Episode-948- Matthew Ladd On Cloud Computing for Business and Lifestyle Redundency
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Matthew Ladd of FleetingSurvival.com
Matthew Ladd is an experienced IT business consultant who provides high level IT audits, analyses and redesign of IT services to determine effective solutions for his clients.
Matthew hold the “Practitioner Level Certification” of Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), which provides best practices for delivering high quality IT service and management procedures. He joins us today to discuss IT for small business and how to move your business and personal IT needs to the cloud to create redundancy and an access from anywhere capability.
We also discuss setting up technology early on to allow for growth of a small business. Exactly what is “the cloud” and frankly why should a business owner or just an average Joe care? How we can prepare our IT needs both personal and business to stand through a disaster.
We further discuss setting up a business environment that empowers employees with the ability to work from home. How smart IT can reduce work load and improve efficiency. Along with some awesome solutions you can start using today even if you don’t own and never plan to own a business.
Resources for Today’s Show…
- Members Support Brigade
- Join Our Forum
- The Berkey Guy – (sponsor of the day)
- Fortress Defense Consultants – (sponsor of the day)
- Fleeting Survival – Matt’s Prepper Blog
- SalesForce.com
- DropBox.com
- Evernote
- Carbonite
- TrueCrypt
- Drobo
Remember to comment, chime in and tell us your thoughts, this podcast is one man’s opinion, not a lecture or sermon. Also please enter our listener appreciation contest and help spread the word about our show. Also remember you can call in your questions and comments to 866-65-THINK and you might hear yourself on the air.
I haven’t listened to the podcast yet, but from personal experience, I would recommend CrashPlan over Carbonite.
I did a lot of research and checked out any failures that either of the two companies have had. I personally liked Crashplan a little better and have been using them for about a year now.
Hope this helps.
Hopefully its ok for me to post another podcast episode link here. http://twit.tv/show/security-now/349 This episode is a great review if most popular cloud services and how they rank as far as privacy is concerned
I personally use this as my backup service. No complaints, its cheap, and unlimited. http://www.backblaze.com/
Loved the show. Lots of great advice, especially regarding Carbonite, which I have used for a few years and really like.
I have been in the telecommunications industry for over 33 years, and frequently talk with business owners who are complaining that they are out of business because their internet connection has gone done. I would ask any of you who work for a small to medium sized business, to ask the owner what he or she would do if they lost connection to the internet for a day or more. You may be unpleasantly surprised to learn they have not considered that scenario.
Please ask them to consider a backup from a different provider, such as a cable company, to change over to in case of an outage. All it takes is a small problem on a pair of wires to put most small businesses out of business.
I have carbonite as well and love it. Ok, Tin Foil Hat on:
My long term concern is if the company goes under, so goes your data. If a bank can be too big to fail, so could the cloud. I have multiple portable drives and USB sticks that I keep in a safety deposit box at a bank. The stuff I keep on carbonite, would not end my life if it disappeared. On another thought, as a society, everything will become digital. Where is the permanent record if we get to the point where we dont have the ability to generate the electricity to power all these servers. Maybe a bit mad in the thought process on this, but it enters my mind once in a while.
As a further comment, I remember when RIM had their network problems, and I think that had something to do with their fall from grace. Same with Amazon, taking Netflix with it. I understand the point that just because a technology or item can go away does not mean we should not use it. But I dont think people have quite understood the vulnerability of a data server in China. In Prince Edward Island, we have outsourced our E-Health to CERNER, in Kansas City, not we opted to host the servers in Canada, with CERNER managing it abroad, solely because of the Patriot Act. If the servers were in the U.S, the U.S govt. could access Canadian’s health care records (dont know why they would) but the option is there.
Previous comment should read “Note, we opted to have the physical Servers in Canada, due to the Patriot Act”
From a firefighter’s perspective, if your house is on fire, please don’t stop to grab things on they way out. Your life is far more valuable.
Another company that I will let people know about is the online backup company I use, Crashplan. I have nothing against Carbonite or Mozy. I used Carbonite for a couple of years. As much advertising as they do on the likes of Glenn Beck, Limbaugh and Hannity: that cannot be cheap. That cost is passed on somewhere. Found Crashplan, a local company for me in Minneapolis Minnesota. Same service, same options, better price.
Just another name to look into. Worth every dollar.
Ronald:
Anytime you give an evaluation, you need to leave politics out of it. You are obviously blasting Rush, GB and Hannity while talking up your “choice”. It makes your analysis, meaningless.
By the way, the “cost” is passed on by increasing market share.
In addition, you never know the real cost of a backup service until you need to recover your data.
JoeO: I do not see that the is blasting anyone. I would agree, anytime I see/hear major advertising on talk radio or wherever I am wondering how much am I paying for that? Many times bigger is not better.
I uses Tonido, which I like better than dropbox. A personal could server 😀
thanks so much for the show. i think i will soon be hooked on evernote. for my backup i use a company called my mypc backup. they have great pricing, they do like to hit you with add-on products but nothing is forced on you.
Loved this show. Currently downloading Evernote, and looking forward to test driving it.
I gotta say that after listening to this episode, I feel really tech stupid. Not that I am a tech pro or anything. I think a few more shows like this would be great. YES these systems can fail, but I would like to be able to make my life a little easier while they are around.
No matter what your backup solution is – until you test it, you have no idea how good it is / isn’t. Whatever procduct or service you pick, make sure you you try to recover the data – BEFORE you have an emergency. The only thing worse than not having a backup at all is not having a workable backup but thinking your backup is fine…
One more vote for Evernote. I’ve been using it for about 2 months now and it is amazing. I have the Outlook plugin so if I’m working in email and need to save something, one click and it’s in Evernote. I have the browser plugins as well, so I can capture stuff from the web too.
If you haven’t tried it, it’s worth looking into.
I agree with Aaron above. http://backblaze.com is great. I have had problems with Carbonite and BackBlaze allows backups of external hard drives.
Hi Matt or Jack, I finally listened today, and as always learned something of interest even on a show I did not think would apply to me much.
I know I need backup (just a home computer but many of the things talked about such as photo’s etc.) and thought I would just sit down and do the carbonite thing, sounds like the ticket for the non tech savvy person. Then thought that my being on Wildblue may kill that idea because of speed, size etc. What I read while looking around seems to echo that.
So, home computer, 10 -15 gigs I think it said, memory sticks and a safe place or one of those Dovro (sp) deals?
Thanks so much for what you guys do, I don’t know if you realize how much you help in so many ways.
Al,
The company I talked about for a good onsite device to hold all your stuff is a company called Drobo. You can check them out at http://www.drobo.com and you can get good prices on their stuff from Amazon.
How much data are you looking to backup?
Matt
It says 12.5 gb at the moment, I would think 15 GB? I would imagine there is probably a fair amount of “trash” or clutter I should parse out of there.
Al,
Thats not a ton of data, You may want to give Carbonite a call and see what they say – 877-BACK IT UP (222-5488).
You may be able to pull it off, it will just take a while to get it all up to their servers and it would be far cheaper than a drobo.
The other option is a product like this – http://goo.gl/lX1ys as it has some redundancy, just make sure you read the directions so the drives form a raid array (the mirror each other).
– Matt
What’s the name of that addon Matt mentioned that removes everything but the text on a page with the click of a button?
Kevin,
Its a product called “Clearly” from Evernote but you dont need to have an Evernote account to use it – http://evernote.com/clearly/
I’m lovin dropbox ! I can work from multiple computers now with out dragging my external hd around . This was a great show and hope for more outside the box type shows in the future .
Carbonite is two thumbs down. I had it for months and it still wouldn’t upload my complete computer even after leaving it on overnight. I had it on my Mac and PC. My Mac would never complete the backup, and the PC said it was done, but never did everything.
I had my Mac stolen and went to get my backups and most of everything wasn’t there. There was only a couple of my important files. Luckily I had a different backup.
When I tried to get some of my stuff off of my PC backup to my Mac remotely, the backup only had the file folders and not the files in them.
Carbonite was a complete waist of money.
Dropbox and Evernote are awesome and that is where I keep all my important stuff and haven’t lost anything in 3 or 4 years of using them.