Hosting 365

Oh dear god - how have 6 months passed us by this fast? We’re half way through 2006, it’s the middle of the summer, and I haven’t blogged in a month - thankfully there is a reason for this.

On the negative side, the reason isn’t that I have been kitesurfing in the Caribbean for a month!

Seriously, I hate those ‘Sorry we haven’t been blogging, but we will again very soon’ posts, so I think it’s important to update everyone on the amazing amount that’s been going on in hosting365 - albeit behind the scenes, which has been defeating the purpose of this blog!

Last Tuesday evening, at an event in the Westbury Hotel in Dublin City Centre, we launched ‘The Solution to Ireland’s Regional Broadband Proliferation Issues’. As Ian Bayly, our partner Motorola’s representative at the event said, ‘This new service will connect the unconnected’. I’ll go into it in more detail in a separate post, but basically it’s an ASP or Franchise service that enables communities and entrepreneurs to build a Wireless ISP business - as we provide all elements of it - from billing and CRM, to IP backhaul and canopy - a ‘total business solution’. You can read more about it here.

So that took a little bit of time to get launched But of course I’d be lazy if that was the only thing that stopped me from blogging!
Since my last post hosting365 have been to Poland, interviewed developers and designers, looked at office space, researched registering a business, hired a serious coder and a fantastic designer, rented an office and begun the process of officially incorporating a company. Hard to believe that in a month we’ve managed to get a business researched, started and running in another country! So, without further ado, let me launch our ‘Polish R&D Cenre’ which is responsible for all new product development and systems integration. Of course our Polish business plan doesn’t end there … but the rest of it will have to remain top-secret for now.

Since we decided in late May that sleep was for losers, that mean’t we coud also work on getting our Exchange service ready to launch. It’s been long-in-the-waiting, and there’s a few weeks left, but I can’t help giving away a sneak preview of it! The reason it’s taken so long is that we aren’t just launching a hosted Microsoft Exchange platform … we’re actually launching Ireland’s first fully integrated (read single sign-on) hosted Exchange, Sharepoint, Live Communication Server and Blackberry Enterprise Server (in bold because I love my Blackberry and can’t wait for everyone to get one so they also don’t get to sleep outside work hours!!). Office collaboration is great, but so expensive for SME’s, so by using SPLA licensing and taking the hit on a large install ourselves, we can offer an Enterprise-class office solution like this, starting from 9.95 a month !!

So we’ve been busy, it’s fair to say, and believe me we have a lot more in the pipeline. Yes this post is blatantly pimping hosting365 - but from the work we’ve achieved in the past few months, and the amount of great projects that are currently in development in here, I feel no compunction in the slightest about raving ‘We are the Greatest !!’

And if you think this post was ‘out-there’ wait till I start raving about our upgraded ‘obsessive’ customer experience department

To our staff, contractors, vendors, partners and especially customers and readers … thanks for working with us and enjoy the rest of the summer !

Iron Mountain have ‘lost‘ 2 truck loads of tapes in the space of a month. There’s a few reasons why this is a huge story and a significant hit to their customers business as well as their own.

The data on the tapes can be cracked, as they admit ‘using sophisticated equipment’, which really means someone with know-how can do it. Depending on what the data is, it may be used for all types of fraud by the thief, as well as the fact that the backup data copy is now gone and there a security hole to be plugged here until it is replicated again.

Of course if you have any sense you wouldn’t touch tape backup any more - it’s an antiquated technology. It rely’s on a poor medium, manual processes, and has logistical issues. Backing up on more reliable media like a redundant array of hard drives through a VPN in an off-site secure data centre makes much more sense. (heehee … and guess who can provide this for you? !!)
And the great thing about this Moore’s Law business is that the kind of system I just mentioned is not only FAR FAR better than tape backup, it’s also cheaper to do. Faster … more reliable … easier to access and restore … automated and secure : it boggles the mind that many CTO’s and SME’s still consider tape backup a viable solution.