Over the last two years we have had extremely active tornado seasons and have brought the idea of disaster to many companies that really did not think disaster recovery right to their front door. Many had thought because the geographic location was not near the coast that they were relatively safe.

Come check it out on Monday, October 3rd! Check more information and register at http://talentconnectaustin.info.

As many did I wanted to check it out and see how this might benefit the small and medium business organizations that I deal with. So I signed up for the beta and gave it a try.

We have set up our new partner portal at: http://partners.vaustek.com

Throughout the history of comparing large corporations and the SMB, Small and Medium Business, you have generally seen different methodologies for how the business is run, in large part due to budgetary reasons and the sheer difference in size.

One problem, it did go down. At least for Amazon and their very public Cloud outage (link) and even with VMware’s not quite as public outage (link).

This is the first of what will be many announcements of strategic partnerships for vAusTek, LLC.

Office 365 is a re-branding of the previous Business Productivity Online Suite which offered businesses Exchange, SharePoint, Live Meeting, etc. for a low per user cost. The downside of Business Productivity Online Suite was the unlike Google Apps they had to have a full version of Microsoft Office to work with the Cloud offering. Now with Office 365 and the online office suite you can truly consider it a full Cloud based suite for businesses.

They also have good informative sessions and awards for the area's top CIO's. It is a great place to network, see new technology and services, and most importantly learn.

We have industry experience in both sides of Information Technology including IT Architecture, Systems Engineers, and Product Marketing. We have 1,000+ hours of speaking experience and are comfortable in front of System Administrators to C-level or Technical to Non-Technical.

For many it is a complete afterthought with no system in place what so ever.  This is extremely dangerous as hard drives are one of the most common things to fail in a server. Not to mention many of the lower end servers have relatively weak redundancy if any at all when it comes to hard drives.

Others get a small storage system or tape backup onsite unit thinking that should be enough. Now while there is generally a small chance of something catastrophic happening to the location where it is houses, do you really want to risk something as critical as your business data?

Losing important business data can be a costly blow!

So why would you go to a salesman for advice?

Now do not get me wrong there are very valid reasons to get a first server for even the smallest of businesses. Microsoft’s Small Business Server (SBS)  and a number of open source alternatives generally setup fairly easily and provide sharing, communication (email, instant messaging), database, etc.

Ok, I will step away from the engineering ramble and put it more into start-up logic. When you are starting up a new business you are taught to make sure you have finances, competition information, marketing, etc. set up properly. While all of this is critical to your business, so is technology an area that often overlooked.

There are a few things that came out of the way Microsoft entered the Cloud…

1. This will validate the capability of the Cloud as well as its longevity. Let’s face it, Microsoft may be a necessary evil to some, but they still have the ability to drive people to a technology and have ruled the data center for many years.
2. Microsoft just brought the Linux versus Windows platform to a whole new level. However in this game the Linux based platforms have a sizable lead.
3. Most important to Small and Medium Businesses, this will bring more innovation. Not just from Microsoft, but all of the other Cloud vendors whose primary purpose was to get their technology out. User friendly was not the primary goal. Although there are several systems that are.

I have mentioned the great benefits before of the Cloud (article) and how it can help businesses start up and keep up. Cloud is the future and it is here now. It is not for everyone and/or everything. There are still many things I would not put on the Cloud just yet. However it can no longer be ignored.

Looks like the future is Cloudy!

So the next question is probably, what does vAusTek do?