July 2009: Aligning Your Technology Goals
You may have read about the concepts of "IT/business alignment" or "business/technology alignment" in many business or information technology magazines, websites, or blogs in recent years. The concept has been the subject of many debates in the business world. Many IT projects fail because the goals of the project are not correctly aligned with the goals of the business. What exactly does this mean? Please allow me to offer my simple explanation - your technology should work for your business, and not the other way around. Particularly in the current US economic climate, technology that doesn't somehow move your business forward or positively contribute to your bottom line may not be a good fit for your business.
Sometimes alignment can be hard to detect. For example, disaster recovery/business continuity initiatives are often seen as problems and expenses that can be put off until another day. However, think of these more like your automobile, health, home, or life insurance. We all pay our insurance premiums to avoid the financial impact of a personal disaster when it occurs. A well-laid disaster recovery plan can help your business avoid the impact of a disaster (fire, flood, loss of access, etc.) and avoid the costly loss of business that so often plagues companies without a plan. Technology, of course, is only one element of a disaster recovery plan - your business leaders must also be involved. A well-aligned disaster recovery and business continuity plan that intimately involves both your technology department (or outside partner) and your key business leaders can directly impact your bottom line - by protecting it!
Technology solutions are rarely a one-size-fits-all proposition. In fact, very few technology solutions ever achieve one-size-fits-few status! It takes time, focus, and expertise - both on the business and technology fronts - to determine if a technology solution is aligned with your business goals. The Colden Company is ready to help. While we offer many technology services, we are also well-equipped to advise in areas of technology choice, acquisition, and life cycle. Think of The Colden Company as your "Virtual CIO". Even small businesses need someone to help guide them through the maze of business technology, and we are here to help. Unlike many technology services companies, The Colden Company is vendor-agnostic. We want to work with our customers to find solutions that are well-aligned with their business goals. We push our customers' agenda - not the agendas of software developers or hardware manufacturers.
Contact The Colden Company Inc. at (518) 885-2857 to make sure your technology is working for your business.
June 2009: Bill Polymenakos
The Colden Company Inc. is pleased to announce the addition of William (Bill) Polymenakos as Vice President. Bill brings more than 20 years of technology industry experience in such varied roles as executive management and leadership, project management, systems architecture, support, applications development, sales, systems engineering, and consulting. Immediately prior to joining The Colden Company, Bill held the position of Director of Professional Services with Permessa Corporation, where he oversaw Permessa's consulting, services, and support practices as well as all internal information technology functions. Polymenakos previously held the position of Director of Technology/CIO at Ecker Enterprises, Inc. Polymenakos' work at Ecker earned him nominations for the Executives’ Club of Chicago/Association of Information Technology Professionals 2006 CIO of the Year and CIO Magazine 2007 Ones to Watch awards, as well as numerous press citations in such industry-leading periodicals as eWeek and InformationWeek. Prior to Ecker, Polymenakos held key roles in GlaxoSmithKline in such varied areas as managing end-user support, through managing support for a global mission-critical Lotus Domino infrastructure, through technical architect and program leader for global information systems standards for use across all divisions of the enterprise.
We are sure our customers will benefit from Bill’s experience and commitment to customer service. In particular, our construction industry customers can count on Bill’s many years experience as CIO of a large construction company to help evaluate products and advise on technology for that industry. Bill also has many years experience with the LincLASER/COINS product and will prove a valuable resource to that segment of our customer base.
May 2009: AIX 5.2 End of Lifes
Keeping your mission critical applications and hardware up to date is not always an easy task. Software upgrades are released, hardware maintenance contracts need to be kept up to date and operating system patches and security updates come out regularly. Do you feel confident that your critical systems are up to date with all the necessary updates? The Colden Company Inc. can help. We make sure our customers critical servers have all the necessary security patches and are made aware of the latest versions. Our goal is to make the process hassle-free for our customers.
For UNIX users, AIX 5.2 is going off support from IBM at the end of April 2009, as our customers already know. AIX 5.3 or AIX 6.1 are the current releases and depending on your application, you may want to consider upgrading in order to maintain support from IBM. The Colden Company Inc. has many years of experience upgrading operating systems including AIX and can perform these upgrades at a fraction of the cost of other vendors like IBM. Our proven methodology is safe and effective.
Feel free to call us at (518) 885-2857 with any questions. We are happy to help!
April 2009: Scheduled Jobs
It is often required on a Windows server to run scheduled tasks on a server. For example, certain backup routines, or off hours work can be scheduled to run instead of having a person run the task. The Windows scheduler is the tool to so this, much like the crontab in the UNIX world. In order to run a job in the Windows scheduler, the job must have the proper credentials to run. Often times we see administrators runs jobs using the “administrator” account. Best practices is to run the job another way.
Create a separate user account in active directory with only the required permissions and set that account so that its password cannot be changed or cannot expire. Be sure to use a strong password when creating the account to limit security risks. Use the credentials from this account to run your scheduled task. The reason for this is so that when you change the administrator password, as good security policy says you should, your scheduled tasks will continue to run as they should.
Feel free to call us at (518) 885-2857 with any questions. We are happy to help!
March 2009: Sending Large Files
Many email users have experienced the problem of needing the send a fairly large file to someone else and email is just not the right forum because of its size limits. Most email servers will reject messages that are over 10 MB and some have limits that are even smaller than that. There are alternatives that will allow you to get that file to your destination electronically.
Organizations may have their own FTP server. This is a location where you can upload files and allow your vendors or customers download the files. This is a good solution if you will be doing this type of activity regularly. The Colden Company Inc. can assist you in setting up your own FTP server should you see the benefit.
If sending a large file is just an occasional problem for your organization, you can use a service from a website we have used called
Call us today and let us help you solve your business needs at (518) 885-2857.
February 2009: Business Process
We have said many times that the goal of computers is to increase revenue or decrease costs. At The Colden Company Inc., we work with our customers to find technology solutions that will help do just that. In difficult economic times, many businesses are looking to improve efficiencies, thus saving money. Let us help. We understand the technology available and we can work with you to see what solution make sense for your business. We are not a company that is selling a particular product or service, trying to fit your business to a solution. Your business practices are likely developed over years of fine tuning and we don’t want you to change the business process. You are the expert on your business, and we are simply the experts in technology. We want to help you improve those business processes through the use of technology.
These types of efficiency improvements are important for sustaining any business. We have a wide variety of technologies available to us and our customer-driven focus will be of great value to you. Call us at (518) 885-2857 and let us be a part of your team!
January 2009: Partner with Colden Company
Technology changes so quickly, it is often difficult to keep up with it. That’s why it is important to have a partner who can focus on new technology and advise on which ones can benefit your organization and which ones to let pass by. After all, technology should either save your organization money or increase your revenue. At Colden Company Inc., we pride ourselves on our partnership agreements. We are believers in the “win-win” philosophy. We believe that our role is not only to provide top quality IT support, but also to act as your trusted IT advisors. Take a look at some of the benefits of becoming a Colden Company partner:
Life Cycle Planning
Preferred Pricing
Satisfaction Surveys
Business Direction
Project Manager Assigned to Your Account
Disaster Recovery Planning
Managing Vendor Relationships
Technology Alerts
Don’t take our word for it, ask our partners. Of the partners we have entered into agreements with, we have never had a partner leave our company. We are committed to a successful long-term relationship!
December 2008: Disaster Recovery
Technology changes so quickly, it is often very difficult to keep up to date on solutions that are available. Which technological advances are going to benefit your organization and which ones are best left to pass on by? It is often a benefit to have a trusted IT partner to advise and guide on these issues. For example, according to PC World magazine, the two hottest technologies for 2009 will be “cloud computing” and “virtualization”. Can these technologies benefit you? Are they “bleeding edge” or viable options for your business? At The Colden Company Inc., we believe virtualization is ready and can definitely bring big benefits to your organization. Let’s just focus on how virtualization can help you with disaster recovery.
Wouldn't it be nice to be done with backup tapes? Colden has a very powerful solution that will backup your Windows Server to a unit called a BDR unit. This is a local NAS device. Backups can occur nightly or much more frequently should you desire that. This device will not only take the place of your tape drive, but it can actually boot up into a virtual server, should your primary server fail. You have your data available to you in minutes.
Taking this solution one step further, this same device can ship your data off site in an encrypted format and have your data safely stored in case of a more major disaster affecting your location. Need to be operational in a hurry? The off site NAS device can be shipped overnight to the location of your choosing, booted up as a virtual server and you have your operations back. This NAS device can also backup several servers, is capable of virtualizing several servers, and can is VSS aware, meaning it can handle Microsoft Exchange data.
Sound too good to be true? This technology is tried and true. At The Colden Company Inc., we are Certified Business Continuity Planners and we have been watching the disaster recovery market for some time and have investigated many technologies over the years. This one, we believe will have practical application and very reasonable pricing. Ask us about protecting your data!
What's new at The Colden Company Inc.?
Keeping with the virtualization theme, Colden Company is also involved in virtual machines at the UNIX level as well as Windows. We have proven solutions for both platforms.
November 2008: Windows 7
Microsoft is announcing its “Windows 7” desktop operating system, the successor to the wildly popular Windows Vista operating system. (Just seeing if you were paying attention.) Microsoft is speeding up the release of the next generation product which will be available in beta in early 2009. The idea behind Windows 7 is to keep the improvements that Vista brought to the table, but also scrap some of the items that made Vista less user-friendly. Windows 7 is set to be available in early 2010.
Unsure if you should buy Vista, or debating on Server 2008? Call us and let us help you at (518) 885-2857.
What's new at The Colden Company Inc.?
Our Green Initiative continues…..we are replacing the last of our CRT’s with LCD displays, saving approximately $23/year per device in energy consumption. We had already begun the virtualization of many of our servers to reduce our energy consumption, hardware and hardware maintenance costs.
October 2008: Virtual Machines
The purpose of technology is supposed to be to make your business successful, either by making money for you, or reducing costs. Technology is always expanding and providing different ways for this to occur. One of the technologies that we feel is very under utilized is virtual servers. VMWare is a popular software company that allows you run multiple instances of a PC or server on the same hardware. This is not unproven technology. It is stable and reliable. Microsoft also has their version of providing virtual servers.
One of the primary advantages of this technology is reduced hardware costs. If your office has a Microsoft Exchange mail server and also a terminal server to deploy applications to the field, you can run these two “servers” on the same piece of hardware using virtual machines. Granted you will need to make sure that hardware has the appropriate power and redundancy, but it will certainly be less expensive in up front costs and maintenance costs. Not to mention the reduced energy costs that will save your company money.
If you would like to know more about this solution, please feel free to call us at (518) 885-2857.
What's new at The Colden Company Inc.?
The Colden Company Inc. has a “Green” Initiative. We have a list of items that can help make your office’s information technology more environmentally friendly. Ask us about it!
September 2008: Managing Internet Presence
Managing your organizations Internet presence can be quite a task. You have your domain registrar, your ISP, your DNS provider, MX records, and more confusing terminology. It takes an understanding of Internet technology to understand which company is providing which service to your organization. Most businesses have a difficult time with this and don't actually record this information properly – that is until it is needed. Usually it is only needed when there is a problem, unfortunately. By then it is a scramble to find the necessary information and involves extended downtime and frustration.
At The Colden Company, we can help you manage this information. We understand the technology behind your companies Internet presence and have forms to record the necessary information for you. Better to have the information handy before the problem occurs.
Do you know who is hosting your organizations external DNS? Do you know how to change your MX records? If your organization needs help with this information, please feel free to call us at (518) 885-2857.
What's new at The Colden Company Inc.?
We are now Lenovo VAR’s. Lenovo has come out with some low cost hardware that may really be worth looking at.
August 2008: Recycling Computer Parts
What do you do with your old computers? There are a couple schools of thoughts when it comes to discarding old equipment. Most of you know at this point, that you can not throw them in the garbage. Most areas will have a local recycler. They may or may not charge for their services depending on the vendor. Most recyclers will make their money by selling the parts and copper from the discarded unit. This is a viable option. However, what if your recycler just dumps your equipment? When improperly discarded equipment is found, it can easily be traced back to the purchaser. You would be liable for any fines that came down from the EPA.
The Colden Company is working with an organization that actually takes liability for the equipment once the equipment is given to them. This absolves your organization of that responsibility. For a few dollars per unit, this may be a very nice solution, especially for publicly held companies that need to answer to stock holders.
If you would like to know more about this solution, please feel free to call us at (518) 885-2857.
What's new at The Colden Company Inc.?
We have some excellent new solutions for disaster recovery in the Windows environment. Ask us about them!