Denver's Premier IT Company

Cloud Formulations

Dan Mullen — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:06:55 +0000

“The Cloud” (as I use both hands to make “quotes” in the air) seems to be the newest homonym (two or more words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings)… and, when did clouds start living in computer rooms? I completely understand how all of this “cloud talk” could be confusing. My aim in the next few minutes of your life is to clear the air a bit.

First and foremost you need to know that “The Cloud” has always been. Twenty(ish) years ago, when I attended my first computer courses at DeVry, the “cloud” was in Chicago; while I sat in Columbus. I programmed on terminals that submitted my “job” to the “mainframe” and anxiously awaited my response/printout from the mother-ship. That, in it’s most basic form, was “The Cloud” in the early 1980′s. This form of “cloud computing” supported the decentralized computing model; i.e. – the terminals and central computer were in different geographic locations.

Fast forward to PC’s in business and early LAN’s (Local Area Networks) that brought the power of the cloud locally. The computer that housed “all of the magic” was now called the “File Server”. Now, “terminals” and/or PC’s could access the power of “TheCloud” (which used to be in Chicago or in a Data Center somewhere else far, far away) that was in the same geographic location; no longer was there a need to wait on the mother-ship or traverse expensive Wide Area Network (WAN) links to get to your company’s most valuable asset… it’s data. The power of “The Cloud” is now local… this represents the “centralized” computing model.

Those of us that have been in Information Technology for quite some time have seen this ebb and flow from centralization to decentralization through many cycles. Each time technology changes, businesses are presented with the bill to “migrate to the newest hardware” or “upgrade to the latest version of software”. As a general rule of thumb, hardware upgrades every 9 months or so whereas software is usually double that; every 18 months or so. Businesses generally count on their entire system to last from, on the shy end, 36 months, and on the far end… about 5 years. Business that realize the benefit of their investment for the extra 2 years are often considerably behind their competitors in the technology area. This constant “state of flux” has kept many an IT company in business and given many a businessperson a bad taste for those in our industry; always feeling like they have to hold on to their checkbooks when the IT guys come calling…

While all of this was happening, businesses STILL needed to link all of their offices together. Some with offices just across town, while others were connecting internationally. The use of digital circuits like T1′s and early technologies like Frame Relay were slow but provided “adequate” connectivity… and they weren’t cheap.

That pretty much ends the history lesson. Welcome to modern day computing! I wrote this on my iPad while connected to WiFi that’s connected to a circuit that is over twice as fast as the earliest Local Area Network (10 Mbps Ethernet) and over 15 times faster than a T1!

A bit of fanfare here if you please as we enter the last cycle of decentralization and the modern day version of “The Cloud”!!

The issues business faced in the past need not be issues of concern in the future. The slow, expensive WAN (Wide Area Network) links that were necessary to effectively run one’s business are now more inexpensive than ever and have far surpassed speeds of traditional LAN’s (Local Area Networks). What’s the overall effect of this increase in speed and decrease in cost? “The Cloud”.

It’s now more cost effective than ever to replace your “on premise” solution for the last time. “The Cloud” allows you to have all of your “equipment” (be it virtual or real) in a remotely hosted location that’s as fast (or faster) as when you installed it in the IT closet just down the hall only a few years ago… and if your solution is “virtual” (a whole other topic) your hardware and software upgrades don’t involve:

* Days of downtime while you upgrade the Operating System
* Upgrading memory & hard disks
* Making sure you have at least 3 backup copies of all of your data
* Trusting your IT guys to pull it all off, seamlessly, before the start of the workday, Monday morning (Scary huh?!)

Nope. YOUR upgrades are a phone call to your Cloud Services provider. Conversations concerning a “technology refresh” (upgrade) should now go something like this:

1.). “Would you please increase our disk space?” Sure. It’ll be available in the next hour.
2.). “How quickly can you bring up another server for us?” We’ll have it available for you this afternoon.
3.) “How current are our backups”? We take complete backups of the entire server every four hours, this includes everything from your most recently updated data and software to the cute picture you have on your desktop. If something happens to your system, we can have you back to the point you were a few hours ago… in about 30 minutes or so.

The Cloud provides businesses the opportunity/ability to never have to upgrade their hardware again and avails an easy way to migrate to more powerful systems… all on the fly. Most cloud service providers also guarantee 100% uptime, data backup, and disaster recovery all within the confines of a highly secure physical location driven by multiple power grids, protected by backup generators, firewalls, and “blended” connections to the Internet that are a combination of many different Internet Service Providers (that way if one company’s connection goes down, your business won’t feel a thing!!!).

I’m drawing a line in the sand here. Businesses are soon to realize the safety of centralizing their data in the cloud once and for all… Cloud computing is the last wave of decentralization and the last time a business will need to approve budget dollars for a Capital Expense… nope, this expense can now be moved to Operations Department…

Long live my memories of doing “everything IT” the hard way… as I confidently send praise and success to The Cloud (quotes around this term are no longer necessary – we’re all friends now).

Whether it be Apple’s iCloud, Microsoft’s Private Cloud, or our very own StoneCloud… this technology is here to stay…

The Cloud is sure to change your life in the near future, if it hasn’t already.. and hec, if given the chance, I’d even vote for the cloud to win Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” award…

IPAD 2, In defense of the Laptop

patsullivan6630 — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:38:07 +0000

You don’t need an iPad. If you have one, it is very likely that you have at least one full PC or Mac in your house that you use on a regular basis in addition to your iPad. There has been a craze as of late that was started by the original iPad last year, for a large flat smart phones. Of course, that is all the iPad and its closes Google rivals are. They take the basis of the smart phone you carry in your pocket, and they make it physically larger. It is easier to use the touchscreen interface when the screen is so much larger. My friend who loves his iPad, often tells me that he loves being able to sit on his couch and pick up his iPad and browse the web or look at email – not that I have ever had any trouble doing that with my laptop. He will begrudgingly admit that it wasn’t that much of a pain to do that with his laptop either. It is just ever so slightly more convenient to do on an iPad.

I am not beating up on the iPad, far from it, it is a very cool little electronic gizmo. However, it does not take long to see some problems with the iPad and its Google counterparts that haven’t been addressed with the latest releases of either platforms. Spend some time crunching numbers, comparing documents, typing, or anything else that requires a lot of interaction and the lack of both a keyboard and multi-tasking become serious issues. I understand Google supports multi-tasking, but moving between running apps is cumbersome and comparing two apps side by side is nearly impossible. That doesn’t even touch on things like printing and file sharing, which aren’t done well natively on either device.

What has happened is that Apple has found a way of separating you from at least $600 for a device that can do nothing more than your laptop. The Google tablets are just as expensive. We are quite quick to forgive the obvious shortcomings of these tablets but we give no leeway to our old business and pleasure partner, the laptop. The laptop that you can get in a touchscreen, get in Mac, Linux, Windows, and very shortly a Google operating system or any combination of those with the right virtualization software. A laptop that can play, edit, and create music. A computer that is capable of running new and legacy software as well as print from both. A computer that can run 5 different types of browsers that are freely available. A computer that will let you compare a website, an excel document, and your email side by side. A computer that has a keyboard and a mouse. A computer than can do many different things at once and do them all intelligently. I can’t remember the last time that I thought “I wish my laptop was capable of doing xyz” because it can do practically anything that modern computing has to offer. The same cannot be said for any of the current tablet offerings.

If you must know there is a tablet in my household. I bought a $270 Barnes and Noble Nook Color for my wife over the Christmas holiday. She uses it to read books and magazines, browse the web, and play sodoku. Which is very similar to what I have heard people do with the iPad. I like being able to pick up the 7 inch Nook Color to look something up on the Web while I am watching TV. I wish it had an email client, but I can log into Google and my corporate email through the browser. Oddly enough facebook also works in a browser, so I can even update my status on the Nook. Eventually the Nook may be compatible with apps from the google store, under the skin in runs Android 2.1 and there have been rumors of app support coming this summer.

So there it is, I like and use tablets, but I use the regular old computer for most of my needs. I am going to guess most people use the iPad in a similar fashion. I don’t pay a monthly fee (I am looking at you Verizon and ATT) for either my computer or the Nook. The Nook is less than half of most iPads and does 80% of what they can do. For everything else I crack open my still pretty convenient laptop computing machine.

WatchGuard Chooses STONEMail for Case Study

danny7seven — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 04:18:05 +0000

Background

Stonetree Network Solutions specializes in bringing the “Fortune 100″ technology experience to small and medium-sized businesses in the Denver, Colorado area. Innovative offerings include their popular STONEMail service for spam-free, virus-free, HIPAA/PCI/SOX-compliant secure email – all without the overhead expense of an in-house email solution. Clients can access their email the same way they would with a traditional email server without the worry of server configuration, backup, retention, archives, or upgrades.

Other Stonetree services include outsourced IT, disaster recovery, electronic backup, hosted email solution, project implementations, wireless installation and support, and virus scans and malware protection for a client base as diverse as medical offices, engineering firms, property managers, nonprofit organizations and more.

‘Blended’ Business Model

In order to make good on the kind of quality services they were committed to delivering, Stonetree owners Dan and Andrea Mullen chose to partner with technology providers who Dan Mullen calls “the best of the best.” Their business relies on a combination of smart technologies that include the Microsoft Exchange 2010 and Microsoft Server 2008 R2 platform, HP ProLiant Servers, VMWare, and WatchGuard network security solutions.

Mullen does not refer to his company as a managed services provider (MSP). “We offer ‘blended services.’ By that I mean a combination of some of the services an MSP would provide, but with the personal on-site touch that lets the clients actually know who we are. We become an integral part of their team, and it doesn’t cost them any more for the personal service. We charge a flat rate with no additional fees for after-hours or emergency support.”

Differentiating with Old-Fashion Customer Service

Mullen believes the cost-per-month/per-device service model isn’t going to last. When providers only offer behind-the-scenes remote access services it brings product differentiation solely down to price. “Someone is always going to beat you on price,” Mullen reflected. “Someone can always offer to charge a dollar or two less per device. At Stonetree, we work on client retention. We want to make sure that they stay with us so that we have a viable business. We’re dedicated to being the client’s advocate for the long term by providing personal service, backed by technical expertise and excellent products.”

“And we make it cost-effective,” Mullen continued. “If you’ve already decided that you’re going to pay an IT person between $60,000 and $100,000 a year, our service can shave that cost down for the SMB market to 20%, 40%, even 60% of what they would normally pay to have somebody on staff. We give them all the benefits of an on-site IT person, with only a fraction of the overhead. There’s definitely no lack of folks with technical skills, so it’s not a matter of being technical enough to do the work. The big deal is getting clients to trust you to use those skills in their best interests.”

Partnering with WatchGuard

Stonetree chose WatchGuard network security solutions for their STONEMail email service. “We looked at all the other competitors in this space, including Cisco and Juniper, and the WatchGuard boxes were very easy to manage, easy to support, easy to order. WatchGuard has responded to client needs and the needs of the industry in a way that is timely and effective. They have kept up with the industry, with us, and the needs of our clients.”

Stonetree relies on a WatchGuard XTM 510 for firewall and VPN, connected to a 40 GB fiber backbone to utilize the high performance capabilities of the 510. “We particularly like the flexibility of the XTM centralized management console,” said Mullen. “Instead of going to each of our clients individually with changes, we can implement one-touch configuration or firmware updates to all of our managed WatchGuard devices– saving our clients money and us a great deal of time.”

The WatchGuard Quarantine Management Server (QMS) is a key component of the STONEMail hosted email service. Because Stonetree has such a variety of clients, they need the flexibility of the QMS to handle client needs in diverse environments. “We are able to set it up based on domain, organization, user and group, so all clients have their own spam quarantine. They have the ability to control how their quarantined messages are handled, just as if they had a QMS at their own location.”

There’s no sitting still in the hosted services business. “We constantly evaluate – ask ourselves if this is still the right thing for our clients and time and time again WatchGuard has proven to be the best choice. You walk into our collocation facilities and there are a lot of red boxes sitting there. We have 100% confidence that we are taking care of our clients in the best way possible.”

For example, Mullen describes one of the features he relies on in the WatchGuard XCS 170, which has powerful built-in data loss prevention capabilities to prevent sensitive data leaving the network. “If somebody were to send credit card information unencrypted,” he said, “the WatchGuard XCS solution ‘has their back’ on the hardware side. As it scans out-bound email content, it would be able to detect that the email was not encrypted but should have been, and encrypt it automatically to keep the customer safe and in compliance.”

Yes, but Does It Scale?

Because Stonetree is always looking to the future, scalability is an important concern. According to Stonetree VP Andrea Mullen, “We typically recommend that the client buy something just a little bigger that we can extend past the three to five year time frame of capital expense. We always assume that our clients’ businesses are going to grow and double or triple in size. We want to protect their investment.

“That being said, we take that same model to our Exchange host. With the WatchGuard platform, we know we can scale as our business gets more popular and people understand what it does and how it can benefit their business. We’re confident that we can continue to scale those systems and not worry that we’re going to hit a theoretic limitation.”

Measuring Success

Since technical expertise isn’t enough in the competitive world of hosted services, Stonetree couples their expertise with an unflinching commitment to getting the job done for their clients. The satisfaction can be enormous. Dan Mullen relates the story of being brought in to help a local medical office migrate off a dying server.

“The server was about seven years old and one drive from each RAID array was dead. They were on the edge and close to losing all of their data. The server was also out of space and they had no equipment locally that could be used for backup to save themselves. With this server on its last breath, we made the commitment to move them quickly.

“Basically, we had to hard convert them because we had to get them into the cloud immediately. Literally, we were taking doctors’ mail, putting it on external drives and physically driving it down to our collocation station to copy it to the server and remote it in to the WatchGuard product. We were using our STONEMail service, which relies on Microsoft Exchange 2010, the WatchGuard XTM 510 and XCS 170, with a WatchGuard Quarantine Management Server 500.

“We had 36 hours with two guys manning the keyboards at all times to create accounts on the Exchange and move the mail to the new system for this 30-doctor, 150-user practice – and we did it. No problems. That’s a success story for the client, for WatchGuard, and for Stonetree.”

For more information on WatchGuard network security solutions, visit www.watchguard.com. This article is also available on WatchGuard’s website.

“Genuine” Customer Service

danny7seven — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 15:38:13 +0000

So, I was going to start by relating to those who remember “Full Service” gas stations. Then I realized that many that might read this may never have had that experience. So, rather than try to relate, I’ll try to explain…

In a land far, far, away (imagine this explanation fading into the abyss in a “Star Wars” kinda way) Gas Stations didn’t have ATM’s , Point-of-sale terminals, “Pay at the Pump” and “associates” that help you from behind bulletproof glass. They didn’t drop your change into a sanitary little stainless steel thingi as they wished you a pleasant day through what looks like Darth Vader’s mouthpiece.

Actually, they rather liked it when you stopped by. They walked out to your car and you rolled your window down (proper social protocol of the day – and “yes”, all the way down!). You’d say “fill-er-up” and then they’d pump your gas for you… Most of the time they’d offer to check your oil and they always washed your windshield … Then, (seriously, I’m not joking) they took your money inside, brought you your change and then thanked you for your business… all without you having to leave your car…

Ok, even as I write this… it seems strange. But why? First and foremost, if some guy were walking up to our car asking us to roll the window down… we’d have no idea how to act!? We’d think we we’re being conned or the guy wanted money or something… right? And, the whole “rolling the window all the way down thing”, for a complete stranger… uh well… probably not. OK, anyway… on to the point…

Can you imagine how you’d feel if someone went out of their way for you like the “Old-Fashioned Gas Station Attendant”? Acting like they sincerely appreciate you as a client? Adding personal extensions of excellent service as part of their normal job? As consultants, we interact with clients on a daily basis… I’ve been doing this long enough to know that it’s not always the “content” of what we have to say that’s the ultimate product… it’s the “delivery” – oftentimes our technical recommendations are the same. Whether it’s accepted by the client (or not) has everything to do with “delivery”. Sometimes our recommendations aren’t cheap. A costly recommendation costs the client the same amount of money whether it’s delivered in a generic proposal stuffed under the glass in the “stainless steel thingi” or personally delivered via a friendly conversation over a cup of coffee… I’m just sayin…

So, what if we brought back “old fashioned customer service”? What if we thought about how we’d like to be treated and then thought of ways that would even improve upon that?! I suggest that we find ways to go past what’s expected by adding just a small personal touch to add value… to go out of our way to show that we appreciate our client’s business…

At Stonetree we’ve committed to be each client’s “advocate”… to offer the “Full Service” experience at the “Self-Serv” pump, so to speak. While no company is perfect, it’s our goal to constantly improve in this area… What’s been your experience? In what ways have YOU experienced outstanding customer service?

“StoneMail” – Stonetree’s Secure Hosted Exchange Service

danny7seven — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 19:30:07 +0000

We’re excited to announce our new secure hosted-exchange STONEMail messaging service! Stonetree is bringing technology commonly used only by Fortune 500 companies to the Small to Medium Business market!

STONEMail offers spam-free, virus-free, HIPAA, PCI & SOX compliant SECURE email to any non-secure recipient…

Test drive the interface from the STONEMAIL button above or using the button in the upper right-hand corner of our website (http://www.istonetree.com/). Select “This is a private computer” using stonetree/demo as the username and “stoneTr33” as the password…

Mail sent to demo@istonetree.com will show up in the inbox…

Comments are always welcome! Please check our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/istonetree for updates on STONEMail in the near future…