Panda Managed Office Protection is a security solution for PCs and servers based on the concept of Software as a Service (SaaS). Software as a Service lets companies focus on their core business, freeing them from the management tasks and operating costs associated with traditional security solutions.

Panda has a solid reputation but may not be as well known as some of the other major players such as Symantec and Mcafee.  If you would like more information on their offerings or would like to know more about the new Panda Managed Office Protection, contact us today.

We called Mozy on a Thursday afternoon and requested a restore of our data, we followed the process to request the restore and the first snag is that during their request process they cannot deliver the restore to a Canadian address (brutal).  Therefore, we had to specify the delivery to Mozy’s Utah address, and then email a specific email address with the actual delivery address.  Not the end of the world…We were told that it should only take 24-48 houtrs for the restore to complete and then we would be shipped the DVDs (19 of them, brutal) Next Business Day. No problem, so we thought…

We received notification Sunday evening that our restore has been completed, we received an email Monday morning saying that our DVDs have been burnt and that they are being shipped out and we should reveive the DVDs Wednesday at the latest (due to going through the border).  Keep in mind the client is currently without a production server, without email, without business files, without a network essentially.  We waited patiently, followed up multiple times during the week, Thursday rolls along and we receive an email saying that unfortunately our data needs to be restored to hard drive and then shipped out.  Ok, so why did you send us notification on Monday saying our DVDs have been shipped when in fact they haven’t?

At this point we decided to attempt a VSS web-restore of Active Directory, SYSVOL, and Exchange, the client has been without essential services for far too long.  We initiated the process, it took hours for the data to download and start the restore, and guess what? it failed, the VSS restores for whatever reason went sideways and actually corrupted our new server rebuild (thank god for the trusted old NT Backup utility we ran before testing the restores).  Ok so that’s strike 5…

We received the data on hard drive on the following Monday!! That’s a total of 11 days before we received the data to restore the server.  Annoyed and frustrated we were somewhat relived that the data was finally here and we could re-attempt the VSS restores of Active Directory and Exchange.  That relief lasted for about an hour as the restores of these critical pieces failed again.  What did that mean? Well that meant we needed to rebuild Active Directory from scratch, re-create login scripts, security groups, distribution groups, you name it.  We also needed to acquire a 3rd party utility to extract mailboxes from the Exchange Database (.edb) and re-import to a new instance of Exchange.   All of this  is totally unacceptable for any business, imagine one that was revenue driven or relied on their customer data for e-commerce capabilities.  MozyPro is NOT a business-class product like it claims to be, if this were the case, it would not take almost two-weeks to receive backup data and it would be reliable from a restore process.

MozyPro support is hit or miss, 1 in 10 support reps were somewhat knowledeable and actually provided some assistance.  That being said, not one could help with restores going sideways, backing up the data is one thing, but not being able to restore it kind of defeats the purpose don’t you think?

Conclusion: MozyPro is great for file-shares and versioning, that’s it.  Do NOT rely on this solution for Exchange, Active Directory, or any other critical server component.  Moving forward we will simply leverage the built-in NT Backup utility to do a OS/system state backup and then utilize Mozy to backup this file off-site.

We are pleased to announce that we are now an official Zoho Alliance Partner.  Zoho is an online suite of business productivity tools that allows your business to exist in the cloud.  Zoho has revolutionized the way small businesses can utilize technology to their advantage.  They offer a variety of web-based applications that can address all of your technical needs, here are just a few:

1. Hosted email
2. Hosted CRM
3. Online document collaboration
4. Hosted Project Management

If you would like to learn more about the Zoho platform and how it can benefit your business, please Contact Us and we will get back to you as soon as we can.

 

Well, it didn’t take long for me to start telling everyone I knew (and even some people I didn’t!) about my experience with Docs. But there was one recurring question from my friends – how do I get my Word and Excel 2007 documents into the cloud?

Today, I’m happy to be able to answer their question: we’ve added .docx and .xlsx to the list of file formats that we accept for uploading documents (which already included .doc, .odt, xls, .ods, .ppt, .csv, .html, .txt, .rtf, and others).

 

The cloud computing approach for small business has many benefits compared to a traditional centralized local setup.  With a local setup, all of your corporate resources are generally tied to one physical location and on one physical server.  What does this mean? Well it means that if this server goes down, if there is a flood/fire in your suite, if there is a break-in, your corporate data is lost. Even if you have an off-site backup strategy, the time to recover and be fully operational would be days. This is where hosted services can be your saviour.

By leveraging the power of the internet, you can access and store company resources in the ‘cloud’. This means that your corporate data is stored off-site in a secure location across multiple servers with multiple internet connections. It is impossible to achieve this level of physical redundancy in your own local environment and is one of the biggest advantages of provisioning a SaaS application. Another great feature of a cloud computing setup is that all you need is a web-browser to access the application. You do not need to install and configure software packages on your local computer, you just need to launch internet explorer, navigate to the appropriate page, and then login. You can do this from any computer in the world, which means you do not need to be sitting at your work computer to access corporate data. This also eliminates the need to setup expensive and cumbersome VPN & Remote Access solutions.

These are just some of the benefits of moving your IT infrastructure into the ‘cloud’. There are a lot of other features and benefits and we would be happy to talk to you about your options and how best to implement a cloud computing strategy for your small business. Contact us today to learn how SaaS, Cloud Computing, and Hosted Service can be applied to your environment.