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Technology was supposed to make life easier, but the end result is often that we feel more swamped than ever. How can you make the right technology and organisational choices to work smarter, not harder?
Once you get through looking at your personal productivity you can start to look at the bigger picture of your staff and colleagues. Theres no point trying to get anyone elses behaviour to change until they see the benefits through your actions. Also, what works for you may not work for other people so take the time to find what fits particular situations. Although many people feel that technology gets in the way of work, using technology smartly can save you time and effort. Knowing where people are, being able to see them during remote communications and knowing whether they are busy can create a working environment that doesnt get in the way of productivity. Improving your personal and professional productivity is not a one-off project. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, many companies promoted productivity and quality programs. But, to get long lasting benefits, you need to make improving your productivity part of your regular work plan, not just a short-term activity, and incorporate appropriate technology as it appears.
For many people, mobile phones are a double-edged sword. Although they make it easy to stay in touch they can also constantly interrupt our work. Aside from calls, there are incessant social media notifications, email and SMS. But your phone need not rule you. You can make your phone into your assistant rather than being its slave. Only answer calls when youre available to answer them. Put the phone on silent and let calls go through to voicemail. Update your voicemail message with your email address and ask callers to send you an email rather than a voice message. That way you wont have to write messages as often and can review the email when you have allocated time. Also, have your calendar and task list synced to the phone this is easy with all the major smartphone platforms so you can update it and amend it while youre out if necessary.
Email Management
Email is insidious. Its tempting to stop what youre doing and address each new message as it arrives. Our advice is to set aside specific times each day to go through email and to prioritise which messages need to be addressed. Use rules to shuffle messages into folders. For example, have all messages where you are cced rather than the main recipient moved to an FYI folder so that your inbox is less cluttered. Have messages from your boss moved to another folder so you can find those easily.
reduce the number of physical devices and changed the way servers are managed. So while virtualisation has offered lots of promise, some businesses have missed out on all the benefits as theyve grappled with a new way to manage their IT. That challenge brings us back to the cloud. Regardless of how technically inclined you are, its a sure bet that someone has mentioned the cloud or something-as-a-service. Instead of deploying your own hardware and software, the cloud outsources all of that to a service provider. As long as your Internet connection stays up and offers decent performance you access your systems using almost any computing device with a web browser. If youre wary about outsourcing critical company systems and information you can use your own, unshared infrastructure and applications that are offered through an outsourcer. This is usually called a private cloud as it uses internet-based systems but they are accessed over a private connection and arent shared with others. The trick to knowing what sort of solution is best for you is to spend some time writing down and analysing what you do, what the problems are with your current approach to technology, and then looking at the gap between what you have and what you need. Its tempting to follow the crowd and go with whats currently popular but you need to work through this process or risk deploying systems that dont work for you. One of the main advantages often touted by cloud providers is that they can reduce your power bills and offer greener systems than you could manage. While this may be true its worth doing some investigation particularly on any green claims. While your own local carbon footprint might shrink, all you might be doing is moving carbon emissions from your office to the service provider.
You may choose to lease equipment and pay a finance company each month. There are a few options. Financial leases are quite common. At the end of the lease period, the ownership of the equipment reverts to the lessor. As well as letting you hold on to lump sums of cash, this makes disposal of old equipment easy as the lessor makes arrangements to collect the gear. With an operating lease, the lessor is responsible for maintaining the equipment and they also maintain ownership of the equipment. Finally, theres sale and lease-back. This is a handy option if you get lucky and score a grant or some other cash injection for your equipment. You purchase the equipment and then sell it to a finance company that leases it back to you. You then pay a monthly fee for the equipment and hang on to the cash. Just watch out for any special terms and conditions of the cash injection to ensure that this is above board. You could choose to not hold any equipment yourself and outsource the entire operation. This is viable if server management expertise is a little thin on the ground in your business. It also means that you can invest in equipment that meets your needs today and increase capability as you need incrementally. For example, if you need to add 20 per cent more storage each year, you can do this easily whereas running your own gear might make that task harder. How long should you plan to keep your servers? If youre buying or leasing then three years is a realistic minimum. In general, tax rules are built around retaining equipment for at least three years. Although many businesses consider servers to have a five-year life, the problem is that youll be stuck with old equipment that requires increased maintenance or servers that are not able to run up-to-date software. If you try to overcome this by purchasing really powerful gear initially, its likely that you wont get the maximum value for your investment early on.
The decision can be simplified as some hardware vendors sell out-of-the-box solutions with all the hardware, storage and virtualisation pre-configured. In that case, youre buying a complete solution so you wont be choosing a hypervisor specifically. All of the major vendors offer free trial versions so it youre technically inclined you can try before you buy. Some of the things we advise you should look out for are the ease of use of the administration tools, how easy it is to create a new virtual server and the pricing structure. Pricing can be tricky as pricing models have changed recently from a per-server or per-processor model to a memory-use based model. It is possible to host your virtualised servers externally. Rather than have the overhead of running servers, setting aside a secure environment to house them and then either learning to run or hiring someone to look after the environment, you can outsource the whole lot. Its your gear but someone else does the grunt work. If moving services to the cloud has been on your mind but youve not been sure about the reliability and security then this is a great transition strategy. You get some of the benefits of the cloud no maintenance overhead, simplified remote access and outsourced operation without the concerns about someone else using the same hardware as you, questions about data sovereignty and whether your Internet connection is up to the challenge.
Although network throughput is important, latency is perhaps more critical. Think of it like driving a car. The network throughput is your vehicles top speed. Latency is the time it takes between you pressing the accelerator and when the car starts moving. Imagine being behind the wheel of a racing car but it takes 10 seconds to get going. Latency with cloud services is largely governed by how far you are from your data centre. The further away the data centre, the greater the latency. If your business is exclusively Australian then a local data centre makes sense. For an international company, using a more centrally located data centre might be a better choice.
Businesses want to ensure that their data is safe so the networked, remote solution works well as users still store data on the corporate servers. If the users computer is stolen there shouldnt be any confidential business data on it. The downside for the business is that if everyone gets to choose their own computer there may be some cost impact. When youre buying hundreds of identical computers your reseller is likely to offer some great discounts. If you end up buy a wider spread of devices some of those volume discounts will disappear. Also, you might find that software licensing costs escalate as enterprise and site licenses may have conditions precluding personally-owned devices. Make sure you do your homework before endorsing a BYOD program. Work through all the hardware, software, infrastructure and policy issues.
The path to making your business apps browser friendly wont be short. Its likely to take a long time and there will be many questions about whether the return on investment will stack up. A simpler solution might come through virtualisation and remote desktops. Where an app needs to run on a full computer, its likely that a virtualised computer thats delivered through a remote desktop will do the job. This simplifies delivery, as there are virtual desktop clients for just about every computing platform you can imagine. However, youll notice that we used the phrase just about in there. Those arent weasel words. The reality is that you cant hope to support every single possible different device that exists. Make decisions about what platforms youll support, make those public and revise them from time to time. One of the challenges will be to determine which applications are best delivered by web browser and which should be virtualised. A logical approach would be to think about two different activities; reading data and writing data. Some users will only read data from an application. For example, senior managers are unlikely to ever enter sales transactions but they will look at sales reports. Delivering the sales reports over a web browser makes sense, as the functionality you need to create is simpler. It also helps you gain experience in creating web-based applications while managing the risk of delivering transactional data through a new platform. Rather than recreate the entire data entry system for a browser, it makes sense to deliver that part of the application a part that already exists using a remote desktop system. This technology is very mature and the skills to deploy remote desktop solutions are widely available.
Ensure that mobile devices that store corporate contact information, documents and other sensitive information can be remotely wiped. You could do this by using a Mobile Device Management, or MDM, solution or by enforcing policies that make it mandatory for users to have such a service. For example, Apples MobileMe and Google Sync for Android support remote wiping of lost devices. Alternately, supply staff with a mobile device and encourage them to maintain a personal, non-work device as well. This will assist with security and make it easier for staff to separate their personal and work lives.
Section 2: The four clouds and why you would use them
Earlier, we divided cloud services into two groups. But another way to divide them based on what they deliver to your business. The public software cloud can be best described as the one size fits most option. The public software cloud delivers basic utility services like email, file storage and other functions that are so generic that choosing one solution over another is really a matter of personal taste. Some of the more popular public software cloud applications that are available are tools like Gmail and Dropbox. All your data sits on systems and hardware that are shared with potentially millions of other users.
The public hosted cloud uses public infrastructure like storage and servers that you can deploy your own applications on. In some cases, the service providers deliver turnkey solutions for specific needs. For example, if you need a server running Microsoft Exchange you can have that provisioned for you. No one else will be using that instance of Exchange. Although the application and database are specific to you and not shared, the hardware the applications are running on is shared. A couple of the more popular public hosted clouds are Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The private hosted cloud enables flexible business delivery within a completely private environment. That means its your software running on your hardware. Nothing is shared with anyone else. What makes this the cloud and not an outsourced data centre is the nature of the applications. They are made to be remotely accessed rather than used on a local network. Finally, you can simply roll your own business infrastructure, taking the best of each. You might use the public software for your email system, public hosted cloud for document management and the private hosted cloud for your finance system.
budget. When you need more, you simply pay for it. When your needs are lower, you can reduce your outlay. When you buy your own equipment, you need to come up with a wad of cash and then wait for the gear you order to arrive, be installed and then made ready for use. There are backups, system updates and other maintenance jobs that need to be done. With a public hosted cloud solution, you completely bypass the capital outlay. When you buy your own hardware you are effectively pre-paying for its use. A public hosted cloud solution takes your expenditure out of the capital budget and moves it into operational expenses. This means you hold on to your cash where it can be used on something that will set you apart from your competition or earn some interest. However, its important that you budget carefully so that any contracted commitment to a service provider is managed in the context of your overall cash flow. Like any shared infrastructure, pay close attention to promised service and reliability levels. Although youll be using virtual servers that arent shared, the physical computers are shared. That means other parties may impact the performance of your servers. As these are paid services you can reasonably expect to be given some service level guarantees for performance and availability. Also, do some investigation about where the actual infrastructure is housed. If your business is based in Australia, using servers in an American data centre can lead to disappointing performance with network latency an important consideration. Many large public hosted cloud providers have data centres in different parts of the world so choose a location that offers you the best possible performance.