Connected SMB

Today I thought I’d put up the first part of a 2 post mini-series on the various wireless solutions available for the SMB looking for some “mobility”.

If you’re looking for an access point for your home or small office, then this isn’t the article for you. To be honest wireless networking technologies have matured to the point where you’d be hard-pressed to find an AP that won’t get the job done satisfactorily. So my advice is go out and pick up something from Linksys/D-Link/Netgear than supports 802.11n and be done with it.

That’s not really what I’m going to focus on here. I’m going to be looking at more elaborate multi-AP solutions designed to support some more advanced applications such as voice and video as well as provide the kind of reliability that would allow you to replace your wired network completely. 

[Read the rest of this entry...]

I’ve been testing out a few online backup solution lately, in the hope of finding something to use for our business as well as to provide as a service for our customers.

Some of the key features/points that I looked out for were:

• Centralised management
• Easy to deploy
• Ability to schedule & throttle backups
• Initial backup speed
• Files/Folder or Image
• Ease of recovery (admin initiated or user? or both?)
• Supported platforms (Mac? Linux?)
• Pricing

After checking out a number of sites and going through some reviews, I ultimately settled on evaluating MozyPro, Carbonite Pro and BackBlaze for Business. Rather surprisingly, only MozyPro hails from a big name IT Vendor (EMC) and even that was through an acquisition. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Data Loss/Leak Prevention (DLP) is something that we’re hearing more and more about, so I thought I’d put up a post to explain what it is and how it can be effectively used at SMBs.

Let’s start with what it is. Wikipedia succinctly defines DLP as:

…a computer security term referring to systems that identify, monitor, and protect data in use (e.g., endpoint actions), data in motion (e.g., network actions), and data at rest (e.g., data storage) through deep content inspection, contextual security analysis of transaction (attributes of originator, data object, medium, timing, recipient/destination, etc.), and with a centralized management framework. The systems are designed to detect and prevent the unauthorized use and transmission of confidential information.

In essence it is anything that helps prevent confidential information leaving your organization (as well as making sure that only authorized users have access to it).

[Read the rest of this entry...]

Sharing files is probably one of, if not the most, common driver behind setting up a server on the network. Emailing files around the office quickly becomes impractical once you move past 2 or 3 users or if you need to share files bigger than a few MB.

The traditional approach has always been to setup a File Server, usually based on Windows Server, create the various folders needed and then share them on the network. In order to do this though you require at least the following:

• Server Hardware
• Windows Server 2008 Standard
• Windows Server CALs

Once you’ve got all of the above, you need setup the hardware, install the
OS, apply the countless patches/service packs/updates, install some kind of antivirus, configure the firewall and then eventually create the folders and set the permissions.

Of course, if you’ve already setup a server as an Active Directory/Domain Controller then you could simply use the same server as a file server.

Alternatively you could deploy a NAS appliance. A NAS (Network Attached Storage) appliance is a pre-packaged server appliance that’s purely designed to deliver file sharing functionality across the network. They’re usually very easy to setup (often using a web based interface for management) and require little-to-no regular management.

For this article we’re going to take a look at the various NAS solutions available as well as a brief look into iSCSI SANs. [Read the rest of this entry...]

First off I’d like to address something I think most people seem to take for granted, but sadly just isn’t true. Having a “Firewall” isn’t enough. I blame movies and mass media for this massive misinformation, but simply put a traditional firewall doesn’t do nearly as much as most people think.

Traditional firewalls, or stateful firewalls, simply apply rules to traffic going through them. Typically each rule has various criteria (to match the traffic against) and an action (what to do when a match is found). So an example of this would be:

HTTP from IP ADDRESS A to IP ADDRESS B with action BLOCK.

So for those paying attention, the effect of applying that rule is that any HTTP traffic (port 80) going from IP Address A to IP Address B will be blocked at the firewall.

Well, what’s wrong with that? That seems useful right? Well…not so much. Let’s consider some web applications, how would you go about blocking access to Meebo (popular web based IM client) with only the above? Block their web server IP address? You’d have to block their entire range of IPs and with many sites using clusters/cloud hosting/CDN that IP address range changes all the time. The work required quickly spirals out of control. To make matters worse, this is just one application out of hundreds, maybe thousands and I haven’t even touched on desktop applications that also use port 80. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Initially I had planned to include a brief overview of Virtual Private Servers (VPS) along with the previous “Virtualization for SMB” article, but considering the recent growth in the market I decided to break it out into it’s own article.

So what’s the difference between VPS hosting and traditional shared hosting? Well the main difference is guaranteed resources. When you sign up for a VPS you’re essentially reserving a minimum amount of resources that will be made available to you when you need it. Let’s take Slicehost for example, if you provision their smallest server you get a minimum of 256MB RAM, 10GB of storage, 100GB of bandwidth and a proportional share of CPU. With traditional shared hosting, you don’t have this strict segregation so you’re generally at the mercy of the often many other users on that server. You can also upgrade your VPS by adding more resources, which in the case of Slicehost takes a matter of minutes. In fact you can upgrade/downgrade whenever you need so you can manage your costs.

The other main difference is that you have full access to your server. You can do whatever you like with it (within the limited of the Acceptable Use Policy of course). You can usually pick from a selection of operating systems, install/remove applications, reboot whenever you want and pretty much anything else that you can normally do with a dedicated server. [Read the rest of this entry...]

I’m going to make a bold statement here that most “IT” people will completely disagree with. Bear with me, however, while I try to explain myself. Here it is: “Wireless Networking can be more secure and more reliable than Wired Networking”.

That’s right, it says what you think it says. The point I’m trying to make is that not only can it be more secure and more reliable, it usually is because of people’s perception of wireless and wired networks. People expect wireless to be insecure, so they make more effort to secure it and similarly they expect it to be less reliable so  they make more effort there too. [Read the rest of this entry...]

In this post we’re going to look at the various Virtualization products available and consider the various applications for SMB. There are a number of different types of “virtualization” but I think the most interesting kind for small businesses at the moment is the hypervisor based platform/server virtualization.

Before we get into it, I’d like to give a quick crash course in virtualization. In a nutshell virtualization enables you to run multiple virtual server on the same physical hardware. Each virtual server appears as though it’s totally independent and has access to subset of the actual resources on the physical server (i.e. RAM, Storage, CPU time etc…). There’s plenty of information on virtualization on Wikipedia, so I’d start there if you want to read up on the subject. [Read the rest of this entry...]

We’re beginning to see some considerable interest from Small Businesses in Google’s hosted application suite Google Apps so I thought I’d write up some of my thoughts as well as take a look at IBM’s recently announced competitor, LotusLive iNotes.

Google Apps comes in 2 flavours, Premier and Standard. For this article I’m going to focus on Premier but you can find a brief comparison of Premier and Standard here. (The main thing to note is that Standard is free, gives you less storage, has ads and isn’t backed by an SLA). [Read the rest of this entry...]

Just a quick update on the Free Business Antivirus article I posted awhile back.

Microsoft has just launched their Free Antivirus product Microsoft Security Essentials. It is totally free as long as you’re running a genuine copy of Windows.

I tested it out back in its beta form and found it to be pretty good. It’s fairly minimal in both functionality and resource requirements, so if you just want the bare minimum it’s worth checking out.