holds certifications from Microsoft, VMware, Dell, and more. 

CRN describes a Next-Gen VAR as solution providers "who are zeroing in on... cloud computing, mobility, virtualization, unified communications, business analytics and business intelligence." 

I've recently signed on to write the newest version of the "IT Security Management Manual" published by Alex Information Services. It's very exciting to take on this project. No publication dates are set, yet, but work is underway! 

To support this new project I'm starting a side-blog for my side-job. http://www.itsecuritymanual.com will be focused on the IT security management issues with a focus on the financial services industry. 

As Information Technology practitioners we live in a world where quality is measured in 9s. Service agreements guaranteeing 5 - 9s, 99.999%, or even 100% uptime are commodities. Why? These guarantees are only possible because the financial damages awarded during outages are insignificant. Achieving this level of reliability, on a sufficiently complex system, is outside the budget of even the most technically devoted small and mid-sized businesses. When the cost of failure is only a few dollars, guarantees are cheap!

In my daily work I'm often asked to meet these advanced reliability levels. It is a simple matter because, like all our competition, the failure to perform at that level is inconsequential. A good deal of transparency and better client relationships can be achieved by dropping the facade that this level of reliability is achievable in an SMB budget. 

As a reseller of products that don't feature de-duplication, I'm frequently asked to explain why anyone WOULDN'T want it. I agree - it sounds fantastic. We all know that every file server and virtual infrastructure is littered with multiple copies of the same files. Storing and backing up these additional copies is really expensive. Why can't we just filter out the duplicates? A favorite blog, StorageMojo, answers that question.

Their answer? The performance impact of de-duplication is huge. Organizations that can afford high end storage such as SSDs and have IOPS to spare should implement. Those without IOPS to spare, MOST small and mid-sized businesses, can't afford the performance hit. 

De-duplication is still a good investment at the backup layer. Backup is a huge component of total storage costs. De-duping here is the best value for my clients.

Our Director of Technology, Marquis Calmes, had this advice for  our technical staff today concerning tape backup:

"You may have heard that .02% of gmail users lost access to their email over the weekend.  The below article has more details, but the basics are that an update to their storage software caused the loss of data.  Google has one of the most redundant file systems I’ve ever read about, yet an update (possibly to that very software) still was able to cause data loss.  What are they doing about it? Restoring from tape.  My take away from this is 1) No matter how much redundancy you have you still need a backup and 2) If Google still uses tape, so should most our customers for this very reason. No update can delete a tape that is offsite. Remember this the next time a customer says they hate tapes.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/gmails-disappearing-act-blame-the-storage-software-update/45445?tag=mantle_skin;content"

How much of your IT budget could you cut today? 10%, 25%, or 50%? For an IT executive in a small or mid-sized business, this percentage can keep you off of the unemployment roles. Unfortunately many IT departments are saddled with 60 - 90% of their budget in MANDATORY spending. Mandatory spending cannot be adjusted easily and includes equipment lease payments, telecom contracts, managed services contracts, and software licensing fees (Microsoft Open Value, for instance). Discretionary spending can be adjusted annually, if not monthly. Many Hosted Exchange providers require no term contract. Offsite backup and disaster recovery solutions can carry contract terms of only one year.

A primary benefit of cloud services is their flexiblity. In periods of high business activity expense will increase. In the doldrums expenses can decrease.

GCS has been the ugly duckling among technology outsourcers for not embracing managed services (fixed price, term contracts). Our hourly consumption model allows expenses to be adjusted in real-time. Pairing an outsourcer like GCS with cloud services provides the maximum flexiblity in budgets, and can make or break an IT exec.

A prominent cloud storage vendor recently sent me a survey. The lack of comment space didn't stop me from replying to the email. I recalled Microsoft's recent promises to post BPOS/Office 365 network statuses online. It impressed me and demonstrated a high degree of confidence in their product. I encouraged this vendor to go one better. Show their resellers and customers the actual performance of their systems. Historical and real-time. Not just ping tests but responsiveness. Not only could it significantly reduce support requests but generate immense good will with a suspicious marketplace.

After more than a decade of experience with Citrix and Terminal Server, I've learned a thing or two about thin client computing. And, for the most part, I despise it. For every success story there are two or three failures. These failures are usually not catastrophic but frustrating, annoying, and troublesome. Not the computing experience I aim to provide to my users.

What if we could combine all the functionality of a desktop with the "thin-ness" of a thin client? As we continue to migrate large numbers of users to the Cloud, we are doing just that. The use of Cloud based solutions turns existing desktops and notebooks into thin clients. I no longer care about the applications, data or OS installed on these boxes. My users can switch devices quickly and easily. Little time is wasted troubleshooting individual devices.

Cloud services such as Egnyte, SoftLayer, and Google Apps have finally delivered on a promise that IT made a long time ago.

By JP McInnis

Last week Apple refreshed its entry-level desktop system the Mac Mini. The redesigned unit includes an all new aluminum chassis with a twist off bottom for easy access to internal components. Processing power has been boosted with a 2.4GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo and NVIDIA’s GeForce 320M Graphics chip. Along with the standard USB and video ports the Mini now sports HDMI output for connection to high definition displays. If you’re looking to replace an older PC or are in the market for a small form desktop the new Mac Mini shouldn’t be overlooked.

While many of our brethren have successfully coexisted with Macs for years, most IT departments are just now seeing a critical mass. Its ok to feel afraid, frustrated, or hesitant. We were all there once and we'll get through this together.

Hardware:

Notebooks: MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. Most folks will use the MacBook or MacBook Pro. $1000 - $1500ish. The hw specs should be extremely familiar. Treat it like a Dell or HP. 4GB of RAM, hard drive is bigger than it needs to be, and the processor is almost certainly up to any task.

Desktops: The Mac Mini is a low cost ($600) box that can get you started. Available in a 2GB or 4GB model. You can easily add your own peripherals (standard video, kb and mouse ports) and avoid the Apple markup. The iMac is the beauty that your marketing department is demanding. It includes a monitor and bluetooth keyboard/mouse. Its performance specs outpace the Mac Mini. At the high end, what a PC manufactuer would call a Workstation, is the Mac Pro. It can swing 2 Quad Core processors and up to 32 GB or RAM.

Backup: All Mac OS X systems come with a backup utility called Time Machine. This is a complete imaging utility (similar to Acronis) that can backup the OS, configuration, and data to a USB hard drive or other media.

Anti-Virus: Symantec, Trend Micro and McAfee offer agents for their enterprise products that support OS X.

Printing: Drivers exist for many, but not all printers. Expect to hassle with this issue. See the full list of supported printers here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3669

Warranty: Each Mac comes with 90 days of phone tech support and a 1 year hardware warranty. It is strongly recommended you add AppleCare to bring those to 3 Year terms. Apple does not offer an onsite warranty plan. Everything is a depot-type warranty.

In the next post we'll take on integration with Active Directory, Group Policy, and network drives.

By JP McInnis

According to reports from the Financial Times, Google is currently making a push to eliminate the Windows operating system from their offices. Users are now being offered the choice between a Mac or Linux workstation. Any requests for systems running Windows must be approved by the CIO on a case by case basis. This change is said to be due to security issues with the Windows platform and recent hacking attempts which Google believes originated in China. Other reports speculate that the internal implementation of Google’s Chrome OS may be behind this shift. Regardless of the reason, this is a noteworthy change in Google’s business practices and will have a major effect on its over 20,000 employees. 

Your intrepid reporter recently went behind the scenes at a national cloud hosting provider.  Once I pulled back the curtain, would you believe I found:

1) Single points of failure at the firewall and switch level. Yep. For an organization that spent millions on infrastructure and management tools, why not configure your firewall and switches for High Availability. The devices they used all supported HA configurations.

2) No backup of static configurations. If one of the single-points did fail, surely they could recover quickly? Right? So where do they store the configuration backups of these devices? The staff I spoke to had no idea. Reconfiguring a shared firewall and switches from scratch would be no fun at all.

3) Lack of spare parts. Anyone would stock replacement gear if they designed in a single points of failure. Not this cloud provider. Though the staff asserted that spare switches and firewalls exist, we were unable to locate the equipment. No spare firewall. No spare switch. Supposing it does exist, the replacement process apparently starts like this:

"Step 1: Dig through mountain of parts hoping to find replacement gear."

I'm as optimistic about the cloud as anyone, but caveat emptor.

If you're not thrilled with the prospect of reading 18 pages of highly detailed cost analysis of VoIP phone systems, let me help. I've digested the attached analysis into a few simple bullet points. The result? Avaya has the lowest Total Cost of Ownership when compared to Shoretel and Cisco. In a world where feature sets and reliability are largely the same, that's a huge difference.

"Avaya’s average three-year cost for this size rollout is lowest, at $827...Avaya costs 36% less than Cisco ($1,296) over three years,"

"Avaya and ShoreTel have the lowest costs in the midsize category." "Cisco and Nortel rollouts are most expensive."

"Savings from SIP trunking – Replacing PRI lines with SIP trunks can save about 40% off the monthly circuit costs."

"Externally provide MACs cost $65 to $400, depending on the city. Internally managed IP telephony MACs cost about $10, based on average telecom salaries."

"Whereas vendors once charged about 10% to 14% for maintenance, those fees now are 16% to 22%."

"When organizations upgrade their LANs, the costs account for 32% to 47% of an overall VOIP project."

Of all of these points the last is perhaps the most important. When the LAN components is that large a piece of your rollout, why are you buying a phone system from a vendor with zero LAN expertise.

In Q4 of this year Microsoft will be releasing Office 2011 for Mac. The big news in is the demise of Entourage and the return of Outlook. Entourage could be described as Microsoft’s last attempt at keeping Macs out of the business environment. Entourage is slow, doesn't allow PST imports and is generally despised. In other words it is not Outlook. Microsoft has finally accepted that the platform and products that Apple creates hold an important place in the business. Outlook 2010 has been re-engineered to use OSX’s native programing platforms more efficiently and provides Mac user’s with all of the functionality you’d see on a Windows system. 

Many of today’s Mac users are recent Windows converts and this update to the Office suite will make the transition much easier. I expect Microsoft to see good returns on this decision. 

If you're looking to make the switch keep this in mind: The default Mac Mail client will only work with Exchange 2007 at this time. If your organization is currently on Exchange 2003 and you don’t have an immediate need to switch to a Mac, hold off until the new version of Office comes out. It will curb many hours of frustration. 

I've often called out Google and other cloud computing vendors that promise cost savings. The truth is that the SMB market makes better decisions with their IT dollars than larger businesses. The often touted savings just don't exist! Cloud computing is new-enough and its vendors proud-enough that most offerings have a very large margin priced in. Enter SoftLayer. SoftLayer delivers a range of managed hosting options as wells as CloudLayer. CloudLayer is a virtualized, highly available infrastructure priced to compete with on-premise solutions in the SMB space.

Unlike other cloud infrastructure providers, SoftLayer features technology frequently found in the SMB. They utilize Fortinet, Dell's Equallogic and Citrix's Xen Server. You'll also find SuperMicro servers and Array Networks load balancers. A powerful web interface enables rapid provisioning and easy management across SoftLayer's three data centers. Pricing for their Public Cloud option starts at only $99 per month for 1 Core + 1GB RAM + 100GB Storage. Bandwidth is included up to 2TB of outbound traffic while inbound and server-to-server is not metered.

SoftLayer data centers are SAS 70 Type II certified and feature bandwidth or peering with many of the top telecoms. They claim 20,000 servers and more than 5700 customers. In a market dominated by enterprise focused companies, it is exciting to see a cloud solution priced for the SMB. I'm planning a trip to Dallas for the tour shortly and an extensive evaluation. I'll fill in more details when available.

More and more we are being asked about email archival and encryption solutions.  For most businesses compliance with SAS 70, HIPAA or other standards drives this need. Recently GCS has seen several of our clients contractually obligated to implement these systems to do business with the Fortune 1000. Whatever the cause email archival and encryption are technologies that are rapidly becoming commonplace.  

As with many technologies today there are two basic strategies to address these needs. The first strategy is an on-premise system. A business will procure archival software, encryption software (or appliance) and storage adjacent to their email systems. Archival systems start at about $10k including the software, storage and deployment. Symantec Backup Exec 2010 offers archival solutions integrated to your standard data backup. Low cost NAS devices make ideal archival targets that minimize cost per GB of storage. GCS has grown fond of the Synology product line that includes integrated site-to-site replication technology.

Email encryption is nothing new. This blogger, and many readers, may remember installing PGP Email Encryption after blowing through Stephenson's  Cryptonomicon at a tender age. That cumbersome implementation has been replaced with appliances that encrypt email based on policy including recipient domains, keyword matching, email tagging and more. Cisco's Ironport, ZixCorp, and Voltage offer appliance/gateway solutions. These devices can be quite a bit more expensive than archival systems with many businesses looking at investments of $50k or more.

If cash flow and ease of management is a concern, hosted/cloud options exist for both archival and encryption. Microsoft and Google both offer hosted email filtering (virus and spam), archival and encryption. With Microsoft's Hosted Exchange Filtering you can get email filtering and archival for about $75 per user per year. Many of the appliance vendors offer hosted solutions as well. Hometown-boys-now-Dell-division MessageOne delivers an archival and continuity solution that is widely acclaimed.

The Redesigned Site: http://www.gcsaustin.com

The first week of August marks 10 years in business for GCS. We've come a long way since our humble origins in my dining room in 2000. A lot of thanks is owed to many people including partners, coworkers, clients, vendors, friends, and family.

To commemorate the anniversary GCS has launched our first site redesign in a few years (since 2006???). Troy Bara did an excellent job on the new design. Lots of new content in the Solutions sections bring our website up to date with our newest offerings.