Here’s a slight dramatization of the most rewarding meeting I’ve had in a long time.
The client has 120 people with a small IT team and they are set grow this year with a Calgary acquisition. In the meeting was IT Director Peter, CFO Steve, and the owner/CEO James. I love seeing business owners take an interest in IT, but I feel bad when they get inundated with techno-talk; losing sight of the business forest through the IT trees. Shady sales people like to exploit these situations, I like to help prevent them.
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You’re probably burning out your corporate IT folks. With the pace of change and innovation increasing and the organizational demands on IT growing, there are still only 40-60 hours per week to get stuff done. The vast majority of IT’s time is spent keeping the lights on. The precious remainder is spent on a crumb of R & D or training to keep up. Never mind about taking a proper vacation. Unless there is a change in the laws of physics or a major increase in IT budgets (HaHa) … something has to change. In progressive organizations, it has already started. The first lesson is realizing that getting external help to look after your IT systems isn’t about replacing anyone. Read more…
Our team is pretty stoked this week. Industry media gave us a lovely Valentines Day gift … MSPMentor’s annual global ranking of Managed Service Providers was revealed and ITW has been named #76 on a list of the top 501 MSPs. With over 8000 technology companies in just Canada alone, this is a wonderful honour and I think it’s a testament to our team’s growing expertise and abilities. Read more…
Nothing hurts the soul or the bank account like regret. When business owners are confronted with the real costs of keeping data and business systems resilient and secure – some of them balk. The short-sighted and stubborn folks are the ones who are in denial about the real impact of disaster, disruption, and neglect when it comes to the integrity of your apps and data. The smart ones appreciate the risk and work proactively with their IT teams and partners to stay safe. Read more…
Here’s an industry cliche: downtime is a terrible sin. And lately, there’s been plenty of sinnin’. We’ve all heard the recent stories about the Amazon Web Services outage in late April and Sony’s giant data hemorrhage on the PlayStation network last week (over 100 million user accounts were compromised). These large-scale outages and security embarrassments are reviving fears about putting organizational data—or applications—online into the cloud. Is it worth it? Is the technology mature enough for your business? What options do I have?
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