January 11, 2020
A lot of our clients have wondered whether going to a cloud-based solution or sticking with their physical infrastructure is the right decision for their company. In each situation it is going to depend on the needs of your business, but we will outline the pros and cons of each below:
Pros of cloud based
No physical infrastructure to maintain on site saving maintenance and power costs
Faster recovery time in the event of an outage or ransomware attack
Ability to scale faster IE. If you require additional resources to add to a server you can typically do it with the click of a mouse being cloud-based, whereas with a physical server you would have to purchase the hardware and take the server offline to install it.
Reduce total cost of ownership
Costs are billed monthly versus high upfront costs with purchasing physical hardware
Ease of backup
Cons of cloud based
You don't have control over your infrastructure. IE. If AWS goes down you have to wait for Amazon to fix the underlying issue.
Consumption based billing model, which means monthly costs can be high if you use a lot of resources (A competent consultant can assist in reducing these costs.)
If your Internet goes down you will lose access to your cloud environment. A workaround is to purchase a redundant internet connection.
Pros of physical servers
You have complete control over your infrastructure.
Depending on use (IE. Engineering applications) it may make sense to have physical servers on site for lower latency.
Cons of physical servers
High upfront hardware and licensing costs
Can be a single point of failure (IE. If you only have one server and it goes down your operation ceases.)
No scalability
You generally need to maintain a data centre or room with specialized cooling requirements for hosting the servers.
Specialized personnel are needed to configure and maintain the servers
December 20th, 2020
Office 365 vs. Google Workspace
We receive a number of inquiries regarding Office 365 vs Google Workspace. Each service is excellent and has its advantages and disadvantages.
Office 365
If you are already a Microsoft customer the transition to Office 365 is quite easy.
Integrates well with Microsoft Office desktop applications
Includes great collaboration tools such as Sharepoint, OneDrive and Microsoft Teams.
Exchange Online (e-mail) works extremely well if you already use Outlook in your environment.
Lots of feature rich compliance and reporting tools.
Google Workspace
Great if you want to be able to access all of your applications through the web.
Google Drive provides Google Docs and Sheets, which are the equivalent of Microsoft Office 2003. If your documents are fairly basic this should be sufficient.
Google Drive automatically saves files and makes it easy to restore previous versions.
Gmail offers a great e-mail interface and the built-in AI capabilities to autocomplete sentences works amazing.
Shared drives enable Teams to collaborate.
All in all both solutions have their advantages and disadvantages. I typically suggest smaller companies use Google Workspace for ease of use and administration, especially if they only need basic document management functions.
I suggest environments that already use Microsoft Outlook or are a Microsoft environment use Office 365.
Each organization is going to have its own unique needs, so please Contact Us so we can perform an assessment to determine which solution is the right fit for your organization.
December 10, 2020
5 tips to secure remote workers
With lockdowns imposed by CCOVID-19 more and more employees are working from home. Remote workers typically use personal devices and need additional security measures in place to protect corporate IT infrastructure and data. This article covers 5 tips to help secure employees working from home.
Ensure there is proper endpoint protection installed on all devices connecting to your network. Endpoint protection includes a firewall, such as Windows Firewall, anti-virus software or more advanced endpoint protection such as Sentinel One or Cisco Endpoint Anti-Malware Protection.
Implement VPNs to connect to your corporate network. Virtual Private Networks provide a secure encrypted connection between your employees computer and your corporate environment. This ensures a traffic cannot be intercepted while in transit.
Use multi-factor authentication to protect access to applications such as Office 365 and GSuite. Multifactor authentication adds an extra layer of security when employees are accessing cloud-based applications. In addition to their code they typically have to enter a code from an application such as Google Authenticator.
Ensure devices are kept up to date. Ensure all devices are patched and kept up to date. Regularly patching devices protects against vulnerabilities in software and keeps your employees systems stable.
Implement Network Access Control. Network access control ensures devices are checked to meet minimum security standards prior to connecting to your corporate network.