Hello readers and welcome to the Silentblast Blog. For this article I am going to mix it up a bit and since having read some articles on the Google Chrome OS; I thought that throwing my thoughts out there on the topic will bring something a little different to the blog.

Firstly, let’s look at some of the things Google does that are core to business and I am discussing this from a business perspective and not from a personal use point of view.

Internet Searching - by far the leader of the pack. Google is without a doubt the Alpha male in the wolf pack of internet searching engines out there. The word “searching” when referenced often in conversations is pretty much being replaced in many ways with the word, “Google.” The lines and differences between the word “searching” as it applies to internet and “Google” are fused more together than probably most people realize.

Gmail - A very popular webmail based application; as long as you are not using it for business in my opinion. Stick with your company branded email address for business. G-Mail being used for business just gives off that sense of you can’t afford to have your own business domain name and an email plan. G-Mail is perfect actually as a secondary dumping site for business email. I forward business email to it merely as a means of mass storage.

Google Docs - Google’s efforts of creating a “cloud computing” environment where the masses will do their documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online has come with mixed results. I believe that it is not widely adopted primarily on the basis that the features of installed software such as Microsoft Office or the open source equivalent Open Office are not available in Google Docs.

So if you look at all the above, Internet Searching which can be part of just being connected to the Internet as a whole, Gmail, and Google Docs; you have the three primary tasks associated with computers and business. So what does this have to with Google developing an OS? A lot actually. The OS is what will allow your computer to function and connect devices and ultimately perform the aforementioned.

I don’t think Google is going to create an OS like we know an OS to be; whether it be a Windows OS, Apples OS, or Linux and its many sub-derivatives. I believe that the OS will be more or less a program much like their Picasa graphic program that fuses and merges Google’s core utilities or services they have. I think more or less it will be a beefed up version of their browser Chrome.

From an impact perspective on Google Chrome OS taking over as the OS of choice I would be cautious of betting on that. Despite the efforts of Apple with their computers and their OS alternative and even free installations of Linux; the company and OS we all love to hate, yet still gravitate to is Microsoft and the Windows OS.

Curiosity seekers will of course try it. If by chance it is a full blown OS that essentially replaces the current OS you may have I don’t see business adopting readily. I would guess even personal users would be cautious of making such a move as well.

Where I see Google Chrome OS possibly having an in-roads is in the Netbooks market area. But Microsoft is pretty entrenched so far in this market in providing the OS and it will certainly be an uphill battle for Google to remove Microsoft as the current leader.

But there is certainly interesting times ahead for Google and of course computer users; no matter which OS you’re currently using.

Silentblast Interactive - Toronto Web Design and Development

Canadian owned and operated, Silentblast is a professional web design and development company in Toronto serving small and mid-sized companies in the GTA, Brampton, Vaughan, North York, Markham, Mississauga, Oakville, Richmond Hill, Scarborough and Barrie, Ontario, Canada. Silentblast also develops mobile web site design and development and mobile applications for the iPhone and other mobile phone platforms.

Website – www.silentblast.com

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Hello readers of the Silentblast blog and welcome back to the final part on the basics of Business Continuity Planning. I will be rounding out the remainder of the Business Continuity Planning Cycle but truly if some of you have done your homework and I hope you have; you will have Google’d some of the information I provided and it leads to valuable resources out there on the Internet.

Business Continuity Planning Cycle Continued…

Testing and Acceptance - You can have all the plans and best intentions in place or even in your mind but if you don’t try them in some measure as a test to you and your staff and business processes; the plan is not worth the paper it’s written on. In my professional line of work as a Risk Manager I often encounter businesses that have gone through great efforts and money to produce literally volumes of plans and procedures; yet have not tried testing of the plan in any way. How are you going to know truly if the plan you formulated is going to work? You won’t until it’s too late and that is usually when some form of crisis or disaster has struck.

I would argue that aside from the thought of having some form of business continuity plan in place; that the Testing and Acceptance of the plan is equally important. So don’t just create a plan and cross your fingers hoping it will work; chances are it won’t because the testing and acceptance phase of Business Continuity Planning will show very clearly to you and your employees what works and what doesn’t work.

Acceptance -We all get that memo right… you know the one; from some office, someone you may have never met, all of sudden telling you, “there are changes.” Chances are, after reading it; you roll your eyes and go, “whatever,” and file it. Change and acceptance to change is hard for some to embrace; especially when you may be implementing something like a Business Continuity Plan. Most employees or people will understand the meanings of the words but not the concept or importance of Business Continuity as you or a company would see it. So getting employees and staff to “buy in” to the concepts and importance of business continuity is very important. Why? Because they will be the ones that will be charged most often in performing the tasks and functions necessary in order to get your business processes back up and running.

Depending on the nature of your business will determine how often you test the plan. Most businesses that have some form of business continuity plan usually do testing of some kind on given business processes anywhere between 6 months to annually.

Maintenance - The maintenance of the business continuity plan depending on the domains associated with your company business continuity plan will determine to a degree your Maintenance phase. In brief the Maintenance process is the continual updating of the Business Continuity Plan as your company changes.

These can be broken down in some examples:

-          Company employees change or are promoted to higher positions of responsibilities

-          Changes with clients and contract details

-          Changes in suppliers that form part of your business processes

-          Department changes, additions, product/services additions

-          Company investments or mission statements

Some other factors to consider in your Maintenance phase of Business Continuity are:

-          Are all your work processes for absolutely critical business functions documented

-          Has there been any changes in those functions

-          Is there checklists specific to functions and staff for them to follow

-          Is the documentation and recovery tasks supporting the recovery and allowing staff to meet the goals of the business continuity plan

Now this may all seem like a lot of work to do. It is actually; but so is trying to recover from a crisis or disaster from scratch with no plan to help guide you. The idea however is to keep it simple and manageable your Business Continuity Plan and not have it morph into binders upon binders of information and processes that would take just as long to read as it did to create. Stick with basic things like checklists and step by step instructions. It is easier to manage for the people formulating the BCP and easier for the people to implement the BCP should a disaster or crisis strike.

Now to associate BCP with Silentblast and their services is fairly straight forward and easy to explain. If your business is primarily online; Silentblast’s hosting services are perfect for business. Information that is critical to your continued business success is stored off your physical business address. That information is mirrored and backed up automatically on a daily basis. There are lots of hosting companies on the internet, some are really cheap and it may be enticing from a cost perspective to be attracted to that but be wary. What is their Business Continuity Plan? If they don’t know what it is; move to someone else.

The same can be applied to email. With Silentblasts hosting services, you get email and while it can be downloaded to your computer and set up in an email program like Outlook; you can configure your emails to be forwarded to several email addresses, such as a Google Mail account, or retained directly on the server. In the event your computer goes down; you can literally use any computer to get on the internet, and still be in touch with your clients and suppliers.

Well I hope you have drawn useful information from these series of articles on Business Continuity. If your thinking about it; that’s a good thing. If you are considering on doing it, even better. If you commence the process; that’s great.

Silentblast Interactive - Toronto Web Design and Development

Canadian owned and operated, Silentblast is a professional web design and development company in Toronto serving small and mid-sized companies in the GTA, Brampton, Vaughan, North York, Markham, Mississauga, Oakville, Richmond Hill, Scarborough and Barrie, Ontario, Canada. Silentblast also develops mobile web site design and development and mobile applications for the iPhone and other mobile phone platforms.

Website – www.silentblast.com

Silentblast Blog - www.silentblast.com/blog

Twitter - http://twitter.com/silentblast

Hello readers and welcome to the Silentblast Blog. It has been a while since I last wrote in the blog and for those keeping an eye on the blog I apologize for the length of time away. My work and continuing education studies have taken the majority of my time and to a degree I had to put the blog on the side for a bit.

But for those of you who have been reading through my previous blog articles and in fact I wrote an article about blogs in general and how they can impact your business; rest assure it is fine to step away for a bit. Unless your book of business is journalism or a specific requirement to have a daily entry into a business type blog it should be fine to step away for a while and return. How else would you end up going on a vacation? Yes you could blog even while away from the office and on vacation; but you are on vacation.

So; the last I wrote about business continuity I spoke in simple terms of data back-up as an important part of business continuity. Just to reinforce the thought; sit back and look at your computer for a few minutes and think about all the data you have on it; emails, photos, songs, work data; whatever you have that if you lost, it would be missed. For some the scale of importance pertaining to each data type they may have on their computer is different.

But hopefully you are thinking more about backing up data you have currently and how important it truly can be. For business; it can mean being in business one day and virtually not in business the next.

So for today I am going write about some of the different aspects of the business continuity cycle. There are actually variations of it based on a specific domain be it; logistics or IT as an example, but this is more the grassroots version that literally can be used across any domain or business type. I won’t write about them all in this blog post. I will continue the remainder of them in the next post.

Analysis

In a nutshell; this is where you decide across your business model what is crucial and non-crucial. In truth all parts of your business is crucial. But to keep it really simple; it’s the choices you have to make on if a disaster happened what you would truly need to get back up and running again as soon as possible.

Solution Design

This phase essentially tables the most cost effective solutions based upon your analysis of the requirements of your business in order to get up and running again. I like to refer to this phase as the difference between requiring a new computer and a coffee maker. I am over-simplifying it in many ways, but in the end it’s about making hard choices.

Implementation

This is the phase where you simply enact the Solution Design phase. If for example you decided that will you will have a computer or several computers at a second location that stores your crucial data; it means getting those computers or services and commencing the controls and processes to actively move or transfer that data in a timely manner and on a regular basis.

Now to those reading; some of you may be thinking there is not a lot of substance to this article. I would even argue yes to a point. But the purpose of this article I am trying to achieve is to get you thinking about business continuity in some shape or form. Each business is different from each other. The requirements for business continuity changes in proportion to the business type, size of the business, location or multiple locations and a myriad of other factors. It would be impossible for me to write a boiler plate “do it all” article on business continuity.

However if you think about your business and begin to formulate scenarios in your head such as floods, fire, earthquakes, which are natural disasters and then consider other things like power outages, data loss and even theft.  Your eyes should begin to open wider that if you never considered those types of disasters affecting your business it might be prudent to begin thinking about them and what you would do in the “event of.”

Hopefully everyone is having a great summer and I will be back shortly for the remainder of the Business Continuity article to finish off the remainder of the business continuity cycle.

Silentblast Interactive - Toronto Website Design and Development

Canadian owned and operated, Silentblast is a professional web design and development company in Toronto serving small and mid-sized companies in the GTA, Brampton, Vaughan, North York, Markham, Mississauga, Oakville, Richmond Hill, Scarborough and Barrie, Ontario, Canada. Silentblast also develops mobile web site design and development and mobile applications for the iPhone and other mobile phone platforms.

Website – www.silentblast.com

Silentblast Blog - www.silentblast.com/blog

Twitter - http://twitter.com/silentblast