by Chas Arnold

There are many good reasons to transition your IT into the cloud. But there is one primary reason the cloud has become so popular - it simplifies your business model. All the other benefits are auxiliary to the fact that you’ll no longer have to buy hardware, software licensing and service to maintain the whole setup in house. All the assets end up on your balance sheet, and then you have to pay taxes on them and worry about depreciating them over time. The new way of thinking in the New Normal economy means businesses should be doing everything they can to get out of the data center business. After all, once you outsource the IT part of your business, you’ll receive even better services such as:

More Security

When you outsource your data, applications and support to a cloud provider, it will be located in building that’s hardened for environmental disasters. They are designed to withstand tornadoes, earthquakes and fires. For fires, they have state of the art prevention and suppression systems to help minimize risk. Flexible cages and thick concrete walls ensure seismic and weather related activities have minimal effect within the confines of the data center.

High-end data centers have 24/7/365 day manned security accompanied with video surveillance. They typically have multiple kinds of biometric security scanners like fingerprint readers and retina scanners for physical access.

More Redundancy

Within the cloud providers data center, there are multiple copies of your data. At all times, there is a usuallya minimum of 3 backups with 2 being on-site and another in a separate off-site data center. Each server contains dozens of hard drives via SANs (Storage Area Networks) that are replicated in an striped array for both speed and data integrity. Whole servers that contain multiple hard drives are cloned throughout the day, so in the event of a whole server crash, a replica server will simply takeover where the other server left off.

More Availability

Cloud providers have high-end, independent power sources that can take over in the event of an outage. They store fuel on-site and test systems at least monthly to ensure proper operations. Even the power backup has backups. There are multiple power substations on separate utility grids feeding into the data center to ensure power is always being delivered and to handle the transitions between utility and generator power. Multiple power feeds means there is never an interruption in power internally. Externally, they allow power to be switched between UPS modules, generators, and Utility power ensuring constant up-time.

More Mobility

Whether you are connected to wireless in flight or in your office, moving into the cloud means everyone is working remotely all the time. An employee in Florida has the same capabilities as someone in your office in Atlanta. The cloud gives you the ability to use your data anywhere AND on any device. An employee can run all of your applications on their iPad, at 30,000 ft. altitude while flying.

Outsource All Of Your IT Plumbing

The cloud is a new paradimg in which you can simplify your business while also making dramatic improvements to your technology capabilities. Through simplifying, you gain the ability to create a major competitive advantage. The cloud offers more security, redundancy, availability, and mobility. Instead of just keeping up with the competition, you’ll be able to focus improving efficiency and growing your company.

by David J. Moorman

Many people learn to live with those old Windows computer that take 10 Minutes to boot. Sometimes, they can even learn to put up with taking 5 minutes to open a Word document. It’s clear to see how bad computers can result in poor performance. Slow computers are what most people think of when they imagine what a failing IT infrastructure looks like. When we talk about the costs of under-performing IT, it doesn't mean your computers don’t run as well as they should. What it does mean is that:

You Lose Productivity From Employees

Slow computers are one thing, but there are also undesirable consequences to limiting employees’ ability to work remotely. Though they are in denial, most people know and understand that employees will do personal activities during work hours. But, your IT solution shouldn't limit an employee’s ability to do work activities during their personal hours. Work life is 24 x 7 these days; take advantage of it.

Having the ability to work remotely improves your employees’ quality of life. They can stay home sick, without getting the rest of the office sick, and still accomplish all of their work. When they can’t sleep at night, they can login and accomplish the things they used to be unable to from home. When employees are anchored to the office in order to work, you lose productivity.

You Can Damage Your Brand

If your IT system begins to break down, the effects can be noticed by your customers. A real world example happened a few years ago during the recession. A high-end country club was feeling the crunch and started cutting corners. One of the corners cut was their IT system. As a result, their system would randomly lose orders patrons had placed. Servers would bring out the food and a plate would be missing. Other people would come in only to find out their tee time hadn’t registered in the system. A place that used to be viewed as prestigious was noticeably looking like they were just scraping-by.

You Can Lose Customers And Revenue

If your employees are underutilized and customers see a blemished brand, you can lose revenue. Waiting until its to late to improve your IT is an uphill battle. With lost revenues, having to make an investment or major change adds insult to injury. It’s always best to improve upon IT proactively than to cut corners and later realize how much damage has been done. Like most things in life, a proactive solution is better than a reactive solution.

IT Can Be A Strength

Many people find technology to be a burden because they only realize their dependence when it  malfunctions. We should always keep in mind how much IT has improved business overall. Most businesses can’t function at all without some sort of computer system. Instead of viewing IT as a blessing and a curse, realize that it’s mostly a blessing. Under-performing IT is a result of not recognizing it’s importance within your business. If you make your IT a high priority, it can take you years ahead of your competition. Otherwise, if you don’t, it can take you out of business.

by David J. Moorman

Prior to the dial tone, operators would say, “Hello, who are you trying to reach?” and would connect your call. When the telephone systems became automated there was no longer an operator there to say, “Hello.” So, the dial tone was created as a user interface to let people know they could begin to dial.

In many ways, desktops have turning into a modern dial tone. We turn on our computer and we expect some sort of platform. This platform for most people is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and typically Microsoft Windows or the latest Apple OS. The term Desktop is now widely known. We are used to the look and feel of the Desktop. But the truth is, we don’t really need it. What we need are the applications on the computer like Microsoft Office or you accounting application. Similarly, we didn't need the telephone operator, we needed to be connected to the person we called.

So what is the computer equivalent to a dial tone?

Glad you asked. It’s so simple and quick, it may pass right over your head.

The modern operating system, capable of taking your desktop everywhere with the ability to accomplish every task you can think of and expands your entire digital business onto every device is (drum roll please)...

The Web or a single web page.

Windows is just a platform we use to connect us to the applications and files we need to accomplish our business tasks. The platform handles two things, navigation and as a human interface. Fortunately, we only need a browser to accomplish both of these tasks.

Other businesses like Google think so too. They’re putting some heavy weight behind creating their own browser based operating system called Chrome OS. The downside of their operating system is that it would require transitioning to their own tool set.

At DynaSis, we created an IT service built on a cloud platform called ITtility by DynaSis that allows businesses to use any operating system, and most browsers to access your applications and files. It doesn’t matter if you are on your iPad, iPhone, Mac OS X, or Microsoft Windows. Your IT system will just work; Anywhere, Anytime.

Do you worry about how Google’s system is run? Probably not. You just expect it to work, and it does. That should be how your IT solutions work. They just do. You can work from anywhere, on any device, and you don’t have to think about it.

ITility by DynaSis allows you to use all of your normal applications like Outlook right over the internet. It’s such a simple form of IT, it’s almost hard to comprehend.

Operating Systems Are Like Operators

Currently, your IT is setup so that your operator is in-house. But with ITility by DynaSis by DynaSis that operator can be outsourced. It would be ridiculous to pick up the phone and have a person connect your call every time. In ten years, you will be thinking the same thing about your current desktop solution. To turn your computer on and have all of your data and applications in one place. You have to maintain, protect, backup everything yourself. That type of operation is costly, rigid, and demanding.

In ten years, you will assume you can work from anywhere and not have to worry about how that system is maintained. When you outsource your IT to the cloud, you will have more time, money, and flexibility than ever before. Doing it the old way, having the operator in-house, will seem like an absurd throwback to the past.

by David J. Moorman

Wouldn't it be nice if the cost of IT was always an exact fit for your needs?

Chances are, if you aren't paying for your IT on a per-user basis billing model, you are paying too much. A per-user IT contract is an all-inclusive, holistic way of contracting your IT. The per-user model gives you the ability to dynamically scale your IT consumption up and down on a monthly basis. By including all of the hardware and software required that a business needs for an employee, businesses can ensure they are paying just the right amount for their IT solution. It will give your IT infrastructure unprecedented flexibility and alleviate the risk of building to much or not enough capacity. The steep costs of investing in depreciating hardware and software goes away, and you simply pay for the IT services as you need them. The ability to scale up and down in the "New Normal" business world we live in offers you the flexibility you need now and in the future.

Growing Pains

Often, a 30 person business will build an infrastructure for 40 people. This means buying 40 PCs, 40 licenses for all of their software, and enough server and storage that will handle 40 people. Then they have a great quarter and business grows. Hiring employees can be a painful process in general but for IT there can be added pain of scalability. Adding 5 or 10 more computers with all of the added applications and services can be just as difficult as creating the original 30 user infrastructure. You even run the possibility of outgrowing your initial infrasturture setup.

With a per-user IT solution model, you can throw these worries out the door. As your business grows and you need more IT capacity and capabilities, adding to the infrastructure is easy.. Per-users IT solutions mean you can set up 10 or 20 more PC's fully licensed, and customized to your business. You don’t even have to think about it.

Downsizing

In other more unfortunate circumstances, you may have to make the difficult decision to downsize your business. Traditionally, with less people in your organization, you are still paying for the original capacity of your infrastructure. 25 of your 40 employees remain, but you are still left paying for a 40 computers and licenses. You are stuck with your depreciating technology and have lost your ROI on that initial investment.

Contracting IT as a per-user service will help to take the sting out of downsizing. Instead of sunk costs in IT, you can adjust your contract and be able to pay for one or 10 less users. You aren't stuck with the hardware, licensing, or expensive servers and storage that you do not need anymore. The office can downsize with the changing needs of your business regardless of size.

One-Size Fits All

A per-user IT model can ensure your IT is just the right size for your business needs. The flexibility will allow you to have more time and money for concentrating on the parts of business that matter the most. Instead of being a burden, it will help drive success. With a per-user IT solution you will receive an infrastructure that will always fit your ever-changing business needs.

Roswell, Georgia – June 30, 2011 - DynaSis, Atlanta’s premier provider of IT services and support for small and medium businesses (SMBs), announced today the launch of ITility by DynaSis Essentials, a cloud-based productivity solution for businesses with fewer than 15 employees. ITility by DynaSis Essentials allows small businesses to move their data and applications into the cloud so they can conveniently access them from their desktop, laptop, home or office location – essentially wherever they may choose to perform their work.

“The increased visibility of cloud-based solutions is stimulating demand for the cloud yet many business owners don’t fully understand what they want, what they are getting or what the cloud can do for them,” states Dave Moorman, president of DynaSis. “With ITility by DynaSis Essentials we’re introducing a reliable platform that delivers the information and applications businesses use most: Microsoft Office and Microsoft Exchange plus standard line of business applications.”

ITility by DynaSis Essentials provides increased reliability for the small office/home office (SOHO) business by removing dependence on sometimes temperamental desktop hardware and poorly maintained servers housed in a shared storage closet or basement office. Instead, ITility by DynaSis Essentials is built on a Windows Terminal Services platform to give users access to their applications and data – in the cloud – from a web browser window on any Windows-based device

ITility by DynaSis Essentials includes 4 hours of monthly helpdesk support. Users call one number for technical support on all of their IT infrastructure if service interruptions or technical complications occur. The SOHO audience also gains enterprise mobility, quality backup and disaster recovery baked right into the solution.

“With ITility by DynaSis Essentials, we’re offering the kind of reliable backup and disaster recovery that is often needed but not secured by the SOHO market,” continues Moorman. “In so doing we’re able to help prevent the SOHO from becoming another statistic of business failure after unrecoverable data loss.”

by David J. Moorman

Technologies that can help drive business operations and efficiency, as opposed to just keeping business operations afloat, are considered competitive technologies. If everyone else is using the same tools and technologies in the same way, it doesn't really provide a competitive advantage. The following technologies aren't currently being utilized by everyone, but they will be probably be in the future:

Sales Automation systems

Sales Automation systems are at the top of many technology executives to-do lists and if they aren't, they should be for 2011. The goal of a Sales Automation system is to give a company the ability to generate more qualified sales opportunities, more effectively and to increase the close rate on those opportunities.
One popular example of a Sales Automation system that provides a competitive advantage is Salesforce.com. The implementation and integration of Salesforce with other systems can help to increase automation, Business Intelligence and communication. Services such as Google Adwords, Facebook, twitter, chat and other social media platforms can integrate with Salesforce.com to generate more opportunities and in the end more sales.

Business Intelligence

Easily readable, real-time business data helps executives make decisions faster, better, and more accurately. Business Intelligence is the collection of data usally from multiple sources and parsed and displayed in a pre defined format. B.I. Systems help to analize the data for questions like:
How many sales occurred today?...by which representative?...to what customers?
What were today’s margins?
What are current inventory levels?
To answer these questions, systems record, create, and organize historical data. This data can be packaged together and displayed into a dashboard or used for reporting purposes.

Data Analytics

Diving deeper into your data to answer very specific questions requires a system that can tap into the troves of data collected by a data warehousing systems. For example, Data Analytics would be able to determine how many resources a customer is requiring from your business. Should you raise rates for some customers and lower them for others? Data Analytics would make complex questions much easier to answer.
Are the customers that are requiring the most of your services generating profit? If so, do you need to allocate more resources for those clients? Should you hire more people to provide adequate service?

Being able to drill down deep into the data helps to reduce the risk of uncertainty. These systems increase confidence in your decisions which translates into a competitive advantage in every scenario.

Social Media

Social media can be used in IT to help market and sell more products. With social media integrated into sales automation systems, you will be able to track where leads are generated, who’s buying your services, and who’s reading your company’s communications. Social media with increased automation can tailor marketing messages to a very specific audience.

Integrated Systems

While each of these systems by themselves can benefit a business, it’s when they all work together that their true power is realized. Ultimately, they empower people by reducing workload and increasing knowledge. When used together you can know exactly who your clients are and what they want. This knowledge can be used to find the most efficient path to balancing the needs of your business and your clients. An integrated IT system can be the competitive advantage your company needs to set it apart from the pack.

After a week when most of Atlanta was out of work and stuck at home due to a massive snow event —which will go down in history as "Snowmageddon 2010," —you’d think CSM Research President Frank Saunders would be anxious to get back to work. Thanks to the remote access DynaSis's ITility service provided during the storm, Saunders felt blissfully at ease.

“Actually, I hated to come back,” says Sanders. “Being able to use ITility by DynaSis was a great thing because we were able to complete all of our work from home. Except for not having access to the Post-it notes on our desks, it was just like being in the office.”

Saunders and his 50 Atlanta employees are now loyal fans of ITility by DynaSis, the hosted platform they use for secure access to their Microsoft Office and proprietary applications as well as Microsoft Exchange.

Business as Usual.

ITility by DynaSis has enabled CSM Research to take advantage of workshifting, an increasingly popular productivity builder for companies large and small. With workshifting, employees can work when and where they choose, because corporate data and applications are hosted in the cloud and accessible over any Internet connection. DynaSis's ITility by DynaSis offers precisely that solution, making it a perfect fit for firms that want to adopt workshifting.

“We have folks with young kids, and when they have a sick child they can stay home and work; when they need to be home from 12-4 to meet the repairman, we can accommodate that, too," continues Saunders. "ITility by DynaSis is great for allowing our people to work whenever and wherever they need to.”

During Snowmageddon 2010, when CSM Research and the rest of Atlanta were housebound for a week, ITility by DynaSis and workshifting helped Saunders' team not miss a beat. They were emailing and calling each other and conducting business as usual. That was important for CSM Research, a leading customized integrated surveys and focused data collection provider with a national client base.

Seamless Workplace Continuity

"Most of our clients are located around the country and not in Atlanta," says Saunders." They didn’t know we were down or that Atlanta was snowed in. We continued work without interruption. Our clients didn't have to wonder if they might need another firm because we go down in bad weather."

Of course, his employees missed the interpersonal engagement aspects of physically being in the office, which he says helps them "manage a diverse set of clients with a lot of balls in air." Nevertheless, his team quickly made up the week of collaboration time they missed, and unless his clients happened to follow Atlanta weather, they never knew anything was amiss.

"One of our clients is large entertainment industry firm, and they wanted to know if we could facilitate surveys over a smartphone," says Saunders. "They sent an inquiry while we were all working from home, and our team was able to do research, collaborate and respond quickly to the client, even though no one was in the office."

Saunders says one IT employee—who doesn't like having a duplicate workstation at home—came into the office. He sent ongoing reports to his remote coworkers about how bad the ice was. "There is nothing worse than ruining your day by sliding down a hill in the ice, running into a tree and doing thousands of dollars worth of damage to your car," says Saunders. With DynaSis, ITility by DynaSis and workshifting on the scene, the only thing CMS Research employees were hitting was their weekly production goals.

Roswell, Georgia – February 22, 2011 – DynaSis, Atlanta’s premier provider of IT services and support for small and medium businesses (SMBs), announced today the opening of a data center in Phoenix, Arizona. The data center will provide instant failover for clients with our HOT Disaster recovery service. Phoenix will also act as a redundant backup site for our data farms in the Atlanta data center as well as primary support for west coast clients.

“Phoenix is the number one location in the U.S. for the establishment of data centers because of the minimal weather-related interruptions in that market,” states Dave Moorman, president of DynaSis. “The lack of electrical storms, hurricanes and tornadoes is one of the primary reasons we chose to locate our new facility there.”

The Phoenix data center provides a redundant setup for DynaSis’ primary Atlanta data center location. In the case of interruptions due to weather or other acts of God, DynaSis customers served in the Atlanta data center would have their operations transferred to and supported by the Phoenix data center.

“For our customers, the transfer of services would be seamless and virtually undetectable,” explains Moorman.

Like the Atlanta data center, the Phoenix data center provides 24/7/365 secure access via biometrics. Robust power is delivered via four 10 megawatt feeds from the utility substation to the facility along two different geographic paths. DynaSis’ infrastructure is redundantly fed from two power distribution panels (PDBs) on separate distribution paths. A bi-directional closed water loop ensures efficiently pumping of chilled water to our facility from two sides while removing datacenter heat. 36-inch raised floors provide increased capability for air circulation and cooling of equipment than the traditional 24-inch raised floors common in many data centers.

“Continuity of business operations is critical to the livelihood of most firms,” concludes Moorman. “Providing this robust backup data center ensures business continuity for our clients. Our mission is to provide fortune 500 level IT to the SMB. This investment furthers our commitment to that strategy.”

About DynaSis
DynaSis is a managed IT service provider for small and medium sized businesses in Atlanta, Georgia. DynaSis specializes in offering on-premise and on-demand managed IT service plans, managed hosting and professional equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis services visit www.dynasis.com.

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We announced our new partnership with IP phone system provider Fonality and VoIP Monitor covered the story.

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