Simple IT changes can have a roll on effect that may not have been considered. Easily avoid these surprises by contacting your IT provider prior to making a change.
Full Transcription - Effect of Simple Changes
L: Lorraine of District 32 and I have the privilege of having a conversation with Peter Trenaman again.
P: Good morning Lorraine how are you?
L: I am very well thanks how are you?
P: Yeah not too bad not too bad some interesting, things this this week.
L: The interest of Life yes.
L: What we’re about today is, I thought it would be really great for us to explore some case studies or common issues that come up for business owners and their everyday working life that they might not have thought about so I thought it’d just be a great way to tell to educate listeners and viewers on what to look out for. So, I think today what we’re going to actually talk about is that theme you know what happens, what to look for in business when you make one small change that can have a knock-on effect to everything else in the business
P: That’s right that’s it
L: So over to you then Peter tell us about your client’s stories
P: Okay so it happens on a reasonably regular basis so I’ll use a name which is indicative of a multitude of clients and let’s call him Ben. Ben is part of a management team of a site which is not in Perth, it’s out of Perth.
They’re upgrading their internet connection and you know when you when you upgrade the internet connection you either ring a new provider or you ring your existing provider and say I’d like to upgrade it. The only trouble is if you’re running a business there’s more to it than just changing the connection.
L: I was going to say it sounds like a reasonably simple request I would say that’s its job done.
P: The request is very fairly simple. In this situation well in two of the three clients that we dealt with in the last two weeks, the providers were changing and, in that case, there was a gap in the internet provision. So, they wouldn’t have internet for somewhere between 24 and 48 hours to the office.
Okay so each one of them had five or six staff which would be that go dark they wouldn’t have internet connection for 24or 48 hours and so GroupSupport come in and provide a 4G dongle or a 4G modem to provide that continuity of internet connection and in the meantime at the back end we work with the web providers and your webhosts, the people who manage your DNS off your domain name to make sure that the spam levels are maintained. Because if you change the source where you’re sending emails from and don’t tell your email provider your email provider thinks you’re a stranger so that you are now a second person and that’s exactly what this email spoofing is.
When someone else pretends to be you and so your email provider thinks that you’re someone else unless you tell them in advance okay.
L: wow, would never have thought of any of this stuff.
P: No and so you then get blacklisted from your own email. So, then a client rings up and says um we’ve got a problem in Houston. It’s not a problem, we can fix it straightaway but the implications are two or three or four days for the fixed to actually apply and so what happens is when you want to change an internet connection on a business specifically a business it’s important to talk with someone who actually understands some of the implications at least a week before so that you can set things up and make sure they’re all working because then once you then go from the 4G connection back to an internet connection you suffer the same problem again wow so there was two changes there.
Then there’s other side of things is that if you or your people are working from home and they’re accessing documents that are sourced locally in the office on a NAS or a server or they’re sharing other documents in a desktop situation how are they going to get in if the address has changed if the external address has changed? So, we need to manage that process a swell to maintain performance and productivity of the staff.
Everything doesn’t ordinarily stay online at every Point and the typical one is printers, how do you print if you can’t find the printer because the printer hasn’t moved but their IP addresses have moved and so there are very little things but they have a severe impact. If your business can afford a week or two, days or three days of outage in that situation then great but most businesses cant so it’s worth a five minute phone call beforehand to say what do we need to do and how much we need to do it and it costs you a couple hundred dollars of Labour to actually manage and tweak that through isn’t that worth the loss of productivity for two or three or four days of say five , six, ten staff?
L: Yeah
P: So yeah, that’s the tip of the week
L: I think it’s a great tip there Peter. I have experienced that myself when I’ve had to go on and use maybe my phone internet which is not connected to my printer and it’s the one day that you have to print out a legal agreement to go somewhere and do something and you don’t have access to the printer. It just drives you crazy so yeah, I just wouldn’t have thought of all those other things either we just don’t know what we don’t know.
P: Well nowadays with especially with Spam and those sorts of things there’s a huge complex mechanism behind making sure that spam is minimized but the tolerance is very very small. You know we use the same devices and we use the same situations and the same passwords same applications and so the tolerances can be very small but the moment we move one of the one of the things, it’s out of kilter and so that’s all marked as black or gray or something but not white. Things like that we are very intolerant, some of the more unwelcome parts of the IT industry and making sure that we stay within those rules or within the constructs that we’ve actually created to keep those rules nice and make sure that we have clean emails and a fluid and working operational environment, yeah that can get a bit gnarly sometimes.
L: So, the tip therefore is any change you’re going to make it doesn’t matter how small call your IT provider first and say this is what I’m going to do what are the implications?
P: It’s worth it it’s worth a coffee or a beer or a phone call, just to say what if? what do we do you know?
L: Peter Trenaman GroupSupport thank you very much for your time and your tips today
P: No problem at all. Thanks Lorraine.
