More on Cloud Computing and File Backup

 
A recent – and apparently irreparable – crash of my Microsoft Outlook got me thinking about cloud computing and backing up files, again.

So, I went online and located a web-based calendar program with every intention of using it to replace Outlook. But, I couldn’t do it. As I began entering personal information into the program, I realized that – even though I know it’s protected – I didn’t want that stuff just floating around in cyberspace.

I know it’s irrational, but it’s not the first time I’ve been accused of that. I bought a paper calendar and am now using it instead.

All this led to a slightly different approach to using the Internet to run your business. Perhaps, if you’re irrationally paranoid, like me, you’re better off installing the programs you need on your computer and storing your files in a safe place online, instead of just being “out there” in cyberspace. Your files are always backed up and you have access to them from wherever you are.

There are many options for regular online file back up and I should mention now that I haven’t signed up for any of them – yet – so can’t make any specific recommendations. Here are a few that I researched:

Mozy (www.mozy.com) offers 2 GB free and unlimited back up starting at $4.34 a month.

Norton – from Symantec – (www.symantec.com/norton/) offers 25 GB for $49.99 a year.

Mediamax (www.mediamax.com) has an interesting twist, adding a sharing and collaboration option. This addresses one of my concerns, easily accessing, using, and updating files stored online, which essentially uses your online backup like another hard drive.

Filesanywhere (www.filesanywhere.com) is a little pricier, with cost is based on storage size. It also has file sharing options as well as backup.

Long story short, online file backup is easy and inexpensive, so do it. With a little research, you may also be able to use a modified version of cloud computing, keeping the more robust software you now have, and still have easy access to all your documents from wherever you are.

Finding the Right Telecom Carrier

 
There’s a lot to know about telecommunications if you want to make the right choices for your business. You should know the basics, but – as with so many other areas of running a business – you’ll quickly find that it’s important to have experts you can trust and turn to for detailed guidance.

What is “Telecom” Anyway?

Telecom is short for telecommunications, but you probably figured that out already. This abbreviation is just the beginning, though. This is an industry full of long, complicated names; abbreviations and acronyms are a fact of life. Knowing a few of the more common ones will help a lot and I’ll refer to them throughout my telecom posts.

What are Telecom Services?

While the broad definition of telecom services includes television, radio, and all the new technologies coming to market, for the purposes of your business – and our discussion – we’ll narrow the definition to any service that’s transmitted over telephone lines. These are, primarily:

1. Internet connections
2. Phone and Fax calls
3. Data transfer

And Why Do You Need Them?

Telecom links your business to the outside world. Without it, you probably couldn’t stay in business for very long – although there may be exceptions. There are several subcategories to the list above, any or all of which could be essential to your business:

1. Basic Phone Service
2. Toll Free Service
3. Data Service
4. Internet Service
5. Wireless Service

It’s essential to analyze your needs and current services before you decide how to proceed. Let’s start with the carriers.

Local Carriers

These are the companies that provide – well – local service: calls within your immediate area, emergency calls, information, etc. They also provide the link to long distance carriers. And here’s where the acronyms start. These local carriers are called LECs (local exchange carriers) and you’ll need one – or one of their competitors – to connect your internal business network to the outside world.

When the old AT&T was broken up many moons ago, one of the groups that was created was these LECs. The more official title is Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC) and as competition entered the local phone market, they are also sometimes known as ILECs (incumbent local exchange carriers).

The competitors to these ILECs became known as CLECs (competing local exchange carriers). And, thank goodness, that’s all the acronyms for this post!

Basically, they all provide the same services and can link your company to the outside world. Most also provide extensive add-on services, like voice mail. If yours is a small company, you may be able to do just fine working with your local carrier to provide all the services you need. They love that because you’ll be renting those services; making monthly payments just like you do for your home phone, cable service, and cell phone.

The second option is to rent the lines from your local carrier, purchase or lease the hardware you need and have it installed at your business, but that’s a subject for several other posts.

Long Distance

Because of the breakup of AT&T, you can’t just pick one service provider. You need local and long distance carriers. The long distance providers fall into two general categories:

1. Facilities-based – those that own equipment and lines
2. Resellers – those that lease space on the facilities-based networks and resell it

The Wireless Option

With the explosion in technology, features, and services, it’s even possible to use a wireless network. This can be your outside link, replacing local and long distance service, or it can be all or part of your internal network creating a wireless network within your office.

If you have a large sales or technical force that’s primarily out of the office, but still requires extensive voice and data access, this may be the way to go. Remember, though, any wireless network is much less secure than being “hard wired.”

So, from a carrier standpoint, here’s what you need to consider:

1. What services do you need?
2. Are they provided by a local, long distance, or wireless carrier?
3. Which carrier(s) will provide you with the best services at the best price?

More on LinkedIn

 
Yesterday I posted some observations about LinkedIn as a social networking option and posed a question, using their Q&A section, about finding a telecommunications service provider in Ventura, CA.

I was quite surprised at the response. I received three from individuals with specific suggestions and three from vendors. I don’t know how this rates in comparison to others’ experience, but it tells me that there’s activity on the network and that there are folks out there who are willing to offer their advice and assistance. This is a very good thing.

And, as I do more research and make a final decision regarding my telecom needs, the six suggestions I received – yes, even the vendors! – will be at the top of the list.

This leads – rather indirectly – to an observation on social networking, marketing, business, and life in general:

You really do get out of it what you put into it.

Regardless of what your marketing strategy is, you have to work at it and make it a part of your daily routine. Even the best plans don’t execute themselves. Someone needs to be calling on prospects, writing blog posts, updating the website, or sending out press releases. And it’s a lot of work. It’s easy to put it off, but doing so will jeopardize the long-term success of your business. Even sustaining your current business level requires the infusion of new customers.

LinkedIn Groups

Taking advantage of all social networking has to offer requires time and commitment to set it up and keep it going. But as I found with my telecom question, there is an active network out there to tap into.

One of the best ways to do that on LinkedIn is with Groups. LinkedIn presently has seven general categories for groups with a total of 283,994 individual groups. So, you can probably find several groups that meet your needs.

If not – and I find that hard to believe – you can always start your own. Creating your own group is a simple one page fill-in-the-blank process on the “Create a Group” tab on the “Groups” page.

LinkedIn offers a very professional, business-oriented option for social networking, which may mesh nicely with your business model. Even if it’s not your primary social networking channel, it’s definitely worthwhile to belong and be active.

LinkedIn: The Professionals’ Social Network

 
With the gallery website up and running, it’s now time to look at social networking options to expand my network and – hopefully – my prospect and customer base. For me, LinkedIn is probably not the best place to start for this, but I’ve had my profile posted there for some time now and I’m more familiar with it than some of the other social networking sites.

The most important thing to remember about LinkedIn is that it’s a business networking tool, unlike Facebook or MySpace which have a business element to them but began their lives as social gathering places. It’s not the place to talk about your recent trip, your pets, or your favorite band.

Now that can be a good thing. You know right up front what you’re dealing with, and depending on your business it may be a great source for prospects, sub-contractors, collaborators, and other contacts to help you achieve your goals.

Your Profile and Connections

You start by creating a profile – essentially an online resume – that can be viewed by others. It’s out there 24/7, promoting your expertise to anyone who might be looking. The challenge is to get people to look…

And you do that by adding Connections. Search through your old Rolodex (remember those?) and contact lists for people you’d like to add and – if they’re on LinkedIn – invite them to join your network.

Here’s where it gets interesting. As an example, I have 32 people in my personal network. In my secondary network – people who know the people I know, but don’t know me – I have more than 1,700 contacts. And in my entire Linked In network there are more than 194,000 people. Now, none of those contacts has ever called to offer me a job, but you can see the reach the network has.

Joining Groups

If posting your profile is a somewhat passive way to build your network, joining – and participating in – the groups LinkedIn offers can really get your name out there. You can post – and respond to – questions and ideas related to the group’s activities. I admit that I’ve been a non-participant, but I just read through some recent entries for the groups to which I belong and can see the potential for soliciting information from your peers and providing it as well.

Keeping Up with Everything

Once you’re set up, it’s pretty easy to keep tabs on what’s happening. LinkedIn does the hard work for you, alerting your network connections when you make a change to your profile and informing you about what others are doing.

Adding to Your Profile

Of course, the more you have in your profile, the easier it is to renew old relationships and build your network. I just found two people I worked with more than 15 years ago and invited them to join my network. It remains to be seen if they even remember me – or if they do, how positive that recollection is – but they just popped up as links from my previous jobs.

LinkedIn continues to add options to make your networking more effective. One I just found – and really like – is the ability to link my blog to my LinkedIn profile. The titles and first few lines of my most recent posts now appear on my profile.

Searching for More

LinkedIn also offers Search options for People, Jobs, Answers, and Companies. People and Jobs are pretty straightforward, but Answers and Companies have some interesting options.

In Answers, you can either ask or answer a question – duh.  But this feature allows you to poll your peers for their insights into your specific problem. And, of course, you can share your insights as well.

Here’s a quick example. As I was writing this post, I asked a question on LinkedIn about finding a telecommunications service provider in Ventura, CA and have already received a response – basically a sales solicitation – for me to call about all my telecom needs. It will be interesting to see what else comes in, but people are reading these things.

The Companies feature allows you to search for potential employers as well as service providers and includes background information to help you find exactly what you’re looking for.

And that’s just the Free Stuff

If you’re willing to spend quite a bit more – $49.95 a month for the Business Plus program and $499.95 a month for the Pro program – you can really leverage your LinkedIn presence with more messages, more profile searches, and more alerts. But for me, free is just fine, thank you.

Telecommunications: Neglected but Essential Aspect of Your Business

 
I must confess to an oversight on my part. In all the writing I’ve done about marketing and running a business, I’ve neglected an essential element: telecommunications.

In part, it’s because I’ve focused my posts on business and marketing. And I take some comfort in knowing that most other business owners don’t think about their telecom needs until something breaks, so I’m not alone in neglecting it.

But I still feel guilty. Your telecommunications network is probably the backbone of your business and deserves much more attention – especially if you want to keep your business up and running effectively.

Even if you’re selling knock-off sunglasses from a blanket on Venice Beach, you at least have a cell phone to contact suppliers and keep your inventory up-to-date, although that’s not much of a telecom system. In my own case, I have a cell phone, a desktop computer linked to the Internet through a cable modem, and a local wireless network for my laptop. At the other end of the spectrum are Fortune 500 businesses with thousands of phone lines and data cables as thick as your arm.

So, where do we start to rectify this oversight?

Disaster Recovery

Every business is different and has different telecommunications needs. A small retail store might have a couple phone lines to handle calls, faxes, and credit card approvals, a computer to track inventory and accounting, Internet access for those slow times when all you want to do is surf, and a cash register.

When all this stuff works, your business hums along just fine, but what happens when you can’t approve credit card sales or your computer crashes and you lose six months of accounting records? Then you’ve got a real problem – one that may be serious enough to jeopardize the continued existence of your business.

I’ve written before about the importance of being prepared for a disaster – whatever form that takes. Sometimes you just fry a hard drive for no reason at all and there’s nothing you can do about it…

So here are some basic disaster recovery ideas that will help keep you out of trouble and get up back up and running as quickly as possible.

1. Redundancy – You don’t need a complete backup system of phones and computers, just enough to help you limp along until your primary equipment is fixed. If your phone lines go down, have a cell phone handy – and who doesn’t these days? – so you can call tech support and get somebody out to fix your problem.
2. Back up Your Data Frequently – Honestly, some of the information on your computer probably couldn’t be duplicated even if you wanted to. Can you afford to lose it? Can you afford the time it will take to duplicate it, even if you can? External hard drives, DVDs, Internet services, all are easy and inexpensive ways to preserve valuable data. If you’re not comfortable setting it up yourself, pay for a tech call. It’s worth the money.
3. Maintenance and Service – Let’s face it: the average person just doesn’t understand technology anymore – if we ever did. And, do you really want to spend your time fooling around with a computer network or phone system when you should be running your business? Find a reputable, experienced technical support company to handle your technology needs for you. They can tell you what you need, how much it will cost, and how long it will take to install. Hold them to a high standard; after all, they make money by selling you new equipment. The good ones will even tell you that what you have works just fine, even if it’s ten years old.

There’s much more to the world of telecommunications and I’ll be delving into it in greater detail, but for now, here are some other things to consider – after you’ve backed up your files and have found a reputable tech support company!

1. Identifying and Assessing Your Carriers
2. Understanding Cryptic Telecom Terminology
3. Identifying and Evaluating Your Hardware and Software
4. Deciding What to Upgrade or Replace, When, and How
5. Maintenance and Service
6. Who’s Responsible for What and How to Get Help When You Need It
7. Voice, Data, or Both: Which System is Right for You

Yes, I know it’s not marketing, but, like a good business plan, without it you could be creating big problems for your business. Better to get the knowledge up-front and make the right decisions the first time around.