The Progression of Thin Computing – Hot Desktop

Posted on November 5, 2010 by Nathan Washington | Leave a comment

In todays ever so fast paced work environment, the use of technology can enable a more user friendly experience without losing security. Hot Desktop by Citrix allows users to quickly roam and share workstations. Some industry related fields that benefit from this technology are banking, healthcare, and retail environments.

There are no more open workstations, user lockouts or denials of service. Users authenticate quickly using their Windows account credentials or strong authenticators such as smart cards, tokens or badges.

Hot Desktop takes a unique approach by leveraging a locked-down shared account that is always logged in for speed, but adds an additional layer of explicit user authentication for access.

This shared account can be a local or domain account, and it is assigned limited privileges. Any privileges assigned to this account are passed along to users running a Hot Desktop session. The client device automatically logs on to the shared account at startup, providing a turnkey kiosk solution.

All user sessions run on top of the shared account Windows session.

When users approach a Hot Desktop workstation, they are presented with the standard Windows Graphical Identification and Authorization   logon screen or strong authenticator logon interface.

A Hot Desktop session looks and feels like a standard Windows Desktop session. A user can start a session, perform any job-related tasks and end the session so the next user can enter the system and do the same.

The switch from user to user occurs quickly and efficiently. Furthermore, the system is protected from unauthorized walk-ups and event logging tracks who uses the system and what activities they perform

Think about all the uptime and productivity your business or department will gain through the use of Citrix Hot Desktop.

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3 things that are critical to protecting your data and your business

Posted on September 9, 2010 by Eric Chiaramonte | Leave a comment

It has been shown from numerous studies that businesses cannot tolerate data loss.  This could mean hours of unproductive time in recreating data that was lost, missed revenue from not being able to run your business, disgruntled customers who might not come back from not being able to respond to their requests, or closing the business due to failure to recover from the data loss incident.

There are three items that should be considered when evaluating a complete backup plan.

  1. Backup of Business Data – This one is obvious but kind of important.  Tape is antiquated and with storage becoming so cheap, disk based systems are starting to prevail.  A good backup solution should be able to periodically take a snapshot of your data throughout the day giving you multiple restore points.  Additionally, taking a snapshot of the entire server will assure the data to protect doesn’t get missed due to not being in the right place.
  2. Continuity of Business System – When (and I mean when…not if) you have a failure with a server, how will you continue to run the business systems on that server?  If we look at point 1 we suggest backing up the entire server.  With this you have the ability, on 99% of systems, to run this snapshot as a virtual server.  Performance will be degraded but the business can continue.  Additionally since the entire server is protected the ability to restore the entire server to replacement hardware drastically decreases recovery time of a production server.  The old way was to rebuild the server from scratch, restore the application or data, and repoint all the end users to the new server. Days compared to hours.
  3. Disaster Recovery for the Business – Most of us have a safe deposit box at our bank, why?  Well we keep copies of important documents there incase our house burns down…  Why don’t we do this with our business data?  The backup process should be moving data offsite daily to assure in the event of a catastrophic disaster we can ship those backed up whole server images somewhere new and spin up the business quickly.  60% of business who have a catastrophic failure like this go out of business within 6 months.

So backup your data often, backup all your data to prevent missing something, plan for virtualization as a quick Business Continuity Plan, and get the data offsite daily.  Add automation to this and your life will be much easier.

Posted in Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, IT Services

Hope and Change… In Information Technology (IT)

Posted on August 23, 2010 by Eric Chiaramonte | Leave a comment

IT is a constant changing environment.  Technology never stands still long enough to get a total grasp of it before we are moving on to the next project.  But as we all know, every change involves risk, and changes gone bad can be your worst nightmare.  Understanding how change affects the environment, affects the users, and affects the goals of the company is critical.  All these things are tightly integrated into a web that touches just about everything in the environment.  So what does this mean to a company that is hoping to implement something new?

The answer is a solid understanding of the environment.  As consultants we are usually brought in to implement something complex, and not being in the environment everyday prevents us from becoming familiar with all the nuances in the infrastructure.  Understanding takes time, time that we often don’t have.  The general thought is that every change to be “simple”, so getting assessment time is often a challenge.  We’ll often be working in complex environments, environments that involve lots of people who might be used to the day to day nuances.  We often have system components in the mix that we don’t know about until something changes.  We may have legacy apps that simply cannot be known – stuff that was implemented years ago by people who have long since left for instance.  Compound this with the familiarity of the end user knowing how to function on the existing system no matter how convoluted, implementing a new system not only can knock systems and process out of place it can cause a headache for the end user who many not have been prepared for the change.

I guess my point is this, while understanding what the goal is gives you something to strive to, understanding where you are at today will help you figure the path to get there and all the change that is required to make it a success.  Don’t just implement change and hope for the best, instead be methodical with an assessment and poses the clarity to succeed.

Posted in IT Services, Managed Services, Migrations, Network Assessment, Small Medium Business

Top 4 things to look for when hiring an IT company

Posted on August 3, 2010 by Eric Chiaramonte | Leave a comment

The SMB market has a very tough challenge in finding someone to help them with their IT needs. While they are small enough that hiring someone on staff doesn’t make sense they will need someone to manage their IT needs.  Here is how to hire an IT Services company to help.

  1. Strong Company – Find a company who has been in this market for years, who has ongoing enterprise project experience, and a support network of Vendor Partnerships with the technologies you have.  These items will translate into an understanding of the SMB IT Challenges, a working knowledge of new enterprise technologies that usually get rolled down to the SMB market to improve your technical stance, and a support structure of resource beyond the company itself.
  2. Expert and well rounded – SMB Clients will usually have one assigned engineer that works with the client closely and on a regular basis.  This engineer should be an expert in core technologies but well-rounded in IT so they can truly be your technology go to person.  You want this relationship to feel like a trusted friend.
  3. Friendly and Easy to talk to – Not only are you going to have a close relationship with the engineer, your staff and end-users will work with this person on a regular basis.  The engineer or any other support representative should never make your staff feel silly or stupid for not understanding technology, in fact after a support incident your staff should feel enlightened by understanding what may have happened and how they could overcome it in the future on their own.
  4. Available and Accessible – Lastly the support structure of the company should be accessible.  If your primary engineer is not available, someone within the IT Company should be able to quickly help out.  This is a sign of good company communication and back-end support processes.

Let us show you what we can do for your company. Learn more about itLogistixs or contact us at 602.247.7600

Posted in IT Services, Managed Services, Small Medium Business