There are two kinds of people in the world, those who start worrying about how much gas is in their vehicle once the tank is half empty and those who drive past the “E” line and coast into the gas station on fumes.
Every time we take a family trip as soon as we hit ¼ of a tank my wife is always fidgeting with the estimated tank graph in the car and telling me we need to stop. I know we have a good 40 miles before we really need to start looking for a gas station. I guess when talking about gas in the car you could say she is more proactive than reactive. I have had to learn the lesson the hard way after having run out of gas a few times in my life. I am much more conscientious about how much fuel is in the car at any given time, and take care of the matter before it becomes a problem.
When it comes to information technology and data, I am all about helping business people start to think about being more proactive.
Let us take for example the issue of backups; many companies have a computer / server / network backup setup by a tech person they know or hire. Then just assume they are running for years over with the HOPE that everything will be just fine.
The problem is that without some ability to test and review those backups on a regular basis that backup system can fail and it could be months or years until you discover those failed backups on your own again. One of the hardest parts of my job is having to tell a client or prospect that I am meeting with that the working backup they thought they had hasn’t worked since four months ago.
I admit it is hard to get people to think about being proactive about their technology when they have always done it reactive.
Think of it this way, how many employees use computers in your business? How much time each day do they spend with emails, financial data, CAD design data, spreadsheets, etc.? Imagine all of that data just being lost one random day because one employee opened up the wrong email, or a setting in the firewall was incorrect and allowed a hacker in, or the server died or a pipe burst and poured on top of the CEO’s computer (all of these things I have had to help recover).
Being proactive in technology is really pretty simple, it requires only four things to be done right:
- Data is backed up and verified in a timely manner.
- Uptime increased by replacing low cost equipment with commercial grade quality equipment.
- Patches and updates are installed regularly so known security issues are fixed.
- Advanced security is setup over the network for intrusion protection so your private data doesn’t become the Internet’s public data.
It costs less to recover data from a backup than to send it off to a data recovery specialist and wait a month to get a tiny fraction back.
It costs less to maintain the firewall and security than to have to argue with the bank that the $40,000 transaction that was wired out of your bank account to Tibet wasn’t something you intended to happen.
When the wireless goes down 5 times in a day because the box store router was on sale, that starts not to look like such a great deal.
Sometimes when a CEO decides to run their IT gas tank on “E” and do it themselves they run out of gas and have a disaster. Wearing the IT hat can be a painful experience if the technology is not setup right and this is most certainly a time where “an once of prevention is most certainly worth a pound of cure.”
As a Holland, Michigan Managed Service Provider (MSP), we offer more than just server disaster recovery and break-fix IT support. We evaluate and organize your network, keeping your data backed up and secure—at all times. Don’t wait for server disaster to find a qualified Managed Services Provider. Reach out to Shoreline Technology Solutions today. Our information technology company will evaluate your network free-of-charge and provide you with best-in-class hardware and cloud-based solutions. We’re excited to hear from you!
President / Network Architect
Mark Kolean always had a fascination with technology from the time he was 3 and his gift of the Atari 2600 to current. In 1990 at the age of 14 Mark got his first job in customer support for a mail order business supporting Tandy TSR-80 computer software shipped on cassette tape. A few years later Mark was building hundreds of 286, 386, and 486 computers for the new emerging DOS & Windows 3.1 computers that had exploded on the market.
After a college career studying business and technology Mark Started Shoreline Computer Systems in 1999 at the height of the dot.com boom with the looming crisis of the year2k bug just around the corner. In the early 2000’s a lot of work was done with early network systems including Lantastic, Novell, and Windows NT Server. Mark became a community contributor to the Small Business Specialist community that revolved around Small Business Server 2000-2011 which focused on single or dual server environments for businesses up to 50 in size. Networks during this time frame mostly had a break fix relationship in which work was billed only when a problem occurred.
In the 2010’s Microsoft released their first cloud based software called Microsoft BPOS which would in later become known as Microsoft Office 365. This introduced a new model in technology with pay as you go subscription services. Starting in 2013 Mark’s team at Shoreline Computer System rebranded as Shoreline Technology Solutions to focus on the transition to become proactive and less reactive to data backup and security needs. Starting in 2018 all customers are required to have a backup management plan in place as a center point with the full understanding that if STS isn’t watching the customer’s data, then no one is.
Now in Mark’s 22 years of business he is building a company emphasis of how to help customers retire servers and build networks completely in the cloud.
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