Checklist of technology resolutions to look into for 2013

The end of the year is a time for reflection and preparation for the New Year. While most of us tend to focus on personal goals and bad habits we'd like to overcome with the ushering in of the New Year, the year's end is also a great time to take a look at ways to improve business processes and workflow in the year to come. The intent should be to focus on ways you can work smarter and more efficiently, not necessarily harder. Of course, some of the best tools for working smarter and more efficient are those in technology.

A Tough Year
2012 brought many challenges for business. The main challenge, many would argue, was the economy. The recession underway for the last couple of years is just starting to ease and many businesses are still feeling its impact. However, there were also several challenges for business surrounding technology.

Mobile Onslaught
For example, there was and is no foreseeable waning to the influx of mobile devices that users are bringing into business networks. Business owners, management, and IT have had to find ways to accommodate an ever-expansive mobile computing workforce. This means managing a slew of devices (think of all the many flavors of Android alone!), ensuring sensitive data is not compromised with portable devices coming in and out of the corporate network daily, and protecting those devices at the perimeter of the network from security threats just as fiercely as protecting traditional company desktops.

Mother Nature
The weather also posed serious tech challenges. Of course, most of the focus, and rightly so, was on the devastation aggressive weather storms wreaked on human life and habitat. However, storm-ravaged businesses were also challenged to get operations back up and running as soon as they possibly could—vital for keeping the economy intact for all the affected communities. Technology was key for businesses to get functioning again: getting access to data and communications became mission-critical for storm-walloped businesses and organizations.

Cloud Challenges
Then we had the continued shift to the cloud. In this past year, you would be hard-pressed to find any but the most customized and specific line-of-business apps that are not based in the cloud. From collaboration to bookkeeping, there is a vast offering of cloud apps for businesses to get work done. The challenge? Managing all of those apps; keeping tabs on data that users may store in SkyDrive, Google Apps, or Dropbox' and dealing with inevitable outages that occur from time to time in cloud service providers' datacenters.

Rising to the Challenge(s)
The good thing about challenges is that they can lead to preparedness and action. By focusing on the technology trends and major issues many businesses faced in 2012, you can not only ward off or ease any of the potential technology pitfalls in the coming year, but you can also use new trends and tech to help you work smarter.

Here's a checklist of technology resolutions to look into for 2013:
Collaboration:
One of the major benefits of cloud computing is the ability to collaborate on projects with anyone, anywhere, at any time. If your business is still relying on email attachments sent back and forth between employees and associates while working on a project, it's time to consider a cloud-based collaboration solution. Many solutions have advanced capabilities where a document or project owner can control who has access to specific parts of a file or document. Many of these solutions also offer versioning control so you can always stay on top of changes made to a file and who made them.
Windows-based businesses can look into cloud-collaboration offerings from Microsoft with its Office 365 suite that includes SharePoint Online and Lync, a tool for online meetings and communications. Google offers Google Apps and Google Drive both of which continue to evolve into feature-rich collaboration and productivity platforms. There are also vendors that mainly focus on collaboration products such as Central Desktop's SocialBridge, SugarSync, and Basecamp.

Disaster Recovery Planning:
If ever there was a year that demonstrated the need for remediation plans in the event of disasters—especially natural disasters—it was 2012. From the destruction on the East Coast from Hurricane Sandy to the onslaught of hurricanes in the Southern and Midwestern United States, natural disasters were at the forefront of this year's news.

We covered how businesses and IT Professionals restored critical business processes Hurricane Sandy: Lessons in Disaster Recovery during Hurricane Sandy. Cloud services, backups, and alternative datacenter locations were critical for many of these businesses to restore operations, even if only partial operations.

We also did a series on the steps needed to get a Disaster Recovery plan in place for your organization. In a nutshell, those steps are: draft a plan with key staff members and decision-makers within the organization, create the plan, execute the plan, and then train all staff on the plan.
Learn from the experiences of other businesses and organization; let 2013 be the year you get that disaster recovery plan into place. If you already have one, ensure that it's up to date and ready to deal with the most likely disaster scenarios for your location.

Virtualization:
End of the year and you are still staring at server sprawl in your datacenter? This may be the time to finally consolidate all of that hardware into virtual machines. The benefits are centralized management, smaller costs of purchasing and maintaining hardware, and the quick scalability of resources (such as storage and processing power) that virtualization can deliver as your business grows.
2013 is a great time to look into updating or implementing a virtualization platform, even for a smaller datacenter. With the release of Microsoft's Server 2012 and Hyper-V R3, business IT has a relatively easy way to incorporate virtualization into a Windows network. With new capabilities such as Live Migration of virtual machines and advancements in virtual storage, Hyper-V R3, alleviates much of the complexity for smaller businesses to create private and hybrid clouds.
If you prefer VMware's platform, VMWare's vSphere 5.1 also offers new capabilities targeted specifically for the SMB including built-in security and disaster recovery solutions.

Upgrading:
The end of the year is a good time to do an inventory check of all software and hardware running your business technology. Have you neglected keeping computers updated with critical security patches? What about hardware? Servers and devices such as NASes, routers, switches…etc. often have periodic firmware updates. Sometimes a software or firmware update can clear up persistent problems you may have experienced with a particular piece of hardware or software. Take an assessment to ensure that operating systems, applications, and hardware have the most current updates. Don't forget those browser plug-ins either—many security threats use outdated plug-ins opportunistically to compromise security.

Centralize:
Centralizing users, hardware, and software is another resolution to make for the start of the New Year, if you haven't done so already. Centralized management is critical, particularly with mobile devices that attach to the corporate network. For Windows shops, Microsoft offers Windows Intune, a cloud-based PC and mobile device management solution. With Intune, Windows administrators can setup self-service portals for users to download company apps to their personal devices and provides a way to keep all devices that connect to the work network in compliance with the latest security updates and has many more management capabilities.

Mobile Device Management (MDM) is a way to reign in and keep tabs on all of the iPads, Androids, iPhones, and tablets that access corporate resources. MDM solutions will be hot for 2013 and if your end-users and business associates are increasingly using their personal gadgets to access the work network, you will want to look into MDM for centralized management.

Organize Data:
Make 2013 the year you get control over your data. With the abundance of cloud-based file syncing, collaboration, and storage services, employees can send and receive business data to and from the far reaches of the cloud until you can't keep track of where your business data may reside.
One solution to organizing data is creating a business account on one or several of the major cloud file-service platforms. For instance, create a corporate Dropbox or Google Apps account and enforce a policy under which employees and associates can only upload or download data from that particular service. With a corporate account, you can keep track of who's accessing which files.
There are also services that will help consolidate an organization's data in the cloud. One such service is CloudHQ.

With CloudHQ, data is continuously synched between multiple cloud services including Google Docs, DropBox, and BaseCamp. CloudHQ also provides detailed weekly and daily reports that can show you what has been changed, when it was changed, and which team member or client made the changes, for any and all of the cloud services you choose.

What's Your Business Tech Resolution?
Whether you're pondering cloud-based collaboration, deploying virtualization, or implementing disaster recovery, the end of the year is the time not only to think about personal goals you want to set for the New Year, but establishing the technology and processes you need to make your business more efficient and to work smarter! What are your key goals for improving your business' tech and processes for 2013?


Original post SMB Toolkit: Six Business Tech Resolutions for 2013 
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2413600,00.asp

Checklist of technology resolutions to look into for 2013