Ep. 60 - Proactive vs. Reactive IT: Mastering Strategy for Success
you're listening to stimulus Tech talk a conversation-based podcast created by stimulus technologies that covers a range of topics related to Business and Technology welcome to stimulus Tech I'm Sher lip the marketing manager at stimulus Technologies and I am here today with Nathan Whitaker CEO of stimulus Technologies and we are going to be talking about proactive versus reactive IT solutions and how it affects your downtime welcome Nathan thanks Sherry I have to say I'm very excited today not to talk about this but also uh probably about the time this episode's airing I'm going to be seeing penguins in life in real life real Penguins real Penguins so uh you know we get asked a lot uh how the penguin became our logo and do you do you know the story Sherry why why the penguin is our logo I I think so I think it goes back to Linux Andes the beginnings of it web and all that stuff yeah so when when we started the company um we used Linux a lot for different things I was um you know really early adopter of Linux I remember um back in high school and college days download loading you know very early versions of Linux uh slackware and uh red hat and you know different Linux distributions and just playing around with them um just really impressed with the operating system and learning about it and uh tux the Linux penguin was uh invented by lonus tralis who's the uh the creator of Linux and I just thought it was a really cool logo um and then you know one of our original logo for the company was a lightning bolt and so I thought about incorporating that into uh the Penguin and combining the two and that's how the Linux penguin came about but very excited to go uh like I said about this time when this airs I will be racing in Iron Man New Zealand and part of our trip is uh we're going to go visit Penguins down on the south island and I I actually had no idea that there were Penguins on the south island of New Zealand until my wife told me so we're going to go see some rare yelloweyed Penguins oh I think I've seen a little documentary about that that you don't expect to find Penguins there and there they are it's you know you think about like New Zealand being you know tropical and you know maybe a warm place but it's actually like the southern island especially we're going to uh see a fjord and a glacier and going to go hiking on a glacier so it's pretty cold so and then I'm a big Lord of the Rings fan so we're going to go visit some more Lord of the Ring sites okay but you're not racing with the Penguins uh they'd probably beat me in the swim I'm sure but no the race is on the North Island and um no Penguins up there unfortunately okay and bringing one back from the office the office p I think that the new zealanders would frown on me taking a penguin all right anyways little segue there got uh I was uh my goal was to throw Sher a little off filter this morning so yeah I'll throw it back to you yeah what's that I didn't even know you were going to New Zealand well there it is so yeah I we were there last year and um really I enjoyed the race uh the Iron Man in New Zealand U my wife did not enjoy it as much and so we're going back so she has a better race and oh okay either she's glutting for punishment or need some Redemption from the race one of the two yeah well it's a fun trip I'm sure either way yeah well we're you know it's funny we're and I'm sorry we're going on a way segue here uh you know we're based out here on the West Coast and um my my wife's a big world traveler she did a lot of traveling and her youth um you know backpacking towards Europe and so she's she's been all over the world and kind of you know this is a new phase for me I really hadn't done much traveling outside of going to Peru on my mission and so we've been doing a little bit more traveling and and it's actually faster for us to get to New Zealand than it is to go to Europe from the West Coast here so it's a it's a long flight but it's it's a straight flight from here whereas seems to get to Europe it's it's kind of tough from the West Coast here just a longer flight it's very yeah I've done it twice yeah yeah you think there's there's places it should be easy to get to from the US but it's certainly not I I can't I hope they get the supersonic travel someday so it's like an hour from yeah from Las Vegas to London or something that would be amazing that would be sign me up for that yeah all right back to it sorry seg us there talk about travel but it so we are talking about a a proactive approach which of course the stimulus you know wants wants our our clients to to do a Proactive or Pro veres a reactive approach to it and how would you define that Nathan well we you know when we started the company um I think you could get away with being reactive on technology um and reactive is where you fix a problem when it comes up so I'll I'll take the analogy uh to your car you know reactive is you get a flat tire you replace a fat flat tire um something breaks you get it fixed whereas proactive is doing the oil changes or doing your regular you know 30,000 60,000 mile maintenance items and you know often you know when you do it to your car you're you're fixing things that may not be broken yet but could potentially cause major problems and so when we're talking about it infrastructure we are being proactive by doing things to your network to cyber security to the environment that should prevent larger problems from occurring and uh causing major issues so you know you know on your vehicle if you don't change your oil every 3,000 or 5,000 miles you know your engine's not going to blow up at 3,001 miles or 5,000 to1 miles but you know if you don't change it for 10,000 or 20,000 miles you know you could cause catastrophic failure inside your engine as you know your oil you know clogs up all the the ports inside and and can cause you know lubrication issues and then eventually everything will stop running and and that's the same way with it is it might not happen immediately but when you're Proactive or when you're not proactive then you are causing catastrophic problems down the road um and that's what we're trying to prevent is doing those regular maintenance doing those things that may not seem necessary in the moment um but can save you a lot of Heartache in the future and do you think do you find that some business owners maybe have a misconception about how long downtime May last if they're you know if they're doing a reactionary approach and something happens are they have you found that some people are under the assumption that they can be fixed very quickly yeah that's that's is the assumption is one you know a lot of times they think well it won't happen to us you know it's never we've never had a ransomware attack or we've never had you know a hacker get into to our system so you know we're too small it won't happen to us or our server's always been operating just fine you know we've been working without any problems everything lasts for you know 10 12 years we've never had a major catastrophe and then their thought is is you know we could just call up the IT company and they can just come to the rescue and you know we'll be back up and running in a couple hours uh but there's you know no server store down the street um you can't just you know order something from Dell or HP and expect it to arrive like an Amazon package the next day uh so a lot of times you know if you have a server in your office that's you know running a line of business application for example and that server goes down and you have no redundancy on your network it could be weeks before you're fully operational again especially if we have to uh recover data um you know restore from backups rebuild the system it's it's an extensive process uh to get things back up and running so it it is much more catastrophic to the business to have a major failure like that than you know prevent that failure by you know installing proper uh redundancies in place proper servers backups and things like that so there's there's definitely a lot of things you can do to prevent that type of catastrophe from happening but if you don't and you don't have those redundancies in place I think the the time that the time to full restoration is a lot longer than most business owners think it is and that's it's a good segue into what kind of tools do we use to kind of to take this proactive approach you know can start with um Cloud you know we had a whole podcast on that but it's going back a little ways now like you what's what's what's the purpose of cloud and how does that help yeah so a couple of different things is as we move more and more data into Cloud infrastructure there's a lot of redundancy built into cloud cloud infrastructure so there's less likelihood of your you know your systems going down if it's in the cloud um it's not perfect you know Cloud systems even Microsoft 365 or Amazon web services or Google they go down periodically but the likelihood of being out for days or weeks at a time is is much lower um so that's that's one thing is if you can move things out to a cloud environment it's better but that's not 100% accurate if you don't back things up so your data um still needs to be backed up even if it's in a cloud environment because um hackers can get in there people can delete things there's there's data that can be lost if it even if it's in a cloud environment so when we talk about you know redundancy we want to you know have data in multiple places have your system be able to operate out of multiple locations um in the event of catastrophe so you know even though we talk a lot about Cy you know cyber security and preventing hacking and uh preventing ransomware and and fraud and things like that you know there's still other things that happen from an IT infrastructure standpoint you know buildings burned down there's theft there's you know uh Hardware failures uh there's a lot of things that we worried more about 15 years ago than we do today I think Hardware is a little bit better than it used to be but they still happen and they can still be catastrophic to a business so having um your server redundant in a cloud environment so if you have a server in your office and you have a a backed up into a cloud environment um if you know something happens to that server for example it's stolen or it breaks you know uh Hardware failure um you can restore operations off of a Cloud Server uh within maybe hours and have uh near zero loss of data so that's that's one way we use cloud to prevent um that type of C catastrophe from happening um other things that you know the cloud is good for and it's really nice is a lot of your data being in the cloud a lot of your applications being in the cloud you could have uh redundant workstations you know maybe one or two spare desktops or laptops in your office so if one of your users devices goes down um you could quickly get them back up and running on a different device and not have to you know restore all their data from backup and get their applications reloaded you could have you know everything ready to go they log in it looks pretty much like what they were running before and there's very little loss of productivity for that employee so we recommend for our clients to have you know few devices um you know spare and ready to go so that if their users you know if user has an piece of equipment that fails they can get up and running quickly so it's just thinking about those those type of things to you know prevent loss of productivity loss of downtime or or downtime in general and uh you know just it takes some redundancy to do that and what um are there unique challenges a business has to have a server we were talking about that a little bit yesterday in our Workshop where you said dental offices have to have Surfers in their office um is that different than having off-site servers as far as managing it is a little different you know the um not not every business still or a lot of businesses don't have servers in their locations anymore but there are some what we call line of business applications that really work better in um on a server on premise so dental offices are a good example that you know the they usually have one location all the charts and patient data are stored in that one location and the advantage of having the server on premise is you know pulling the data um especially these large image files like x-rays a lot of these applications want to store locally on a device um and integrate into into them into their operating system their their line of business application um something like dentrix or the like um they just work better in house and so a lot of businesses you know still prefer to have the server in house and have you know control over that um and it and it just works better in those environments so uh we see that with engineering firms a lot too I we see that uh especially with these large CAD files that they have you know want that data in house um CPA firms are still you know often using servers in house for you know auditing and data and data protection but again you want to make sure that if your server goes down your server infrastructure goes down you can continue operations and so having that redundancy even if it isn't a Cloud Server um gives you that peace of mind at night to know that you know tomorrow if you know you wake up and your server stolen or your office burns down you can get people up and running very quickly and when it comes to managing threats you know we've talked about this many times but you know a proactive approach uh and having the third party monitoring and can you go into a little bit you know kind of reasons why for that so there's uh having somebody look looking over the systems to ensure that you know best practices are occurring so for example you know we we've talked a little bit on the podcast about the Windows 10 to Windows 11 update but there's a lot of operating system updates that have to happen in between and one of the best ways to prevent hacking is making sure your systems are up to date on the latest patches um latest operating system environments but you have to have a software that enforces that and reports back to the IT company that that's happening when we started our business we would go around manually on each computer because these tools weren't available and we'd have to look to see is the antivirus loaded is it the latest version you know run the run the updates on the machine manually um we'd update all the other software and it was like you know an hour per computer you know at least once a month to get all this done and it was honestly disruptive uh to the environment because the user wouldn't be able to work on their machine while we were doing these updates now you know we do it Ma automatically overnight and then we get reports back into our system that these things these patches are occurring the antivirus um EDR systems are up to date and then even more than that we're monitoring um user actions and environmental actions on the computer so that if a user clicks on a bad link or it appears that it's you know ransomware is downloaded or something like that that we could take immediate action uh and be proactive on preventing that from causing major issues on the network um and you know prevent that catastrophe from happening so that monitoring is is an essential part of being proactive um so that we are you know solving problems before they become major issues and then being proactive on making sure all those updates security patches and all those things are happening have you encountered where somebody May didn't do those updates and had an issue oh yeah it's you know over time it's always you know that's a constant issue that uh you know an old operating system um you know kind of again going back to you know updates um uh I mean it's been 10 years now like Windows 2000 Windows Server 2003 um went end of life and you know people didn't update it immediately think it thinking wasn't important and then those servers were hacked through you know Brute Force attack on remote desktop for example and you know those those things we've seen over time uh occur so it's really important especially these big operating system updates that they they occur because that's one of the easiest ways for hackers to get into your system is when you're running out ofate software out ofate operating systems um they look for those those systems in V abilities and use that to get in so if somebody you know a business owner is managing this you know we work with a lot of smaller businesses if they're kind of on their own what steps should they take to identify where they need to be more proactive in their it well you know we we often talk about tabletop exercises you know ask that question of you know if this happens to my environment if if my server stolen if um my internet goes down if um a user clicks on a bad link you know what what am I doing right now to prevent that from you know causing a catastrophe in my system um and especially you know even if you're working on cloud environments your all your data is in the cloud you know if you lose access to that if um sometime somehow data was shut down or um that company went out of business um how would you continue operating those are questions you know periodically you should ask maybe in an annual planning session of your company is how do we continue operating even if you know X happens to my business and then ask questions like how do we prevent that from causing a catastrophe because you know when these things happen they can you know cause permanent damage to businesses and have them shut down I mean it's you know we we see it in the news we see you know companies that don't recover from these type of events even if they have proper insurance it's really hard to start back up a business that hasn't operated for weeks or months because of you know major downtime to get your clients back and your customers back is really hard it's like starting new so these are questions that should be asked and and then you know maybe again along the insurance line too is ask your insurance agents like how can they help you know um prevent these type of catastrophes from happening or causing major Financial damage to your business and that was going to be my my next question was you know what are the financial benefits of being proactive but I think you pretty much said we used to do a webinar that said you know the right approach can save you 880,000 in in Damages and and so probably the benefit is not having those losses yeah I mean that's one of the primary benefits but you know a lot of people you know I think the government had to mandate that we buy car insurance because you know there's a certain percentage of population that would just go out and buy car insurance regardless whether the government mandates it or not but I think a large majority would say oh I've never get in a car accident I haven't been in a car accident in 20 years or 30 years I don't really need insurance or I don't need my home insurance or you know whatever it may be and then you know the these catastrophes happen happen that are unexpected and can cause serious damages to us personally or to our businesses um and so ensuring that we have um the you know Financial backing and the right policies in place to prevent that but honestly I I think the other side of it is uh a better way to look at it too is if you're running a business that's really efficient if you're doing those updates if you're maintaining your systems well um it increases your bottom line because your employees and your staff are more productive you are providing better services to your clients uh your employees are happier and it makes for a better working environment so it's not just a fear loss it's also you know the gain to the bottom line of your business because you're you're a more productive and better business when doing these things anyways all right well last question you know how do how do we help businesses with this so softball question Sherry there we go so you know our approach has been for 20 years now of uh we started out you know about 20 years ago calling it proactive Wellness plans and that's you know our goal as stimulus is being proactive and solving these problems be before they become major issues but also working with you know our clients to make their businesses better so our approach is you know installing tools on the computers um and the entire environment to monitor what's going on ensuring those patches and updates are occurring reporting to us if there's any you know antivirus issues or system issues before they occur um we get alerts you know if there's a server that goes offline or equipment that goes offline and often we're calling you know at six o'clock in the morning the office manager saying hey we noticed your servers offline you know we'd like to help and uh you know we're we're monitoring that and know what's going on so that's that's our approach to being proactive and and then on the other side of it too is working with the business owners on putting budgets together understanding you know what equipment they need to have what systems they need to have to ensure that if you know all heck Breaks Loose as they say uh that you know we can get you back up and running quickly and there's a lot of things that we can do uh for our clients whether it's redundant servers cloud backup cloud storage um and redundancy in that that prevents this type of catastrophe from becoming even worse for your business all right well thanks Nathan and thanks everybody for listening [Music]
2025-02-11 16:46
