RANT: What people sell to small businesses
***RANT ALERT***
Browsing for products and solutions on the internet I come across many different things people are trying to sell to the ma and pop shops. Some are very good, but even the good ones are not as easy as they advertise. I will not use names here for legal reasons. Many products that are being sold to small businesses because of the ease of use. Take for example a USB storage device that allows sharing and access over the Internet. Awesome right! No. Yes you can just plug it in, activate it and off you go, but how do you connect to it? Being a consultant for all types of business, I don’t know many small business that carry a dedicated IP address to their office, let alone have ports open on a firewall to even allow access to the device. Not only that, but by default this device is not encrypted, meaning if I knew you had one and you kept all your company documents on there so you can access them from the road, all I would have to do is sniff the IP, get your credentials, and off I go. Yet there is an option to enable SSL 128 bit encryption. Do you, the small business owner know how to configure that also with your firewall, and do you also know how to install a certificate? Most likely not, so once again you will need to call a consultant to set this up for you. So now your sweet deal product that sells for $99 now costs you oh roughly $500 – $600 to get this far. That is just for one product!
If you are going to spend that much money, you are half way to a networked secure solution professionally configured by a good consultant and now have the ability to offer much more to your business. A good consultant should be able to get you going in the right direction to cut costs along the way also. For example you could use Microsoft Windows Small Business Server for you office. This would give you a secure network with Active Directory, SharePoint, server storage, VPN (remote access) that is on a secure tunnel, email with Microsoft Exchange, and much more. You can usually pickup a good server with SBS installed on it for around $1000 and a few hundred to have it setup and configured. A bit more from us to be honest since we never use anything PC or Server with the Operating System pre-loaded. This can also be done without having to get a dedicated IP address from your ISP and use a service like DynDNS.org to maintain the IP. You also get a SSL certificate with SBS you everything is secured and you don’t have to go out and purchase one.
If you don’t need a server for these purposes we would recommend looking into Google Apps solutions or a very minimal solution would be to use Microsoft Live Mesh (see previous article: http://jimirig.com/?p=1135). The Microsoft Small Business Server is a very robust and cost efficient product by Microsoft. We have been using SBS for some of our clients since it was introduced in 2003. Some of us here at Jimirig were actually partners with the beta testing for it. Ok enough rambling.
Moral of this rant is to find a good consultant to work with. Let them help you with technical needs for your business. A good consultant can save you money, time, and usually make business more efficient with a good ROI. We don’t charge to be in your address book, so call when you need something 
