SBCN Small Biz Podcast

We welcome back Gunther Kramer who discusses the importance of not trying to do everything yourself. Speaking with Linda Ockwell-Jenner, Gunther shares some of his experiences in helping to scale his successful business over the past 20 years.

In this episode, SBCN Co-Founder Linda Ockwell-Jenner chats with Lisa Sinclair of Enviro Painting. Learn why an environmentally friendly approach to painting is also friendly to our health.

Chris Davis returns with Linda Ockwell-Jenner, co-founder of the SBCN,  to delve deeper into the subject of IT downtime and what it means for your business. It's quite easy to think of downtime purely as the situation where your PC stops working, but as you'll discover, there's so much more to it than that.

What is Downtime?

Many small businesses do not have a solid plan for preventing "bad things" from happening to their computer networks. "bad things" such as server/desktop crashes, firewall crashes, or router/switch malfunctions can take down an entire network for many, many hours. These instances are considered downtime, but they have another hidden component that is possibly even more costly than when a network device crashing.

Things you may not realize that contribute to downtime can be as simple as  waiting for applications to load.... waiting for slow web pages to load..... Waiting for pages to print on the printer.... When you recreate deleted and missing documents... these are all forms of downtime that can quickly add up.

• Employee deletes something by mistake
• And employee clicks something they shouldn't - crypto locker
• Wait time to restore files and systems

It comes down to:

• RTO how much downtime can you tolerate? (Recovery Time Objective)
• RPO how much data are you willing to lose (Recovery Point Objective)

Free Calculator on the Polarverse web site: http://rcalc.polarverse.com calculates RTO and RPO.

That is just protection from failure, it doesn't mitigate issues cause by a poorly maintained network and that is where something like managed services comes in where your network is monitored with regular maintenance. Does your car run better with regular maintenance and care? Would you just drive it till it stops working?

The main benefits of Managed Services is discovering and fixing problems before they can negatively impact your business. A well maintained, proactively serviced computer network always runs better than a network serviced by a break-fix method. Proactive network monitoring, patch management, and desktop optimization performed on a regular basis, you will notice a tremendous difference in reliability. With this type of service you can typically reduce your annual IT costs by 30 to 50%.

In this episode, Linda Ockwell-Jenner chats with our featured guest, the ever bubbly Sylvia Pond! Sylvia is well known for two things: great photography and being part of great local networking events. If you've ever wondered how professional photography can help your business, Sylvia has some excellent insight and great tips for you.