Japanese electronics company Sony Corp.  had announced Monday that Sony Network Entertainment International will fully have restored all PlayStation Network and Qriocity services in Japan by today.

You may recall in April when a hacker breach prompted Sony to shut down these services to bolster their overall security.

This breach was evidently perpetrated by the “hactivist” group, “LulzSec.”  (they have since claimed that they are disbanding)

Since May 28th, they have been in the process of slowing phasing in newly implement security procedures.

Now that service has been restored in Japan, Sony has fully brought back PlayStation and Qriocity services in every area where they had been operating before the breach.

In addition, Sony will be offering a special “Welcome Back” package to all registered customers as a way of making amends.

Despite the new security measures.  People and organizations utlizing these services should still take their own measures.

• Cancel credit card
• Change associated email address
• Change your password to something entirely new, not used anywhere else

Yesterday, I received an email from a potential, new client that was preparing to let go of their in-house IT guy.  I am not sure what the events were that led to this, only that potential client was REALLY worried about what sort of chaos this ex-employee could cause.  I gave him a few suggestions:

The terminated person should not be allowed physically near a computer on the network, or even inside wireless range, if possible.  Box their belongings for them and mail them.

Change all passwords, here are some sample items:

ISP Account

Firewall / router

Web Hosting / Domain names

Emails

Server passwords

Phone System passwords

Letting go of an employee is never fun, but it is even less fun when the person has the potential to retaliate.

As of the time of this writing, Google cloud is experiencing issues.  Specifically with their cloud-based calendar product.  The current error message reads as follows:

“We’re experiencing an issue affecting less than 0.125% of the Google Calendar user base. The affected users are able to access Google Calendar, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behavior.

We will provide an update by February 23, 2011 12:52:00 PM UTC+1 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem.

Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.

Affected users may be missing entries in their calendars.”

This begs the question of course, when your cloud solutions provider experiences problems, who can respond to the issue in a more speedy manner?  A beheomith such as Google, withs its millions of users, or a locally based IT company that managers your private cloud?

Deciding if whether or not to hire a full time IT person (or persons) or to outsource your IT support to a managed services company poses a few challenges.  Monetarily, access-wise, knowledge-wise and other; the decision can have far reaching implications for your business.  Let’s look as a few pros and cons.

Outsourcing  IT vs Hiring In-House IT personnel comparison

Pros of outsourcing (Cons of hiring fulltime IT personnel)

1.      Reduced costs (It will cost more, generally to hire just one full time IT person)

2.      24/7 Support Ability (A full time guy still needs to sleep )

3.      Potentially greater consulting expertise (A managed services, IT support company can draw on more experience and expertise)

4.      Full utilization of resources (Often, in-house staff will have lots of downtime, and their complete abilities may not be fully used).

The primary con, of course, is that a managed service company will find it more difficult to give you an exact personalized response.  But, if the company is large enough, it can often assign certain staff top certain accounts, thus providing a more personalized response.  If a certain IT engineer that you prefer isn’t available, at least you can still have access to other knowledge staff, even at odd hours of the day.

The larger your company, the more sense it makes to go with a managed services company, rather than hiring  in-house IT support personnel.   With each employee, you have to factor in benefits, vacation time, as well as scheduling.  The costs can add up quickly.

As a side note, we often do find that many companies still like to have a semi-technical liaison that coordinates with us.  They can often handle very simple issues, and keep communication between the company and a managed service provider smooth.

This article really only touches the surface of this very important question for businesses.  If you’d like to get more detailed information on how managed services can benefit your business, please give us a call at 877.635.4837.

Lately, there has been an up-tick in the outsourcing of IT services. Let’s examine why:

1) In tough economic times (even when things are improving, as now), it is simply cheaper to have these functions managed by an outside firm.

Case in point. An expert full time IT professional, with all of the proper certifications may well demand $80K/year. Those same IT support credentials can be brought to your organization for much less. There are always trade-off, of course. In this case a slight delay in response time. However, 1 IT guy has to sleep sometimes. An outsource IT solution is 24/7.

2) More technical knowledge than 1 IT guy can possibly amass.

With a full team of network engineering professionals, the combined knowledge will dwarf what any one individual may have.

3) Accountability

An organization must maintain its reputation through years of consistent, high quality work. With a single IT guy, the accountability factor does not come in to play nearly as much.

Generally speaking, you only want to work with firms that offer contracts, unless you have only very small jobs for them to accomplish. Keep in mind, that often contracts have various “tiers”. Often emulating Olympic medals. Lower tiers may only include limited on-site support, with higher, more expensive tiers providing nearly unlimited access. Generally, the smaller your organization, the more simple your infrastructure; Thus, you can probably get away with a lower cost plan. However, for large companies, with critical operations, and complex infrastructure, the need may arise for on-site support, and lots of after hours support. In these cases a higher tiered plan would be appropriate. You can shoot me an email here if you have questions:

Contact me

In the current economic climate no one wants to waste money.  It is a big reason so many companies outsource their non-core activities, like Managed Services and IT Support, in the first place.  But how is a business owner to know if his or her IT Support is doing the best job it can?

Responsiveness

Probably most important is how quickly your outsourced IT Support can respond to issues that arise.  Things like viruses, servers going down, etc can crop up for a variety of reasons and interrupt the work flow of your company.  Does your IT Solution have the ability to react instantly to these situations?  Are they proactive, meaning they are even able to anticipate serious problems before they arise?  A good IT Support solution has proactive monitoring that alerts them of potential issues before they come to a head.  And when serious issues do arise, they can respond on multiple tiers.  Tier 1, immediate phone support and the ability to remotely connect to affect a solution.  Higher tiers would incorporate more in-depth analysis, and if needed, an on site visit ASAP.

Technological Savvy

Simple put, does your Managed Services IT Support team know what they are doing? Do they have any certifications?  How long have they been in business and can they provide recommendations from satisfied clients?  Do they promise they can do things that they have consistently failed to do, or do they deliver?  Don’t be satisfied with excuses.  They are there to ease your burden, not add to it.  They may be the nicest group of guys in the world, but if they are not up to date on the latest, pro-active, technologies, and are unable to quickly diagnose and repair issues, then you should move on.

Personable

I include this because it is important that your employee base know they can contact tech support, and not be condescended, or chided, but treated with respect.  If your employees do not feel comfortable bringing up a situation that occurs, that helps absolutely no one, and potentially will cost you money.

To summarize, I think these are the base line factors you need to consider when evaluating your Managed Services and IT Support solution. In my next post I will speak more about specific items to look for when choosing on a solution.  Until then, see ya later!