Small Business Technology Challenges

DACS General Meeting Review, June 2016

By Richard Teasdale

Rick Van Akin was the featured speaker at the DACS June general meeting; his topic: Small Business Technology Challenges. He gave us a fascinating glimpse into how even quite small businesses are able to leverage the very latest technology. Rick was unusually well-qualified for this subject, being himself the owner of a small business which helps others handle their technology problems and challenges. His company, Computer Troubleshooters of Greater Danbury (CTS), has the goal of making technology “just work” for its clients.

Rick began the evening with a quick run-down of his own IT career. He worked in senior technical and management positions for large corporations, in large IT shops, for 28 years. In 2007, he decided to found his own company and entered the computer support business.

Rick’s strategy is to apply large-company thought processes to the requirements of small businesses, bringing all the best practices that he learned in large companies to small ones. The goal is to have IT be a utility that just works.

Small businesses want the same things as large ones but without budgets and at minimum cost. The provider has to be very clear about the benefits because money usually comes out of owners’ back pockets instead of from a budget.

CTS performs all of the standard support tasks for small company clients and for home office users. However, in order to organize the effort, Rick tries to get clients onto managed service plans. These are of two types: Business Enhanced Support Technology (B.E.S.T.) plans for small businesses, and Home & Office Support Technology (H.O.S.T.) plans for home offices. These plans include monitoring of clients’ environments, patch management, remote support, regular tune-ups, management of external service providers, security support, cloud backups, etc. Rick emphasized the importance of security by mentioning the example of ransomeware, which is projected to be a billion dollar problem this year.

Question from the audience: What kind of services are you using for cloud backup?

Answer: Carbonite and similar. The problems are bandwidth, and the fact that data is not encrypted on providers’ servers. Rick uses a service which, for $9.99/month, encrypts the data to be stored in the service provider’s data center. It works well for small data volumes but not for large.

Rick presented several case studies to illustrate the services and solutions that his company provides, and the kinds of challenges faced by his clients. He pointed out that the challenges include do-it-yourself solutions, e.g. registry cleaners and tune-up utilities, which just make things worse.

Case Study 1: A solar installation company – has teams out on the road and about 10 people in the office. Rick’s solution for them consists of a “private cloud”, cellular-based tablets, and Tsheets software for scheduling and time tracking (using GPS to accurately identify locations). The company also uses NAS (network-attached storage), which Rick finds to be an excellent way to share files without server cost and headaches. Challenges: (1) the technology champion left the company and it is now hard to get people to use it; (2) Tablets used are less robust than he recommended (due to the client trying too hard to save money).

Case Study 2: Telephone service. Rick provides and supports telephone services because (1) it’s now a network application, and (2) if he did not, other service providers would steal clients by offering phone service. He provides VOIP (voice over internet protocol) systems, usually not because customers want all the latest VOIP features but rather because they need to replace old telephone systems that are falling apart. VOIP phone systems are part of the network – when you plug in a VOIP system, you find out quickly whether there are any network problems. Because it is a real-time service, VOIP quality is sensitive to any situation in which excessive numbers of packet retransmissions are necessary.

Rick described some of the sophisticated things that can be done with VOIP. For example, an App on his cell phone makes the phone into an extension of the office phone system. Now he doesn’t have to give out a separate cell phone #, and he can make and answer calls from anywhere as if he were in the office.

In answer to audience questions, Rick said that he no longer recommends the use of locally-run VOIP systems e.g. Asterisk, because (1) they are not quite as reliable as hosted systems, and (2) there is lots of hacking of VOIP systems. Star2Star Communications is the VOIP system he likes best. RingCentral is another good one.

In response to another question, Rick described some elements of his marketing strategy.

He no longer lists the business in yellow pages because people now use Google and Facebook to find services. Although the website is well-ranked in Google, he spends $300/month to use Google (paid) adwords. He reckons this is worth the investment because he gets roughly $1,000 of business per month in return. He has recently started testing paid Facebook ads.

His most powerful advertising channel is word-of-mouth. An audience member backed this up by describing his use of “certificate” numbers to do referrals. Rick recommended joining networking groups because of the power of referrals.

Case Study 3:

CTS has two tag lines, one of which is “Computer Troubleshooters – when there’s no time for down time.” Rick described a client who wants no down time – if the primary server fails, he needs another server up and running. Repairing the primary server and restoring from backups does not meet the requirement because of the time needed for recovery. The solution is a BDR (Backup & Disaster Recovery) – an onsite appliance (a small Unix server) which takes hourly snapshots of the primary server and backs up to a cloud service overnight. If the primary fails (e.g. due to a disk crash), the DR system only needs to be booted to take over. This provides a faster DR solution than those which even major corporate datacenters could accomplish 10 years ago.

In answer to other audience questions, Rick commented that:

He tries to do as much as possible remotely (from his office). LogMeIn is the main tool (but it has become very expensive recently).
He makes a point of answering the phone to clients whenever possible or calling right back – promotes customer loyalty.
CTS has become very good at virus cleanups because clients like their settings and therefore don’t want their machines rebuilt from scratch.
He has configured Facebook to tweet automatically.
There is a website at which individual e-mail addresses can be checked to see if they have been compromised: the website is https://haveibeenpwned.com/ (it is mentioned in a New York Times article about the hacking of several of Mark Zuckerberg’s accounts.)
HIPAA compliance is a growing concern because (for clients in medical-related businesses) he is signing agreements that he won’t leak the client’s information.
Doing one’s own e-mail hosting (on own servers) is very hard to do right at a reasonable cost.
Amazon Glacier is cheap but very slow (e.g. versus S3.) Amazon is a very good service provider but can be overwhelming because they have so many services available.
He tries to convince clients who are Quickbooks users to send their files via the cloud instead of on thumb drives. Terminal Services is another option but Quickbooks Online is not a fully-featured alternative to standard Quickbooks.