Xantrion

Xantrion consultants, like Derrick Aquino, are a dedicated group

2012-01-25T17:09:00.000-08:00

If we had to describe Xantrion's consultants in one word, that word might be "dedicated" — and we don't just mean the dedicated contact we assign to every client. Our consultants are willing to go the extra mile for clients, even on their own time.

One of our clients found that out during a recent move that relocated a single office and warehouse in Alameda to two separate locations in Concord. Two months before the move, operations manager Nick Hensley met with the client's IT liaison and office manager to determine what would be involved. Primary engineer Derrick Aquino then took over planning, implementation, and management. Aquino created a detailed checklist and schedule covering everything from recommending a new Internet vendor and ensuring the new location had the right kind of electrical circuits to updating all the documentation for the client's hardware.

On the Friday of the move, Aquino unracked the client's servers and networking equipment and transported it to the new location in a truck he rented for the occasion, then set up and tested the network in its new location. Once the moving company brought over the client's desktop computers and printers, Hensley and four other Xantrion engineers — Tyler Woods, Marty Tuttle, Austin Ngau, and Mike Peth — gave up their Sunday to set up and configure every workstation so the client's employees could show up on Monday and get right to work.

"Our job is to keep clients happy and get it done," Aquino says. "And in this case, everything was just humming come Monday morning. It was as smooth as a move could have gone."

Apple’s growing popularity in the business market

2011-12-19T13:09:00.000-08:00

Our crystal ball -- okay, the industry media reinforced by client early adopters -- is indicating Apple is becoming a significant player in the business market.

Last month, the New York Times noted big companies are buying significant numbers of iPhones and iPads for employees who need even more portability than a laptop provides. This trend means IT departments need to figure out how to accommodate them in the corporate environment.

Xantrion has been exploring solutions that will allow us to handle this trend. Over the next few months, we'll share our thoughts and findings.

It’s official, cloud computing is mainstream!

2011-11-30T09:06:00.000-08:00

Last month, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman waxed enthusiastic about the way cloud computing can let businesses turn social media into new opportunities. Friedman also wrote about the cloud's ability to give anyone, anywhere, access to major computing power as if it were a new phenomenon. He even used the word "revolutionary."

That's not news to us!

Gartner projected a dramatic shift to cloud computing way back in 2008. Businessweek reported that same year on how eagerly small and midsize businesses were jumping on board. And it's already been five years -- an eternity in the IT world -- since Amazon became the first company to offer cloud services to external customers.

The cloud and its possibilities can be dazzlingly new to people (including New York Times columnists) who don't spend their days thinking about technology. To those of us who work in IT, though, it's already a familiar part of the landscape.

In other words, if you're considering adopting cloud-based technology, you can be confident that we have a good grasp on it. We'd go so far as to say it's now officially mainstream.

Xantrion wants to be sure our clients get what they pay for -- and not just from us

2011-08-10T11:44:00.001-07:00

Our client, a professional services firm, was paying over $4,000 a month for a 6 Mbps link between its San Francisco and Los Angeles offices, but the connection was unreliable and never exceeded 2 Mbps. Two years of trouble tickets failed to resolve the problem. In fact, the telecom vendor insisted everything was testing correctly on its end.

The professional services firm asked Xantrion to look into the problem. Consultant Christian Kelly discovered that the vendor had misconfigured their network equipment at installation.

Armed with this proof, the client was able to negotiate a full reimbursement of the roughly $130,000 they had paid for the faulty connection, as well as exit the contract early without penalty. Xantrion helped secure a new contract with the service provider which greatly increased the speed of the link at a lower monthly cost.

The moral of the story? Xantrion wants to be sure our clients get what they pay for -- and not just from us.

Don't take Cloud Security for Granted

2011-06-23T13:16:00.000-07:00

If you're going to trust your data to the cloud, your cloud service providers need to be trustworthy. They may not be as secure as they say they are. We've seen two examples just this month:

On June 2, Sony suffered its second network breach of the year, losing control of more than a million customer records including names, addresses, passwords, and other personal information. An earlier breach in April, thought to be the largest in Internet history, exposed more than 100 million customer accounts and shut down the PlayStation Network for more than a month.

A code update at Dropbox accidentally disabled password protection on user accounts for four hours on June 19. Although Dropbox has notified everyone whose account was logged in during that four-hour window and has yet to identify any unauthorized activity, the bug has caused serious chills across the company's user base, and a fever among some customers to find an alternative.

Make sure your cloud service providers offer a level of security that meets your needs -- and your expectations!

Xantrion Consultant Solves A Problem Microsoft Couldn't

2011-04-25T14:34:00.000-07:00

Our Senior Consultant Ben Ludwig knows Microsoft Exchange better than anyone else at Xantrion. Now he can brag that he knows it better than most of Microsoft's own engineers -- because last month, Ludwig found a solution to a tricky Exchange migration issue that even Microsoft had only been able to solve once before.

One of our clients wanted to upgrade its email system and needed to complete the migration with as little downtime as possible. Since the client was still using Exchange 2003, Ludwig had to help them leapfrog over Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010. That brought up a known issue. Other users migrating directly from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 had reported that they could use Outlook Web Access to retrieve email from any browser, or they could use ActiveSync to access their email, calendars, and contacts from a smartphone, but they couldn't do both at once.

"I knew it was going to be a problem, but I had to make it work," Ludwig says.

A typical Exchange migration project takes 40 hours. This one took 150, many of them on the phone with a senior Exchange specialist at Microsoft. But in the end, Ludwig found a way to give our client both webmail and mobile email.

Microsoft's pro told Ludwig it was only the second time anyone had been able to solve this particular problem. But it's certainly not the last time. Ludwig has documented the entire process in detail so other Xantrion consultants can duplicate it.

Forecast: Partly Cloudy

2011-02-07T15:21:00.000-08:00

Even if your company has already decided to adopt cloud computing, you still face a choice between public and private clouds. Big public clouds, such as Google's, offer the promise of cost savings, flexibility, and agility, but don't necessarily guarantee an adequate level of privacy, security, and compliance. Private clouds, which are wholly owned onsite networks, can deliver greater security and many (though not all) of the advantages of a larger public cloud. How do you decide?

Frankly, we think you should be experiencing a bit of déjà vu. Haven't we seen this before? In the early days of the Internet and the Web, some people advocated running directly online for commerce, communication, and collaboration, while others were proponents of private networks that realized many of the advantages of open computing without relinquishing control of the IT infrastructure.

You know what eventually happened: companies ended up with mixed environments. Common applications like e-mail and instant messaging moved to the Internet, either as updated versions of existing applications or entirely new options, while proprietary applications remained behind firewalls that safeguarded their competitive advantage. And companies focused on developing the right resources and strategies to integrate the two -- linking the public and private infrastructure to allow a free flow of information without risking data security.

Xantrion recommends taking the same approach to cloud computing. In the short term, at least, it makes sense to implement a combination of public and private clouds based on your specific needs. As we mentioned in our last blog post, not all applications perform well in the cloud, and public clouds aren't always entirely reliable or secure. By creating a hybrid, your company maximizes the benefits and minimizes the drawbacks of each.

Some of our clients have already implemented hybrid clouds. One, for example, has adopted cloud-based applications for document and workflow management, banking and payroll, staff performance management, faxing, and data backups. However, it continues to use local applications for timekeeping and billing, tax preparation, and audit preparation.

In the end, we believe that decisions about cloud computing -- public, private, or not at all -- need to be made on a task-by-task basis. The deciding factors are speed, security, and reliability. It's up to you to decide how best to balance them.

Google Apps: No Match at the Office for Microsoft Office

2011-01-12T14:27:00.000-08:00

This month, we're tackling the question of whether our clients should consider migrating their most basic applications, such as word processing and email, from Microsoft Office to Google Apps.

In a nutshell: no.

In general, we're in favor of Software as a Service. Our recent blog posts and newsletters explore various ways business owners and managers can manage costs and increase agility with cloud-based computing. However, after conducting our own research and looking into other users' experiences, we don't think Google Apps is an adequate replacement for a local version of Microsoft Office. Here's why:

1. Compatibility issues. Google Apps has a 500kb cap on uploaded documents, a limit many companies might reach in weeks, if not days. More importantly, your documents have to be readable in Office, since that's what the vast majority of businesses use. You can't afford to risk Google Apps' known incompatibilities in editing, commenting, charts, and formulas.

2. Key feature gaps. Google Apps is not yet able to perform productivity tasks including automating spell checking, tracking document edits, delegating mailbox management to another user, sharing email folders, and performing two-way syncs between your BlackBerry and your calendar. All these basic features are readily available in Office.

3. Email reliability issues. Xantrion believes Gmail's frequent outages, however brief, are unacceptably disruptive to a business-critical application. We also feel Google's habit of releasing experimental and unannounced email features adds another layer of unreliability.

4. Security and compliance risks. Cloud service providers must earn your absolute confidence in the location, ownership, and security of your data and services. Google can't tell its clients where their data is located at any given moment. What's more, its terms of service dictate that email is potentially never deleted, as Google reserves the right to maintain copies of all information in their backups. Yet at the same time, Google will not guarantee they maintain email backups, which makes it impossible to know whether you'll be able to recover deleted or historical information if necessary.

5. Insufficient support. With the exception of "system critical events," Google Apps only offers 24-hour phone support Monday through Friday. Any other issues have to wait until the weekend is over. In addition, some Google clients are unimpressed by the quality of Google support, saying, for example, that it's "useless" when questions can't be answered with "generic, canned responses."

6. Lower-than-expected cost savings. Most companies underestimate the software, hardware, and IT administration costs associated with migrating to Google Apps -- costs that include on-premise equipment and administrative support for security directory synchronization, BlackBerry users, and email protection and archiving. In addition, we've seen that companies continue to need more on-premise user support than they anticipated.

This blog post focuses only on Google Apps as it compares to the locally hosted version of Microsoft Office. In the future, we'll look at how Google Apps stacks up against Microsoft's cloud-based version of Office, the new Office 365.

Xantrion Consultant, Pat Carpenter, takes his committment to service seriously

2010-12-01T15:12:00.000-08:00

Xantrion's consultants take their commitment to client service seriously. Just ask Pat Carpenter, who was on call one recent Sunday afternoon when a client's server went down and refused to restart.

When Pat got the trouble ticket at about 2pm, he excused himself from a lunch date with his mother and grandmother to drive to the client's home office in Half Moon Bay. His initial troubleshooting revealed a hardware problem that required him to spend two hours on the phone with Dell. Dell eventually had to send out a technician, who worked with him to bring the server back up — but then Pat discovered the hardware failure had corrupted some essential software. That led to more time on the phone, this time with Microsoft.

By the time everything was working properly, it was 10:30pm. Pat recapped his fixes and drove home to the East Bay.

And yes, he says, Mom and Grandma understood completely.

Is Cloud Computing Secure?

2010-06-16T13:42:00.000-07:00

Opponents of cloud computing usually put forward that organizations shouldn’t outsource their IT infrastructure to the cloud because of security concerns. However, there are many arguments on both sides of the security fence. Below is a blog that does a decent job of summarizing both perspectives in layman’s terms.

http://4sysops.com/archives/is-cloud-computing-secure-pro-and-contra-cloud-security/

What we primarily see in small and medium organizations is that cloud computing service providers deliver better security than the organizations themselves. In addition, smaller organizations that don’t need the name of a large cloud service provider to enhance their reputation can mitigate many of the concerns highlighted in the blog above as well as the concerns highlighted in the PCWorld article below by choosing a reputable, local cloud service provider. For more on how to ensure cloud service providers deliver better security than you, check out the CIO article below.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/168224/does_google_know_too_much_about_you.html?tk=rel_news

http://www.cioupdate.com/trends/article.php/11047_3752881_1/Three-Steps-to-Secure-Cloud-Computing.htm

More on what we understand Cloud Computing to be

2010-05-19T14:01:00.000-07:00

To follow up on our last blog, I thought it would be helpful to expand on what we understand Cloud Computing to be.

For decades, engineers have drawn a cloud to depict a network, such as the Internet, whose inner workings were unknown to them. From there, Cloud Computing evolved as a term to describe free or subscription based services delivered in real time over the Internet. Today, Cloud Computing is a term used to describe three primary types of computer services delivered over the Internet.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service: Grids of virtualized servers, data storage and networks. Examples include Amazon's Compute Cloud and Simple Storage, Xantrion's Constant Current, and Rackspace's IT Hosting services.

Software-as-a- Service: Applications with a Web-based interface accessed via the Internet. Examples include Google Apps, Salesforce.com and FaceBook.

Platform-as-a-Service: The abstraction of applications from traditional limits of hardware allowing developers to focus on application development and not worry about operating systems, load balancing and so on. Examples include Force.com and Microsoft's Azure.

For more on what Cloud Computing is, visit: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/164933/cloud_computing_explained.html

Introduction to Cloud Computing

2010-04-30T17:00:00.000-07:00

Cloud Computing is one of the latest buzz words in the Information Technology arena. As with all new technical catch phrases, people have lots of questions about it. What is Cloud Computing? Is Cloud Computing safe and secure? Should my company implement it? What is the best way to implement Cloud Computing in my company? Let me start by providing my take on the first question.

Cloud computing is internet based computing, where software and information are provided to computers and other devices on-demand and almost as reliably as a utility like electricity.

Most people are already using Cloud Computing. The last time you checked your Hotmail email or typed a search into Google, you were in “the cloud.”

For more on Cloud Computing:

Click here for a brief, non-techie, business view point.

http://www.xantrion.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=148&Itemid=30

Click here for more detailed, technically oriented information.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

Xantrion is growing!

2010-04-15T18:12:00.000-07:00

New hires, new clients, and a new website! We love the excitement around the office and invite you to explore our new website to learn a bit more about our team.

What better way to demonstrate that our employees make the difference than to feature them on the home page. No stock photo here - simply the real people who work hard to thrill our clients on a daily basis.

We'd love to hear what you think of the new site. Drop us an email.