I know, I know, the technology world is rife with slang, jargon and acronyms.   In fact we’re famous for being almost impossible for the layman to understand – I’ve been using words with no vowels for longer than I care to admit.  That said, some of these terms are important for a business owner to understand – if for no other reason than to make sure their business has what it needs.

So let’s get started!

1. Backup and recovery – the verb phrase “to back up” means that you make a copy of your data so that if you lose it you can replace it.  The noun “backup” is the copy you made and the act of replacing it is “recovery”.  You can back up your data on any sort of schedule – monthly, weekly, daily, hourly or even more frequently.  I usually recommend making a backup at least daily.  There are a lot of ways to back up your data – to a USB drive or other external hard drive, to a CD or DVD or to the cloud.  Services like Mozy and Carbonite are a business owner’s best friend.  Here are a couple other thoughts on backup and recovery:  First, make sure you are backing up everything you should be.  I had an outage about a year ago and realized I was backing up everything except my email.  Ouch!  Next, test your recovery.  If I had done that I would have realized I was taking incomplete backups BEFORE I got bitten.
2. Redundancy – redundancy essentially means duplication.  A system is redundant if services are split in two or more pieces so that if one fails you have something to fall back on.  It is important to think about your technology and to determine where and when you need redundancy.  If you are a small business owner with only a single pc your redundancy plan might be to go to Office Depot and buy a new pc.  Then you could use the backup from number 1 to be back in business in a few hours.  If you are a larger business or are looking to push technology services to the cloud you may have deeper needs.  When you talk to service providers ask them about their redundancy and look for two things:  first is hardware redundancy which means that they have split your services over multiple machines so that if they lose one you are still good to go.  Also ask about location redundancy – what if oh, for example, Hurricane Irene slammed into their data center?  Do they have services in another, preferably far away, location that can keep your business up and running?
3. Archiving – to archive means to save off old data that you want to keep around but don’t need ready access to.  Archiving is closely related to back up and recovery but with a subtle twist.  When you are archive you may choose to copy your data to a medium that isn’t as easy or fast to recover from and that is separate from your current data.  An example of this would be where you back up your current data to the cloud for fast and simple recovery but you put your really old stuff on a DVD and store it offsite.  It is important to consider what needs to be archived – you may not want to pay to back up and store all that old data every night and you certainly won’t want to add time to recover it in the event something bad happens.
4. Disaster recovery – Wikipedia says “ is the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster”.  Your disaster recover plan will include your backup, recovery, redundancy and archiving plans.  It is the technology portion of your overall business continuity plan.

What does all this mean?

  by  Roger Smith

  by  edgeplot

Back in the day, I wrote a lot of custom software.  First of all, that is what I DID and second, finding good software that met the business needs in a flexible way was hard.  Ok, I know I am showing my age now!

As time has passed and technology has advanced we have more and more technology options to support our business and these options have great functional capabilities.  At the same time, access to these technologies has become easier, especially for smaller businesses.  I find it remarkable that I can have, at my fingertips, the same business capabilities of a large corporation.  Gotta love the cloud!

With so much to choose from I would find it hard today to ever recommend “build it for yourself” to a client unless they had a very specific, niche need – a need that was their competitive advantage, something that set them apart.  You can get inexpensive development resources today but you still have fundamental issues with “roll your own” applications:

• you may be using developers inexperienced with building bullet-proof  applications
• you may be building with a technology that it is hard to find developers for
• you will have to do your own maintenance and changes
• you may be using a technology that won’t be supported long term.

  by  Yury Cortés

In the past few years there has been a proliferation of specialized business applications for every kind of business. Lawyers, accountants, spa owners, music teachers, golf courses – all these businesses have a variety of niche software applications built just for them.  Have a camel farm?  I bet someone somewhere has built “camel farm technology in a box” just for you.  This is a great development – if you are starting a new business there are specialized tools just for you and most of them are cloud-based and inexpensive.  These days, if you can think of it, someone has built it.  Just for you.

What is the downside?  First, they try to be all things to your niche market.  You may end up with functionality you don’t need and when you get stuff you don’t want it can make using the rest difficult or at least confusing.  Second, because you using capabilities that everyone else in your business is using, you are just “keeping up”, not using technology to give you a competitive edge.  Third, to some extent you are buying into a certain business model, one that may not be what you had in mind.

And then there is the ugly – some things these applications do very very well but some are just awful.  Areas where I see consistent poor functionality are CRM, websites, integration and reporting.  For example, I belong to two clubs that use “club” software – applications are are expressly built to support membership clubs.  They use different vendors but they both have the same problems:

• They both keep member databases but they are rigid and clunky and don’t have features a lot of clubs would find in a simple CRM tool like tagging, keeping track of correspondence and notes or social integration.
• The both allow the clubs to create websites but they are confusing, hard to use and frankly create butt ugly websites.
• There is no integration or easy way to get your data out. For example, you can’t easily integrate your member list with something like MailChimp.
• The reporting is canned – as long as you want to ask the question they have a report for you are in good shape.  If not…well, just don’t ask that question.