Cloud Services

We have found that our customers have found the following cloud services to be most beneficial to their businesses.

Google Apps

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Google Apps for Work has been a very cost-effective solution for those businesses that have large mailboxes, large shared folders that they want to make available to the web, or those who don’t otherwise have a strong affinity to Microsoft products. One of the greatest features of Google Apps for Work is the Gmail interface and Google Drive. These web apps are quick and responsive, making use of Google’s incredibly fast search technology. It is simple to add additional space in either Gmail or Google Drive for a small additional fee.

The downside of Google Apps for Work is that it is a little more difficult to integrate the email into Microsoft Outlook and some of the settings, such as Out of Office Notifications, need to be managed through the web interface as opposed to Outlook.

Microsoft Office 365

Office 365

Microsoft’s Office 365 offering has been improving over the last few years and is now a formidable competitor to Google Apps. There are three levels of business offerings: Office 365 Business Essentials, Office 365 Business, and Office 365 Business Premium. The differences come down to whether or not the business needs desktop versions of Office as well as fully hosted email.

The best part about Office 365 is that you can purchase your email, full desktop Office applications and a full collaboration platform (through SharePoint Online) for a low monthly fee. It also offers up to 1 TB of storage per user through OneDrive for Business.

The downside of Office 365 is when mailboxes approach 50 GB or if large file shares need to be synchronized with OneDrive, it can be problematic.

Office 365 also has a non-profit offering available in Canada.

Reduce your IT budget

This article discusses three ways that we help our clients reduce their technology budget. Contact us now if you’d like us to do the same for you.

Embrace the Cloud

Embrace the cloud

You’ve probably heard a lot about the cloud for the past few years. The reality is that using online or hosted services can drastically reduce what it costs to install and maintain your corporate applications. The biggest example of this is your email server. If your email is still hosted in-house, a large part of your IT budget could be reduced or even eliminated by moving your email to Office 365 or Google Apps. In the last year alone we have helped a number of our clients reduce their email costs by migrating them to one of these two major email hosts.

Email is only the beginning of where the cloud can benefit your business. Virtually any service that you are currently using in-house servers for is available as a hosted service. Examples include customer relationship management, oil and gas applications, accounting, facility/rental scheduling, employee scheduling/timesheets and even your phone system.

User training and proper security policies are important to help minimize any risks associated with cloud computing. We’ll be discussing cloud application security in our next post.

Remote Monitoring and Support

Remote monitoring

If your IT support provider is not monitoring your equipment and providing support remotely, you are probably paying too much for your IT services. The tools that Claritech employs today can reduce your support costs and make your users much happier and more productive.

Your users are continuing to do more work from home and on their mobile devices. Traditionally, home computers and personal cell phones have gone unsupported or the users are left on their own for personal device support. Our new service offering focuses on your users and makes sure they are productive with all of their devices, not just the corporate ones.

Outsourcing to Reduce your Payroll

Outsourcing

One of the highest costs of managing information technology is employee salaries. Along with the use of new online technologies, we can help to reduce your payroll costs in the following ways:

  1. By providing the right level of resource for your particular need. As your needs change, we can change the level of resource we provide;
  2. We can provide fractional resources, from very part time to multiple full-time equivalents;
  3. We manage transitions for a continuation of service to keep your business operating, even during times of change.

Contact us today to find out more about our services, including our new Claritech Trust Bundle.

Hosted Email Distribution Lists – Sherweb fits the bill

We recently migrated one of our clients to Google AppsTM for Business from in-house Microsoft® Exchange.  Everything went pretty smoothly until it came to distribution lists for their email newsletters and announcements.

Here’s the issue:  While Google does a great job of processing distribution lists through Google Groups, these lists cannot be managed (or accessed) via Microsoft Outlook®. My requirements were simple:  give me a distribution list that I can pull up in an address book and edit it or expand it as needed. For example, if I have a list of my extended family, I’d like to be able to bring up that list in Outlook, expand it, and then delete the family members I don’t want to send to, based on my own criteria.  Ideally, it would be nice to be able to maintain the list in Outlook as well, but that’s not a priority.

It’s a simple requirement, but it turns out it’s not as easy to accommodate as one would think.  I did finally arrive at success, however, with Sherweb, an independent Exchange provider based in Quebec, Canada.  In this post, I’ll go through the three platforms I tested and describe the problems with distribution lists that I encountered:

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Google Apps – Is it right for your company?

I’ve been testing Google Apps Premier Edition for the last month and this note details my likes and dislikes about the service offering.   Overall, while I think Google Apps holds promise, its smartphone support is lacking and might not be the best choice for all companies.

Likes

  1. Multiple calendars – while at first I thought the lack of category capability was a bit of a pain, I’ve started to warm up to the concept of multiple calendars for tracking different types of appointments/events. The best part about the multiple calendars is that you can view them all on the same calendar view.  Different calendars are represented by different colours on the same view.
  2. Interesting calendars (sports teams, holidays, etc) – as part of my experimentation with multiple calendars, I noticed that there are numerous public interesting calendars available that can be easily integrated into Google Calendars.  Once you’ve subscribed to them, adding them to your calendar view is as easy as clicking a checkbox.
  3. Easy to setup – the Google Apps Setup Guide is detailed and easy to follow.
  4. Integration of your domain name – you can set it up with webmail.yourdomain.com, docs.yourdomain.com, calendar.yourdomain.com, etc.Continue reading

Two-Factor Part II – OpenID, VeriSign PIP and PhoneFactor

As you may already know, I am a huge believer in two-factor authentication.  You should keep in mind that two-factor authentication is not the absolute answer to Internet security problems.  It is critical that you keep your computer patched with current antivirus software and that you browse and use email with care.

I won’t get too much into the technology other than to say it involves using two of the three factors:  a) something you know,  b) something you have, and c) something you are. The majority of Internet two-factor authentication implementations use the first two factors, since determining something you are (such as a fingerprint or retinal image) involves considerably more logistics than is reasonable for a remote service.  The something you know portion of the system is trivial and widely accepted as username/password combinations.  Of course, password complexity is extremely important and will be the topic of a future post. That leaves us with something you have as the simplest and most common second factor.

It is worth noting that a second username/password combination can never be considered a second factor.  Theoretically, an infinite number of passwords is still part of something you know.  The primary reason that this is important is malware, particularly key-logging software.  This is the reason I am disappointed in PayPal’s two-factor implementation, as described in my previous post on the subject.  If you do implement two-factor authentication with PayPal, you should make sure you never bypass it or you risk exposing your account.

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Yet another cool hosted service – Draftix.com

DraftixI recently had the opportunity to test another hosted service, Draftix.com.  I found it by searching for some software that would help with season ticket group distribution.  I was creating a new season ticket group of varying ownership and figured there had to be someone out there who’s already figured out how to do it easily using software or even Excel. 

After doing a quick Google or Bing (I’ve tried using Bing lately – maybe more on that in another post) I stumbled upon Draftix.  Interestingly, Bing provided the only direct path to Draftix- the second result, while Google (using the exact same “season ticket sharing software” query as linked to above) didn’t have a link to Draftix in the first 200 results (I gave up looking after 200).  Google’s second result did find a site (Vator.tv) that holds a review of Draftix that leads you to the Draftix site.  This is a perfect example of why relying on only one search provider (and Google is getting a lot of negative press about this lately) can limit your “view” of the Internet substantially.  An analogy would be if you rely 100% on one news service for all of your current events (The same kind of negative view a lot of people have of CNN.)Continue reading

It’s 2009, do you know where your data is?

 

In this post I want to talk a little about our data.  By our data I mean any information that is unique to us: files we’ve created that can contain personal or important information that we may want to keep private and/or that we want to have backed up.  Examples include your email files, your photos, tax files, resume, letters, school papers, even your MP3 files.

One of the challenges of managing all of this data is backing it up.  If your hard drive dies for whatever reason, the data on that hard drive may be unrecoverable and all of that information (some of it priceless to us) may be forever lost.  There are many options for backing up data and I highly recommend checking out this IT Business article for more information on some free online services as well as inexpensive external hard drive solutions.  I personally use and recommend free Mozy for home and we resell Mozy Pro for business.Continue reading

Livin’ in the Cloud

As I embrace the concept of cloud computing, I’ve been asking myself if it’s possible to live completely in the cloud.  To get a picture of what I’m talking about here, imagine doing all of your computer-related work at an Internet cafe or on a diskless netbook.  And I mean “all” of your work.

My revelation that living in the cloud could be a real possibility came to me about a month ago as I was walking into one of my clients with my laptop bag strapped over my shoulder.  As I had done almost every day for the previous several weeks, I put my laptop case on the floor under my desk and proceeded to log in to my client’s computer and carry on with my day.  My email, complete with contacts, tasks, notes, sent items, etc. is all totally accessible from the cloud through my hosted Exchange account.  I very seldom need my laptop at work any longer and I’ve started leaving it in my car to be used only in case of emergency (my security blanket).

There are a number of potential obstacles that must be overcome for a complete transition to livin’ in the cloud:Continue reading

PayPal and two-factor authentication

I’ve been a huge proponent of two-factor (something you know and something you have/are) authentication for several years now.  I understand that nothing is 100% secure, but I haven’t seen anything better come along. 

I’d like to see more services provide this type of authentication option.  PayPal has a feature called Security Key that allows you to add two-factor authentication to your PayPal account.  LogMeIn has a similar implementation for even their free version of the service.  They allow one-time passwords as well as the use of SecurID cards.

I’ve used PayPal’s Security Key with some success.  I only have two concerns with it:

  1. It allows the user to bypass the security key for times when you don’t have your second factor available or the service isn’t working;
  2. The service isn’t 100% reliable (at least not the cell phone key).

I applaud PayPal for introducing additional security to their service. A system as important and valuable as PayPal needs to be a leader in online security. 

Unfortunately, when it allows the user to bypass the security key, it effectively voids the two-factor component and just asks the user for one or more things he already knows, thereby making the first factor a little more complicated and the second factor unnecessary.  The reason they do it is because the service isn’t 100% reliable. 

Even so, I’d like PayPal to allow the user to decide whether they want the system to allow an override of the second factor.  In this way, I can force all authentication to go through my security mechanism and, if it isn’t available or not working, I’ll just have to wait until it is.  I think that is a reasonable compromise.

What is cloud computing?

What is “cloud computing”?  After writing my last post, I feel that it is necessary to define my opinion of what cloud computing is. 

The simplest way of describing cloud computing is any web page you use to perform a function or store data. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are part of cloud computing, as are online storage sites such as Mozy.com. 

The most interesting aspect of this migration to cloud computing is that it will radically change the face of information technology, especially within small businesses.   One of the early pioneers is Salesforce.com, who were one of the first to provide online Customer Relationship Management software, making what was previously available only to multi-million dollar corporations, accessible to the sole proprietor for a small monthly fee.

There is very little that can’t be hosted through the cloud today. Virtually any application you can think of is available through an online offering.  I’ll be highlighting some of the the ones that we use on a day-to-day basis in future posts on this site.

Cloud computing is the future?

The consultants at Claritech have been embracing the concept of Cloud Computing for the last several months, from hosted Exchange and backup solutions to online employee scheduling and document storage.  This site is being developed as a portal to our clients to provide easy access to some of our recommended Cloud service providers.