Microsoft Windows SBS simplifies small business IT, protects business data, reduces IT costs, and increases productivity and growth. This small business solution promotes collaboration within your company, is simple to manage, and is very affordable. SBS also provides file and print sharing, automated backup capabilities, identity protection and active directory integration, and even a simplified management console.

SBS consolidates all of your critical systems, making a single point of failure for SQL, Exchange, and SharePoint - the center of the small business.  Prior to SBS, outages in previously disparate systems only effect a portion of the business, now when SBS fails, downtime affects your entire business.

SBS does not support clustering, and while backup and replication can be used to protect the SBS system, recovery is time consuming for you, the IT support team, and the business – which may be down during the hours-long process.

Depending on your total cost of downtime, it might make sense to research high availability solutions to protect your SBS environment. With a high availability solution, you can prevent downtime on Exchange, eliminate costly SQL server outages and keep SharePoint up and running. Some solutions may even allow you to predict failures and migrate applications without data loss.   One industry-proven HA product for SBS is Stratus Avance, an affordable HA software solution for small and medium sized businesses.

Be sure to check out our Avance high availability software solution, and share how you protect your small business systems below.

Downtime for manufacturing applications is getting costlier and costlier. Efficiency improvements in the increasingly competitive landscape center on resource consolidation, information technology and automation. Manufacturers are deploying more business critical applications on the production floor to increase and optimize product quality and output, without sacrificing abilities to respond to changing raw material quality, market conditions, and customer demands.

These changes are good because they allow manufacturers access to better information on improvements, infrastructure costs, and resource availability. They also allow some manufacturers to run continuously.

However, the consolidation of computer resources and server virtualization pushes more and more applications onto fewer pieces of infrastructure, creating a single point of failure  for the plant. Even a minor loss of uptime can be catastrophic for productivity, and in some cases, entire batches of products are ruined.

Manufacturers are facing enough pressures including tense global competition, government regulations, and a lack of skilled workers.  The last thing they need is a breakdown of processes due to a faulted server.

ARC Advisory Group recently conducted a survey on application downtime specific to manufacturing. Their webcast, “Application downtime, your productivity killer,” discusses the critical nature of downtime and how best in class manufacturing organizations are addressing this issue.

Watch the webcast, “Application downtime, your productivity killer,”, to hear John Blanchard, a principal analyst at ARC Advisory Group, explain manufacturing trends are making uptime assurance more important than ever, and how to protect your own plant from downtime consequences.

Calculating the cost of downtime is perhaps the biggest hurdle for IT departments addressing availability concerns. In February 2012, Aberdeen Group conducted an in-depth analysis of a number of factors surrounding datacenter downtime. Survey respondents were asked questions concerning the average number of downtime events per year, the average length of an event, the cost per hour of downtime and the time it took to recover 90% of business operations following a business interruption.

Instead of worrying about how downtime is hurting your business without being able to pinpoint the dollar amount per hour,  reputation loss or productivity loss, read the report and find out exactly how outages affect best-in-class companies like yours – and how they are taking steps to address the issue.

Cloud computing is on everyone’s minds these days – and it isn’t as light a subject as the title would suggest.

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines cloud computing as “a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources … that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

That mouthful makes cloud computing sound like a boon to IT departments everywhere – and it certainly can be. However, cloud computing often creates just as many problems as it solves, forcing companies to develop complex work-arounds or face PR disasters when clouds go down. Here are the top five cloud computing conundrums.

1. Security Concerns Around Cloud Computing

Security of data and access control is always the number one concern of IT professionals considering moving to the cloud. Public clouds involve external ownership and internal IT departments are in the dark about who owns their confidential information or where the hosting servers are located. In Steve Hendrick’s IDC Directions presentation on Cloud Platform Wars this month, he said his 2011 IDC Cloud Survey found “Security; keeping content outside our firewall,” was the most important challenge facing cloud adoption.

2. Changing IT Roles

In short, CTOs and CIOs are now businessmen, and CFOs and CEOs are increasingly getting their hands in IT. In an effort to become leaner, more efficient, retain a competitive edge, companies are leverage their resources differently and with more collaboration. The business side of companies are seeing more and more opportunities in Cloud Computing to cut costs – be they servers, software licenses or headcount. On the IT side, cloud computing enables IT decision makers to focus on productivity and efficiency of applications instead of the infrastructure required to support those applications.

On Tuesday, March 13th, Boston experienced a large power outage due to a transformer fire. NStar crews arrived to the scene in mass in a heroic effort to contain the fire and get the Back Bay, Fenway and South Boston residents and businesses back online within a matter of days.

The rancor of citizens and public officials, it seems, was not with the outage itself, or even the response effort of NStar to fix the damage. NStar created its own PR problem when they repeatedly set and failed impossible deadlines.

In and NECN interview, Mayor Menino said, “NStar was responsive to a point, but sometimes they overpromised.”

The 115,000-volt transformer fire occurred at 6:30 p.m. on March 13. NStar responded quickly, reporting that they were
“assessing the situation and will begin power restoration as soon as possible,” via their Twitter account, @NSTAR_NEWS.

At 5:02 a.m. Wednesday, March 14, they claimed via Twitter to have restored power to 8,000 customers and would restore power throughout the day and into the evening for the remaining 13,000. That tweet, widely reported by Boston news stations, set the standard that power would be completely restored by the end of Wednesday. When residents and shopkeepers awoke Thursday without power, they started to get angry.

When power restoration did not happen Wednesday, NStar promised citizens via news conferences that they would restore power during the Wednesday evening commute.

That, too, did not happen for some 12,000 Back Bay, Kenmore Square and Fenway residents.

Later Wednesday, at 5:59 p.m., the City of Boston tweeted via @NotifyBoston that “NSTAR reports power back to Back Bay/Kenmore restored by 7 p.m. Power to Pru/Copley area around 4 a.m.”

Ironically, Boston resident Marcela Garcia retweeted them, qualifying “FOR SHO???”