Small to medium-sized businesses are constantly under pressure to do more with less, especially when it comes to
technology. With a limited budget, they face multiple challenges that can hinder growth and efficiency including costly infrastructure, defending against cyber threats, and juggling a wide range of IT responsibilities. Fortunately, there are strategic, cost-effective solutions that can help. Embracing cloud technology, investing in cybersecurity, and leveraging managed services are three ways SMBs can let their teams focus on what truly matters: serving customers and growing the business. Let’s look at each of these now.
Racksquared Data Centers Expands into Louisville, Kentucky
I am new to the world of IBM Power but in the last 6 months, I've learned a lot and would like to share some of those key
learnings with you. I'm going to talk about how staying current on your OS avoids trouble, why you need to follow the 3-2-1 best practices rule for backups, and how having a disaster recovery plan prepares you for a worst-case scenario.
According to TechTargets, “The term cloud came into widespread use in 2006 when Amazon launched AWS with the Elastic
Compute Cloud (EC2) service”. Since that time, there have been endless debates as to whether it is better to host IT infrastructure on-premises or in the cloud. From my perspective, the answer is a definite “it depends”. How do you figure out what’s best for you? Check out the three questions you need to ask as you determine on-premises versus the cloud. Your company should have the expertise, technology, and environment to support your business requirements.
Earlier this year, I wrote an article entitled The IBM Power Trap that described how a series of decisions related to how you
manage your applications and IBM Power can leave you stuck. A few people reached out to me with questions so I thought it might be appropriate to share a real-life story about one of our customers, we will call them Glass Corp International (GCI), that got caught in this trap and had to be rescued.
IBM 
Power has long been known as a stable, reliable hardware platform and as a result companies have leveraged it to run their most critical business applications. For many, it has become so ingrained in their business that they would never choose to migrate away from it. But for some, IBM Power has become a trap from which they can’t escape. This is not a malicious trap that suddenly jumps up and grabs you but rather a trap that is triggered by a series of decisions made over time with each compounded by the previous. So, what are these decisions that create the trap? At Racksquared Data Centers, we have classified them into three categories, application neglect, operating system ambivalence, and hardware apathy. Let’s look at each of these.
According to the CRC Group’s June 2022 Cyber Redy Index, in Q2 2022, 82% of companies that renewed their cyber insurance had a price increase greater than 20% and of those 44% had an increase of 50% or more. Maybe most shocking is that in recent months 1 in 4 had increases greater than 100%.
These increases have companies questioning whether buying insurance still makes sense. However, self-insuring is a risky business so here is what we are telling our customers.
Check the front door
IT departments have shored up the obvious entry points like firewalls and routers but that doesn’t stop cyber criminals from testing them. Your best defense is to check the “doors” and address weak points before a hacker does. A simple network assessment, often done at no charge by insurance and credit card companies, will aid you in proactively identifying ports that should not be open, firewall vulnerabilities, unpatched servers, outdated operating systems and other risks. You can then use the results of the assessment to eliminate vulnerabilities before applying for insurance.
Your business runs on IT and chances are if your systems are down, your business is down. Have you contemplated the 
most common reasons for data loss and whether your strategy can protect you in the event of natural disaster, hardware failure, fire, ransomware, human error or theft? Depending on the reason for your outage, you may experience data loss and need to leverage your backups to recover. Are you confident in your backup and recovery strategy?
One of the simplest tests you can do to assess your backup strategy is to see how you stack up against the 3-2-1 best practices for backups. This requires that you have 3 copies of your data on 2 different media with 1 of them being offsite. When I visit companies and talk to them about their backup strategies, very few are meeting the 3-2-1 best practices.
Why haven’t you made the move to IBM Power in the cloud?
Is it because you like the big upfront capital expense and the depreciating asset? Is it because installing PTFs and doing OS
upgrades gives your IT team something to do during slow times? Or maybe it’s because the thought of migration and downtime is just completely overwhelming to you? While I don’t have an answer to the first two reasons above, I’m here to tell you that a migration does not have to be difficult, and downtime can be practically nonexistent.
I recently spent some time with an IBM reseller, and he walked me through the steps of migrating to one of the “big IBM Power in the cloud service providers”. To say that it was complex, and self-service would be an understatement. I know there are many companies that like the self-service cloud model. Give them an interface and they are happy to configure, manage and tweak the environment on their own but I talk to companies every day that want to walk away from hardware management and don’t want the added burden of planning and executing a migration to the cloud. With their limited iSeries expertise on staff, they are happy to offload the project to someone else.
