On June 14, 2012, the last day of Cloud Expo NYC, FortressITX CEO Jason Silverglate gave a technical presentation titled “Leverage Cloud Technology to Power Your Office” amid hungry lunch eaters. Through ham sandwiches, turkey wraps and Cobb Salad’s, Silverglate presentation educated attendees on the benefits of why businesses of every size have an obligation to join the Cloud. In the presentation Jason clearly highlights the increased productivity matched with reduction in overhead costs Cloud Integration brings to a company of any size. By way of full virtualization Jason passionately makes the case that if as a small business you are not considering moving into the Cloud through services such as Hosted Exchange, as a business owner you are throwing money and efficiency in the garbage.
To read the transcript from the video, click read more.
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Leverage Cloud Technology to Power Your Office
Jason Silverglate: Good afternoon folks. My name is Jason Silverglate. I am the CEO of FortressITX and I am here to discuss with you Leveraging Cloud Technology to Power Your Office.
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We’ve All Felt This Way. The Cure? Office in the Cloud!”
JS: The cure? The cure to that problem? Office in the Cloud. What is Office in the Cloud and what composes Office in the Cloud? A few different technology solutions…VDI or Desktop as a Service (DaaS), which is basically taking your desktops, whether they are obsolete, current – reprovision the amounts as thin terminals for Office in the Cloud. Hosted Exchange, that’s pretty self-explanatory meaning you take your Exchange server and put it in the Cloud. Hosted PBX, getting rid of your legacy phone systems. They are inefficient and not very feature packed…putting it into a feature packed Hosted PBX type of environment. And all this pretty much equals up to Office as a Service (OaaS).
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VDI/DaaS
JS: One small part of Cloud which hasn’t got a lot of attention in recent years is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, Desktop as a Service (DaaS). Now what does DaaS mean? This means that you will receive a VM or total server type of environment hosted in a central Data Center that looks and feels just like an actual desktop. It enables you to work essentially from anywhere. Be it your home, on vacation, on your iPad, your cellphone, your laptop on the road, it enables you to be fully mobile and have all your resources fully available at your fingertips.
VDI also enables you to have much greater security controls in your environment as opposed to just having some desktops with some “policies” in place to limit application installation, firewall management, virus scanning…all this is moved into the Cloud giving your infrastructure more security and making your users more productive.
Every three years we run into the problem of well, Dell, Microsoft etc. want us to buy new gear. So we have to spend $500,000 because the lease is up or because Windows 10 comes out and we upgrade to the latest and greatest just to support it. By leveraging your existing infrastructure and reprovisioning it for thin terminals, you never have to buy new hardware ever again. You can take your desktop that’s ten years old and make that a VDI thin terminal.
It’s also environmentally conscious because you’re not throwing away your old desktops, you’re not throwing away your old infrastructure. You’re keeping it, you’re using it and your utilizing it lowering your carbon footprint by not buying new gear all the time.
Application Control is basically, if you guys are sitting in your office, your employees are messing around on Youtube or installing random applications, you may be getting infected with spyware, malware…VDI essentially allows you to control, at a very finite level your office mates and what your employees are able to do.
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Hosted Exchange
JS: What is Hosted Exchange? Hosted Exchange is taking that clunky server you paid $10,000 for two years ago, 3 years ago, eve six months ago, and reprovisioning it for something in office and moving the exchange functions off to the Cloud. Now you might say ‘why would I do this? I just bought this server.’ A hosted environment gives you full email continuity. So if your server goes down at the office, if your email goes down at the office, you’re not losing any sort of performance, you’re not losing any email – you’re always up, you’re always receiving your data.
Another bit that Hosted Exchange has that internal exchange might not have is full synchronized across all of your devices. Your laptop, your cellphones, your iPad’s, your touch pad, your desktop at home, your desktop in the office, they are all kept up to date in sync with your contacts, calendar, tasks etc.
One of the biggest features which most desktop and inter office exchange systems don’t offer is advanced anti-spam/anti-virus. Your email is getting consistently flooded with junk mail and consistently bombarded with viruses. Most in-house systems don’t have advanced anti-spam/anti-virus capabilities that a hosted platform would offer you.
Now we have all been in the situation where you deleted your mailbox or you had it corrupted or the server crashed. What do you do to restore for backups? Well you got to go your “IT guy” and ask him to find that tape from the backup from last week that he shipped and sent off to x,y,z, company in whatever city. The fact of the matter is tape backups fail more than 50 % of the time. So the likely hood of you getting your data back or full intact is slim to none.
Message Archiving & Compliance. If you are a law firm or country firm or your clients are a law firm or county firm or you are in some sort of litigious type of environment or you simply want to protect yourself from being audited or whatnot, Message Archiving & Compliance allows you to keep your email out of the exchange system but fully searchable, fully indexable and online for you for up to 7 – 10 years or for as long as you want to keep it.
Also this once again significantly reduce or eliminates your CAPEX investment. Because every other year Microsoft comes out with a new exchange product and you have to buy a new server, you got to buy a new software license – you have to spend more and more money to maintain your infrastructure at the features you need. Through Hosted Exchange, we upgrade it, we keep upgrading it and you keep paying the same flat low fee.
And in some larger environments you have an internal active directory server. You already have your entry passwords established. With a lot of Hosted Exchange providers now-a-days, certainly with 2010 programs and above, they have features called AD Synchronization allowing you to maintain single sign on for your exchange that’s hosted and your internal active directory system. Hosted Exchange allows them to be synchronizing with each other allowing no password changes, no username changes – everything stays the same and consistent for your user base.
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Hosted PBX
Hosted PBX. Now-a-days a lot of offices are moving some sort of in house PBX system that still works off the internet but still a lot of people are still based in a Nortel phone system that are very very feature limited compared to a full Hosted PBX infrastructure. Now a lot of you might be traveling, I mean everyone is here right now, so how would it be to have your office phone work in tandem with your cellphone? Essentially your cellphone can become your office phone in a Hosted PBX infrastructure. The full caller ID, the full calling from your office number, your entire contact list, entire internal extensions – it basically gives you full mobility features allowing you to be more productive.
A lot of Hosted PBX structures also offer you a unlimited local and long distance calling so you have predictable monthly spend. You get a T1 from Verizon, you get x amount of minutes calling here, x amount of minutes calling there, x amount of minutes calling to California, calling to Canada, calling to anywhere etc. and they nickle and dime you all day long. And you never know what your bill is going to be. If your phone system crashes, guess what? Your calling your service, they come in, charge you $150 an hour to fix your problem and then they say ‘oh, its Verizon’s problem, sorry.’ and you’re out $300 – $400. With a Hosted PBX environment its a predictable spend. You know exactly every month you’re paying $100 a month from now until the end of time.
Built-in disaster recovery/continuity. So we have hurricanes or we have inclimate weather, sometimes the weather in NY gets really wintery and you don’t want to get in the office or you can’t get into the office because the office is closed, built-in disaster recovery/continuity allows you to utilize the mobility features of your Hosted PBX platform to work from home and still have the same features of your desktop and work environment. Also, if you are an executive there is a feature called shared called appearances which allows you to actually have a physical phone at home, a physical phone in the office and they mirror each other. One person calls a number and it rings both phones simultaneously.
Another thing a lot of PBX providers officers is 24/7 support. In this world where you are dealing with customers from California to Europe you need to be operational and get your problems fixed and resolved on a 24/7 basis. So these are some of the advantages of a Hosted PBX platform that you really don’t get in a traditional environment where you have to send out people to fix your problems and your legacy systems.
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Office as a Service (OaaS)
So all these together pretty much equal Office as a Service. You’re eliminating all your software licensing headaches, getting rid of your three years refresh of Office 2010 and Microsoft Exchange and Windows Desktops. You’re greatly increasing your network security by eliminating or greatly reducing your chances of getting spyware, malware and other sort of infections by controlling what your user base can do on the VDI limitations. You’re giving your people full mobility allowing them to work anywhere in the country where there is internet access. You’re eliminating the IT waste, it’s good for the environment and you’re greatly reducing your CAPEX. Ever couple of years (OaaS) saves $10,000, $20,000, $50,000 on hardware refresh. That just goes away entirely. And once again, you can access your data, your environment from anywhere in the country or world.
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Who is FortressITX?
So you’re now saying, well ‘who are you? What makes you an expert?’ Well, FortressITX, we are an NY based Cloud Managed Services Provider (MSP). We have over 15-years in business. Now what makes us unique from other MSP’s we own and operate our own Data Center in the NY Metro area. This gives us a leg up on a lot of other people in the industry who outsource a lot of the operations that they in turn try to sell to you.
Basically, because we are an all in one solution, we eliminate any 3rd party consultants you might need, thus eliminating the he said, she said problem. Your IT guy says its this person’s problem, their IT guy says its Verizon’s problem, another guy says the security guy did it by having a problem in your firewall and you need to enable these ports for your VOIP internal server to get it on the internet…you eliminate the he said, she said problem that has plagued most of your lives in industry.
We offer full stack control, so we can control the stack from your desktop to the internet connection back to our Data Center providing you with internet access giving you full QOS on any VDI or VOIP application.
We provide true one call solutions. You call us and you will speak to a human being here in NY Metro who will fix and solve your problem without having to transfer you off to x,y,z, person or dispatch x,y,z, tech from another company to help you fix your problem.
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FortressITX
JS: Once again ladies and gentlemen thank you for your time. I am Jason Silverglate from FortressITX and we are a NY Metro based MSP Cloud Integrator. Thank you for your attention.
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