Recession-Proof Investments: Cloud Computing and the Refrigerator of the Future
We’ve long been told that necessity is the mother of invention, but when necessity is out of a sense of privation, reactions vary. Born and raised into the world of residential and commercial construction, I’ve felt the motion sickness that results from the ups and downs of the building cycle well into my earliest memories. And I‘ve been in business long enough to have stomached enough down-cycles to observe how different companies react to these changing economic climates.
As the current bull market gets slowly walked to the slaughterhouse, managers at all levels begin to wonder what it will mean for their own place within America’s larger business landscape. There is always the search for the investments that could be considered “recession-proof”—investments that will yield value during the current crisis, but would also serve as a foundation for future success. Simple cost-cutting is rarely such an investment—it yields short-term savings, but often at the expense of long-term objectives: I’ve never seen a hiker make it to the top of a peak faster by trimming down the soles of his boots.
That is, the most reactionary of companies looks to simple knee-jerk reactions to trim costs in order to get in line with shrinking revenues: eliminating optional programs or reducing essential services to their bare minimum. More innovative companies utilize this newfound necessity as a means of transforming their current state by getting ahead of the competition.
At the consumer level, the most well-known example of this phenomenon was the advent of the refrigerator. It was the Great Depression, of all things, that led to the broad use of the refrigerator by America’s large middle class. While it was, at the time, a significant capital expenditure for any given household, the refrigerator allowed families to save time and money: the ability to extend the life of the day’s victuals allows families to reduce waste, and thus cut costs, while also allowing them to expend the physical labor that would have been spent on the next meal on other activities. This rendered the old-fashioned ice box obsolete. In this way, times of downturn often have a way of surfacing new innovations—products that outpace their competitors suddenly emerge because the competitive landscape has reduced the viability of their less-innovative competitors.
Similarly, as America hit rock bottom in the late 2000s and early 2010s, cloud computing grew rapidly at the same time, as companies looked for ways to reduce cost and risk, while scaling up for the future. In this way, cloud computing may very well serve to become the coming recession’s refrigerator—the tool that will allow individuals and companies to strategically equip themselves not only for the hard times ahead, but also for the good times thereafter.
For Epicor customers, cloud computing surfaces as an opportunity to avoid the costs of replacing outdated hardware. Also, by moving installations into hosted environments, customers are able to eliminate the cooling costs required to keep their stacks on ice. Estes Group’s Epicor Cloud Managed Hosting offering (ECHO) is ready-by-design to protect and carry your company through the down-cycles and get you back into the saddle and riding the next bull market to better times. Looking to recession-proof your business? Please reach out to our team, and we’ll help you innovate a cloud computing strategy that will keep you ahead of the storm.
Are you looking for cloud computing options, or have questions on how we can help make your systems more flexible? Contact Us today or let us know below.
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Looking California When You’re Feeling Minnesota: Where is the Best Data Center Location?
For manufacturing companies, the advent of “cloud computing” has raised a lot of questions. Luckily, you don’t have to wander lonely as a cloud to find answers to your questions surrounding cloud solutions for your business. Not as complicated as a cumulonimbus or as feathery as a cirrus, a cloud in the field of technology is as simple, or as complicated, as someone else’s computer. But of the many questions a manufacturer may have, one frequently surfaces in relation to the location of the data: “So where is my data located, anyway?”
This isn’t a small squall of a question: if you are looking for an on-premise installation or a server stack in the cloud, your primary and secondary data centers’ location is a decision of atmospheric proportions—one with direct business impact.
Whether choosing hosted or cloud solutions, your data center location is critical. You must be wary of where exactly your data center servers are located, for all clouds are not created equal. Downtime is the great fear when it comes to all things computing, and is often the result of natural disasters—and do you remember how long it took to get the power grid functioning in Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria? Clearly, minimizing the risks of mother nature is a central concern. Let’s take a down-to-earth look at some of the natural dangers facing your company’s data.
Earthquakes
When I worked in Arkansas a number of years ago, in an area that was on the edge of the New Madrid seismic zone, I noticed the strange cross-bracing in one of the factories, and I asked a local about it. He explained the seismic risks in the area, and recounted the family lore about the quake of 1812. Then he looked me square in the eye and said, “Whatever you do, don’t blame Arkansas—it wasn’t our fault.”
It can be a surprise to discover that one the largest earthquakes in North America’s recorded history was not along the California coast but was actually along the New Madrid seismic zone in Missouri—of all places! This was the quake that briefly caused the Mississippi River to run upstream back in 1812, the year almost exclusively famous for the conflict between America and England. But while the Americans were locked in battle with the British on the East Coast, they were unwittingly losing the war with nature in the Midwest.
This might serve as a warning if you locate your data center in a seismic zone—if your server gets death-rattled into oblivion, it’ll be your own fault.
Tornadoes
Nothing can lay your blades out like a deck of 52 quite like a tornado. Tornadoes pry open buildings like nature’s proverbial can opener, allowing copious rain and debris to decorate your server room like a third grade art project, and you don’t want to see your data garnished with nature’s glitter. Tornadoes pose a risk not only to your data center itself, but they also tend to knock out your primary—and even your secondary power supplies. Backup generators are often located adjacent to a building, making them a potential target for mother nature’s twisted wrath. So while a twister might leave a building unscathed, it might take out your external generator, rendering backup power systems useless. Of course, that’s a moot point if the contents of your data center are laid out across the lawn like your laundry, for all to see. Luckily, a proper data center location can help you avoid an unfortunate game of 52-pickup.
Floods
I reached out to one of my customers after a series of tornadoes ripped through Oklahoma, and he gave the all-clear: “The twisters missed us, but the water levels are so high, some folks can’t get into work.” That is to say, a natural disaster can be more sneaky than a weather channel headline. While things like tornadoes get a lot of attention, water levels can do a lot more damage over time. As such, one might think twice about locating a data center on a floodplain. While all my gamer buddies are hyped over water-cooled CPUs, I don’t quite think this is what they’re referring to.
Hurricanes
Hurricanes amount to the worst of wind and water, with the ability to pummel your data center into paste from above, or dissolve it into a silicon solution from below. And while the zone immediately affected by hurricanes is rather small, the extended zone where hurricane-related storms transform into inland berserkers is much larger. Locating your stacks in a place that is far-removed from the hurricane fallout zone will serve you well in reducing wind and water risks.
Heat
Another sneaky disaster when it comes to all things electronic is heat. Not too long ago, I was in Charlotte, NC with a coworker. One morning after breakfast, we were about to head to the customer site when my coworker ran back into the hotel to retrieve his coffee mug, leaving me in the parking lot. I stood out in the morning heat for maybe a minute or two. Now, being a Canadian, I generally overheat reading the newspaper, and the morning temp in Charlotte was obliterating. By the time we got to carpooling, I was already a puddle. And this was still in the early morning! Servers are like Canadian consultants—they work better in temperate climates. When choosing a shack to hang your racks, look to locate it in a place where your cooling systems won’t be fighting a losing battle with the heat index. Servers generate enough heat on their own—they don’t need any help!
The Cloud
While the notion of “The Cloud” brings with it visions of the ethereal, it is in reality quite terrestrial in nature. Hosting a customer’s ERP system is a huge responsibility, and not one to be taken lightly. The cloud itself can be just as risky as a hurricane. As such, the EstesGroup is all about maximizing service while minimizing risk. In support of our Epicor Hosting initiative, we keep our data center located in Michigan, which has a favorable climate for keeping servers cool as a cucumber, while avoiding the many environmental pitfalls noted above. Moreover, by having our data center location in the Midwest, we provide centrality that allows us to rapidly service a broad region. With optimal location and cloud infrastructure, the team at EstesGroup can serve your business needs by providing ideal solutions for your data, regardless of the weather.
If you find yourself looking to the sky for answers to your worldly business questions, please give our team a call.
I just need to get this off my chest – so bear with me.
First off, I’ve been doing sysadmin work for scores of years now, and the idea of backups, business continuity, and “bad guys” isn’t new. However, this week it was brought to a new and interesting head for one small business.
Rewind the clock two years and we were in the conversation with this business about where they host their “golden nuggets” of their business, what servers did what, where were the users, how did the backups fare, state of malware, web filtering protection, etc. You know, all the “normal” stuff any qualified IT provider would ask a prospective customer. “We’re fine” was the answer – they had an in-house IT guru watching all that stuff. However, they did make a (wise) decision to host their ERP solution with us.
Last week, our monitoring went suspiciously quiet, it looked like the company went on vacation, or they had fallen asleep at the keyboard. I reached out to the company, and was informed that they had been the victim of the latest ransomware attack, and all their documents were encrypted and unusable. Thankfully, since they were hosting their ERP system with us, that was safe from the attack. All their ERP data was secure but everything else they controlled was locked. Backups proved unreliable or inaccessible, so the ransom was paid. The company got lucky and the recovery key worked and they got their documents back. What they didn’t get back was Active Directory. Ouch! Nobody could login, even though their documents were back on a server, nobody could access them.
A week later, a new domain, and new profiles on everyone’s desktop, new shares, new permissions, and they were back up and running. After everything, the company is back to doing business, but it could have been a much worse situation. A critical note: the ERP system was never at risk and no ERP data was lost since that was safely stored elsewhere.
Moral of the story:
Test your backups. Not just documents, but the whole server. How long does it take to get it back? It should not be more than a few hours.
Just because you can restore files doesn’t mean you can go out, buy a new server and restore your existing workload onto a new server.
If you can’t live without it, and you don’t have the in-house expertise to manage it – outsource it! Let the pros handle the critical IT while you do what you do best: making essential product and making your business grow.
Your password must be complex, 7 or more characters with UPPER, lower, #’s and Symbols
More than 10 bad password attempts will lock your IP address for a time, so please be careful!
You (and your users) can change your own mail password via webmail at mail.estesgrp.com.
If you are the domain administrator, login to the Web Hosting Control Panel to manage your mail accounts.
Mail Protocols
You’ll probably use IMAP4 instead of POP3, as it keeps your mail on the server, ready to be consumed by more than one device. If you have only one computer that you are checking email with, then POP3 is OK, as long as you don’t mind all your email being on your one device and NOT on the server! If you remove mail from the server, then it’s your responsibility to back it up.
For manufacturing companies, the advent of “cloud computing” has raised a lot of questions. Luckily, you don’t have to wander lonely as a cloud to find answers to your questions surrounding 
I just need to get this off my chest – so bear with me.