The world of small business accounting has traditionally been dominated by Quickbooks and Peachtree. Both of which I have had to become familiar with out of necessity for my own sake and my clients. However, with this great paradigm shift towards the “Cloud”, we have seen a number of cloud accounting services spring up. We’ll …
It has to be said: I’m pretty brutal when it comes to all things Microsoft. About the only thing I don’t give them a bunch of grief about is Skype. I absolutely HATE Microsoft’s licensing structure. I HATE their product layout. I HATE the amount of thought (or lack thereof) put into their products. Very …
In 2008 I started S2 Consulting, Inc. to serve the small/medium business community’s IT needs. What I found is companies and individuals fairly consistently are taken advantage of by technology providers who are stuck in the past, focusing on old paradigms of on-site, client/server architecture and break-fix services doing nothing but costing them money and …
At the end of the first quarter of 2014, some very important events have occurred on the IT front that you should be made aware of. First, Windows XP, which has long been the work-horse for business, has reached the end of its support life. This creates security issues, privacy concerns and should be a very …
Now that you know that the cloud is essentially an internet-based network of computers sharing resources, the thought of making use of some of those resources shouldn’t be quite so daunting. On the contrary, you should feel excited about your new found door to efficiency and peace of mind. Many of these services take advantage …
The concept of cloud computing isn’t really a new one. They had something like that decades ago, known as “dummy terminals”. Typically low powered machines that accessed the resources on a high-end, very expensive server. As computing needs grew and performance was needed, the de-centralization movement began. Sort of. Now, with the added resources of …
A Head in the Cloud – Speed & Equipment (Part 9) Read More »
One of the biggest sources of hesitation I run across when talking to business owners about these concepts is the data security and client or business data privacy. I like to think of it this way: How secure is your network now? Better still, how long is it going to take me to get through …
The advent of smart phones and tablets has been a rise, nearly on pace with that of the “Cloud”. This cloud concept has made data highly available and convenient for the end user to have on the go. If I were to think about just a few years ago, if I wanted to do anything, …
It used to be, back when you still thought servers were the way to go (you don’t anymore right?), backups were typically done by tape drive, external hard drive or backup server (with a tape drive or external hard drive). And the fantastic price you’d have to pay for all this would be in the …
For the anachronism, we’re back to having everything centralized on a server and nightly backups to tape or (if you were very cool) to an external drive or backup server. The usual, throw all your eggs in one basket then pay a typically unreliable fox a lot of money to look after it. We’ll look …
A Head in the Clouds – Document Storage (Part 5) Read More »
