Data Management

Jason Null: [00:00:00] Welcome to DIY for SMBs. This is our episode seven and this is on data management. Go around the room and we'll introduce everybody here. I'll start to my right with. With you young man,

Austin Ringland: Austin Ringland, system administrator,

Austin Doans: Austin Dunes systems administrator.

Nate Jewett: Nate Jewit, V C I O.

Jason Null: Are you sure? I'm pretty sure it's been because we've had several episodes where we've had multiple titles.

Now I, you know, it's just one of those things. I think you should go with CTO this time. I think I have. That could be Chief Technology Officer. Mm-hmm. Cool. Flex vCTO Yeah. V vCTO You're the virtual technology officer. Same thing. A lot of stuff going on here. Yeah. So job title's moving over there. Exactly.

So Nate's getting the new title every time. Yep. So I'm Jason all Vice president here at MIS Solution, and you're smiling host. So, so let's talk about data management. Let's get into the importance of understanding data. What, how it's kind of generated, collected, stored with s within SMBs and maybe even maybe [00:01:00] larger kind of small level enterprises.

And we kind of talk about what you guys see every day, how you manage it how you control it, how you protect it.

Austin Doans: Not a lot of management of data for our clients. I mean, we obviously back it up. We ensure that our clients can access it. Right? You know, so data base administrators isn't something, you know, we do on a daily basis, but we do take the data that is.

Being used daily. Make sure that it's, it's fast that it's backed up in case anything happens to it. And

Jason Null: Well I would say you guys do more than that. I mean, data versus database management, it's kind of a couple different things, right? So data, if we're thinking like Word documents, Excel, you guys are building, whether it's a file share, somebody somewhere putting shares on it.

Managing sizes of volumes to modern day data, which is stored in [00:02:00] Cloud, SharePoint, Google Drives or Dropbox One, or was it Box is another one. So, and what do you guys do with that kind of stuff? I mean, how are you managing data that way?

Nate Jewett: File permissions, network shares, like you said, right?

Austin Doans: I mean, it depends on the client and the client's needs, obviously.

So the, the two things that, the two types of, of data storage that we kind of if you wanna say manage would probably be onsite versus cloud data, right? So some of our clients have. Physical file servers that are onsite. And that's what works best for them. It's, it's quick local storage. Maybe they're dealing with big data, so, you know, videos large spreadsheets, those kinds of things work better onsite, locally, then maybe potentially in the cloud.

Then we have a lot of other clients. That, you know, would prefer the flexibility of, of cloud data storage [00:03:00] that could, you know, take a few extra seconds to download the video, per se mm-hmm. Than, than needing in instantly. And, but they would rather have the flexibility. So instead of needing to get on a VPN when they're on, you know, at a coffee shop to work, they can just go to a website.

And

access it.

Jason Null: So data's changed, at least with the housing that you have, the anytime, anywhere access much faster, right? Mm-hmm. From being cloud, one of the things you mentioned, I wanna go back to a little bit, is flexibility. So that flexibility is obviously remote access. I think another one of those flexibilities, and you can kind of tell me if I'm going the right direction here, is probably the ability to expand that storage quickly, correct?

Correct. Sure.

Austin Doans: And we can obviously build in, build, build in scalability, in, in local instances as well. But with cloud, you know, it's just as, just as easy as you know, how much do you wanna pay for? You click the plus button and you pay for it and you have it, instead of needing to go on site and [00:04:00] actually put in a physical new driver.

You know, plan for that sort of thing. Yeah. So yes, flexibility is, is greatly increased with cloud. So I think

Jason Null: scalability, yeah. Do we see, do we see clients doing hybrid solutions, kind of doing some stuff onsite, some stuff in the cloud? Or does it seem to be either one or the other?

Austin Doans: I mean, if you're talking in relation to, to data storage in particular obviously there's a lot of solutions that are hybrid that.

are not in relation to data storage that we implement, but for data storage in particular, we, I wouldn't say we have much of the way of hybrid. So either you're gonna have either local or cloud, and it's possible that you could, we could do hybrid, but it's, you know, it's gonna be less cost effective.

So certainly we'd be open to that option, but it hasn't come up as, you know, something that would be viable or worth. The, the extra price

or effort.

Nate Jewett: You do see sometimes though people creating their [00:05:00] own hybrid is where they'll put some stuff in, like their OneDrive or in a SharePoint site to just edit a document on the go and not have to worry about saving it all the time and then dump it somewhere else when they get back to the office

or whatever.

Austin Ringland: The only, the only other time I've ever seen like anything hybrid is like we, some clients will want to keep maybe something local just for, like you said, like their CAD drawings or bigger documents, like they'll put. Most are smaller stuff in SharePoint, and then they'll have, you know, their CAD drawings,

bigger documents, still local.

Jason Null: So just to kind of cover what you're saying, so they may have local storage. Mm-hmm. But they have, nowadays we're using Office 365, they get it anyway. The company's not using OneDrive or stuff, but their people are like, Hey, I have this, I can move the data here and I have access to it much easier. And so sometimes, The employees are migrating themselves and working in a hybrid solution, right, to be able to be more flexible in their job.

Maybe they're a salesperson, they travel a lot. I mean, realistically,

Austin Ringland: if we're going down like that far, then probably every client we have is hybrid cuz we, we implement, share, we [00:06:00] Right, implement OneDrive just for backup

Austin Doans: reasons. Pretty much every, yeah, I mean, SharePoint and OneDrive are the same product, just with different, you know, names for depending on what kind of days.

Obviously, you know, OneDrive is personal. Files and SharePoint is shareable files.

Jason Null: Yeah. So it's basically OneDrive is my documents. Right, right, right. And then SharePoint is more like the P drive, which is our public drive. Right. Or you drive, or not you drive, but any other drive letter you're using whatever you want to call it.

Austin Doans: So, so if we're talking personal files and OneDrive that is very, a very hybrid solution. Yeah. So there are certain clients where they could. Be storing their files. You know, using the OneDrive client, sometimes we recommend that, sometimes we don't, depending on their use case. But they would, they could have local files on their, on their computer that, that continuously sync to, to the cloud.

They're, like I said, depending on the use case that is, you know, if, if it's a good solution for them or not, is [00:07:00] is the conversation to have. But it does happen and that's

Nate Jewett: one of those things that, you know, when we as the MSP come in, we can see how you're using your data. If you're not storing the big files and the mass amounts of data, that's when we can recommend, hey, let's maybe push towards a cloud solution because it would be, A better option for you and your employees is they're working remotely or,

Jason Null: I, I kind of also think about this too is applications, right?

So in the past we've had applications on, on premise, whether it's like, I'll use something like a QuickBooks, right? Mm-hmm. And the database is local, or the file, whether you wanna look at it is stored on a server today. As those clients are moving, they may still have files locally, but they've moved their applications in the data for it.

Into like QuickBooks Online. I think those are great solutions. It gives, the accountants we've seen be a lot more flexible. Mm-hmm. They're no longer having to remote into a [00:08:00] company to get to a machine that they hope somebody left on or somebody's using at the time because they have one QuickBooks license now they have a flexibility in the cloud.

So I see it not only from like data of my personal Word files that I want anytime, anywhere. But even applications as we move that kind of data into the cloud, I think makes companies way more flexible than they have been in the past. And of course, we go back to discussions we've had before is we're not having to buy servers anymore then.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So we're not having that huge expense now. We have a reoccurring expense. It's more like a utility bill, you know? You know, ah, in the wintertime, I use my, my heating and electric costs me 200 bucks a month. Right? In the summertime it's maybe a little less, you know, but you can kind of budget for that versus.

I just bought a server. I spent 10 grand. I wanna run this thing as long as I can, and I'm not really even thinking about the fact that it's so slow that it's costing me so much money because my employees are waiting. Mm-hmm. Where the clouds just continuously [00:09:00] gets faster and faster. We talked about internet connections being.

Increased and keep getting faster and faster because of that cloud. So as we're talking about like management of data, like do you see or have companies ever coming to you guys asking you guys to help them with their data? Do you ever see them retiring data actually getting rid of data? Or do we just, or is it My impression of data today, which is I think that we've all become digital hoarders.

I don't think people delete anything anymore. I think that data just, you just look at it like, well, I don't need it, but maybe I might. So it's not taking up any space. I'll just leave

Nate Jewett: it. I might need this, you know, maybe 10 years down the road for a lawsuit. You know? You never

Jason Null: know. True. I, I don't think, I don't think any of that.

I could see it from a legal Yeah. And financial standpoint. You have certain pieces you can keep. Yeah. But I think a lot of data, I go, that's the thing about my data, I actually every so often go through and clean up stuff. And I, I'm amazed that things I've kept from five jobs ago. Right. [00:10:00] You know, and we're going back to, you know, 1999, I've got files that are.

Things that I worked on, I'm like, I might need that again. And I'm like, it's 23 years later, 24 years later, I don't, something that you

Nate Jewett: probably did on

Jason Null: server 2003? No, 2000 probably. Actually Windows nt Oh yeah. Was the, probably the platform at the time, you know, before, you know, but still, and it's probably running in like who knows what version of Word, but, and I've kept stuff like that and recently I've started personally cleaning up my own data and trying to get rid of things.

I, I, I absolutely find that. I think the worst thing probably as a society we have data-wise is photos.

Nate Jewett: Oh, 100%. Can you imagine the amount of, the amount of data just in photos at the areas? Oh,

Jason Null: it's probably ridiculous. I've heard, I heard a statement that said that in the last 10 years, We have created more data than if [00:11:00] you took that, say it was 2010, if you measured all the data ever created till 2010, that in 10 years we've created more data than that ever took to get to that point in history.

Understand that's how much data we have and it's just, and exponentially is continuing to grow.

Nate Jewett: People are wanting to go digital. You know, you got people, the legal assistance and paralegals with the scanners on their desks. They're scanning every single document in so they can keep it for a later date.

Austin Doans: Everything increases. Yeah. I think with data management it, it's the same. It is, business use is the same as personal use, so, You know you have anyone with an iPhone, they're gonna fill that iPhone storage up to the top with their pictures and not think about it for one second until it's full, and then they're gonna go get a new iPhone with more storage or true.

Or if you know, maybe, maybe they'll delete some pictures. Yeah. And that's the only time they're gonna think about it. Right. So that's probably most companies as well. You know, that scales all the way up to probably even, [00:12:00] you know, large company corporations. They wanna keep everything as much as they can.

Nate Jewett: Yeah. I hate keeping photos on my phone. Like, I don't want my storage to be full. Yeah. I also, my wife has like, 5,000 photos just sitting on her phone at all times, like, can't do that.

Jason Null: And I think we're getting better at data management. I mean, there are obviously things in place that de do de-duplication.

Mm-hmm. So instead of having, if in a company, if there's a file out there that is the same file in the past, and it was across. Everybody's home directory. So it's say it's the employee handbook and everybody has a copy of it. In the past that was everywhere. There could be 200 employees had it in their fuller.

Today at least, storage is smarter to look at it and say, I have this. Here are the markers. I'm only storing it one time. But it's accessible to you. You don't notice it, right? You think you actually have it. So that's kind of cool. And I think we've gotten better with compression and different ways and files, you know, hopefully saving smaller.

Sometimes I think that these continue to get [00:13:00] bigger, like everything else. I mean, even our operating systems have gotten bigger just to install Windows nowadays is, you know, Twice the size. I, when we're running into issues with iOS on devices that you would think, you know, I'm fine with 16 gigs, you know, iPad when the OS is 13 and won't even install anymore.

Right. So

Austin Ringland: I think that might be something that honestly does like end up pushing people completely to the cloud. Just because like with an iPhone you can just buy Apple data storage. Like that's what I do. Mm-hmm. Like it's just, it's easier. Never have to worry about like Right. I'm running out. Like

Jason Null: it's pretty much only, right, what's two bucks, right?

I battery that, I really don't care. And if you need more, what's two more bucks? And I

Austin Ringland: mean from a company standpoint, it is a a cost point. But like you said, I mean realistically it would be similar because best practice, I mean you're buying a server, you know, once every hopefully three to five years anyways.

So I mean, you're gonna spend that money really regardless.

Jason Null: So I think one thing that I really like about moving data into the cloud is what we can do to manage the [00:14:00] data more so than we could manage the data on premise and. Nine mean managed data from a security standpoint. Yeah. You know, office 365, if you get very technical, you can get into basically locking people out of files.

You have the UN like ability not to copy stuff. You have all kinds of security policies that you can implement to really, truly help protect your data, you know, and if somebody leaves a company, And you have the right tool sets on stuff, you can remove that data from a machine so that they don't have it, which is really cool.

So, you know, if somebody had in the past where we were running on a Windows, you know, 2012 server and you're doing offline replication and you're leaving and you're synchronizing your files, you could have those If you got, you know, somebody fired you, you still have that data today, the moment you connect to any type of internet connection, which you need pretty much to work.

Right. Okay. Your data would be removed? I think so. There's some great policies in place to protect companies and protect their [00:15:00] data and their intellectual property going forward. I think security overall, even just from a two-factor standpoint, I think there's a lot more protection in the cloud if you're enabling conditional access.

Two factor to protect your data going forward.

Austin Ringland: I mean, there's also a lot more protection too, cuz it's, you're not, you're not worrying about like faulty drives or anything like that on You have a

Jason Null: onsite Oh yeah. Server. Yeah. I mean, we think about how many times we've had, you know, a drive go bad and then occasionally even a rate controller freaking out and you have an entire server go down.

Yep. And we're talking, you know, yes, we're running backups. Yes, we're trying to maintain that stuff. But you have to now fix the hardware. Right? And then you now need to restore. And when you've got terabytes of data, restores do not go fast. No, I don't. It doesn't matter if we've got 10 gig connectivity back into the server, it's gonna take some time to get it back.

You know? Which, it's a great point. When you look at cloud, [00:16:00] you know, we're not, we're not dealing with hard drive failures. I mean, we're not Somebody is somebody is somebody at, you know, at one at Microsoft or Google or whatever other places storing data for us. Somebody's managing those. Managing they're, and from that standpoint, they're now managing the volumes for us.

They're managing the data, they're doing type de-duplication for us. They're doing data center replication so that the, the data's available as to if a data center goes down, it's. It's at another hot site and you don't notice those outages.

Austin Doans: Yeah. I mean cloud, cloud storage is, can, is and just simply is expensive.

No, but you're getting a lot. You're getting a lot from that cost. I mean, everything you just said, you get high avail, high availability. You get flexibility and so on and so forth. That's something you would've to pay significantly more for, right. For an online onsite server. I mean, do you want, if you want high availability for your onsite servers, you, you buy [00:17:00] multiple servers so that there's ones they can run your stuff when one dies.

So you go from one server and if you want I availability, like it wouldn't be in the cloud, then maybe you have three servers, three times the cost, right? So it all depends on, obviously depends on the use case for, for the client and what their needs are, but you know, you get, you get, you get what you pay for with cloud.

Jason Null: I think that's a good point. Austin, when I think about that, if I was going to truly build out something that is really redundant, Has all this type of protection in place. So say, you know, I need to have two servers available for one fails, the other one takes over. You know, we can look at like ESX and you know, high availability stuff going on to centralized storage with redundant controllers, redundant power supplies on everything.

Two. Then battery backup units, two generators to multiple internet connections. Redundant firewalls, redundant switches, redundant [00:18:00] uplinks. I mean, you start adding that up. Oh, yeah. And most places don't do that in the first place. Right? Right. I mean, very rarely do we, I mean, obviously larger con partners for us do that stuff, but even to a certain point they stop, right?

Mm-hmm. They may have, but. If you were going to build that out, it's a hundred thousand dollars. Oh, sure. For a small business. Yeah. If

Austin Doans: not more. Then you have a data center and then you know, you could just go with cloud and they already have a data center for you, so, so when

Jason Null: you start thinking about maybe that storage is costing me 500 bucks a month, that actually is not bad.

Yeah. And I don't ever have to upgrade again. Right, right. I just have $500 cost forever, which is fine. It's budgetable. I mean, they may increase rates over time, but I can certainly budget for that. It makes my company way more productive, more pro productive from an overall standpoint. I have much better data protection, I have much better compliance.

And the security is, you know, depending on how you're doing it, you could have top-notch security. Something [00:19:00] you wouldn't have on premise. I mean,

Austin Ringland: even like as far as like a disaster, I mean, even with all that redundancy, your building burns down or you have a flood or whatever else, man, all that

Jason Null: stuff still.

So now we have that hot site, right? So now I take that whole a hundred thousand dollars cost. Now I'm gonna duplicate it, right? Yep. So I'm gonna duplicate it on the other side of the Mississippi in another de center, right? Because I'm trying to get geolocation going, right? I don't want my data located in the same areas.

You know, if I'm in Cincinnati and I am, I've got a backup running here. I want my hot site somewhere else. I want my backup somewhere else too, right? I don't want it the same, you know, a tor, we've seen tornadoes ripped through this area. And hop around and go 30 miles across the place and wipe out a bunch of stuff.

You don't, you know, it could take out all your data. So having that hot site now, it just keeps increasing those costs. That's what you get out of cloud. You get companies that have built these massive data centers. They're replicating for geolocation for you. You've [00:20:00] got all this protection, they have all the fire.

They are bunkers and can take, you know, hurricane level storms coming in and just wiping out everything around them and they're fine. Unless a tomahawk cruise missile hits it, it may not survive. Or an e m P of some kind, but depending on how much cement you have, you might be okay too. So

Nate Jewett: I think if we're getting to that point, we got bigger things to worry about.

We do, we do. I mean, how

Jason Null: much data would count? I always make that joke, like, you know, so people are like, is are we protected? Like if we get hit by atomic bomb, making gonna really matter. So it's, we're good, but you know, at the same time we talk about backups. Right. Today, you know, we are backing up obviously on-premise environments.

But we're also backing up the cloud's. Great. And I think a lot of places fall short thinking, oh, I'm in the cloud. I'm a hundred percent protected. Which there is a lot of protection there, but I think that there, I personally think, still think there's a need for backups. What do you guys think? Do you think we still need to backup to cloud?

[00:21:00] Do we just leave the cloud alone? Do we just let it rain? What? I mean, like you said,

Austin Ringland: it's really just how, how protected the customer wants to be. I mean, the partner wants to be, it's, if it feels, in my opinion, more backups are better. Yeah. I mean that's just how, how I feel about it. But then again, if you're kind of a risk taker and feel like you're stuff safe, then

Jason Null: go for it.

Risk. Taker. There's

Austin Doans: levels, there's levels of, you know, in, in cloud you can get, you know, how, how, how backed up you want to be. You can back up your own stuff that's in the cloud already. You can, you know, it's in a different data center or you know that your current data is, is already replicated across three, two data centers and you can pay for three or four or you know, whatever.

And then you could scale that down to yes, having your own local backups and in case the world implodes. Yeah,

Jason Null: I mean we do obviously reverse cloud backup, so, We have data in the cloud and we're pulling that data down to a local device now. Yep. So that we have it, we can get to our, our, our information.

I think a lot of times with that stuff it's [00:22:00] just, it's just, just that, just in case. Right. I mean, it, it probably is fine, but if somebody goes through and wipes out a bunch of data and then somehow the retention, cause I know like within Office 365, within SharePoint, And even OneDrive, you have a recycled bin in a sense.

So you have retention. You also have the ability, which this is what I really love about cloud. When you talk about the ability to roll back data, right? Mm-hmm. Because of revision. It's I, I and I, oh, I love when I was training people on using OneDrive, this is one of the biggest things I used to point out, because everybody does this.

You open up that Word document and you're gonna reuse it, right? And you forget to save as something else, and you start working on it and you hit save and you realize you just wiped out everything you had in the past. You're gonna have to call up the IT department, submit a ticket. Hopefully they'll go get tapes, restore my file, and I'm good.

Right? Today I can go out [00:23:00] there and say, show me previous version. And right there I have, I think by default, what is it, like 10 retention points

Austin Doans: more than that either. Yeah. It's like

Jason Null: goes back quite a while. Yeah. And you can be like, I can just roll my file back to what it was before. Plus I have the new one, which I love that.

I mean, that's power into the end user that we haven't had. That's the power of cloud. I'm sure that there are ways to do that on-prem, but in every small business I've ever been into from a data standpoint with the servers that they're running and their money, that they're investing in their infrastructures, nobody had that in place.

Until we went to Office 365. I thought that that's just such a game changer. I mean,

Austin Doans: that's a benefit of, I mean, Microsoft did it on purpose, right? They want you to go cloud to pay more money to them, which makes sense, but they're giving you more features as well. So yeah, I, there really isn't a way to do that on prem.

I mean, you can, sure, you can, you can back up a Word document an hour a day, you know,

Jason Null: whatever. Yeah. I mean, we used to run, I was at the product was, I think it was [00:24:00] shadow copies. But it always seemed to be problematic. But with, with what you're

Austin Doans: talking about, it's by default, right? Yeah. I mean, you, you click on the revisions and it tells you the person who made the division, the revision, like every revision, like every word, they changed in the document pretty much.

For months. Yeah. I mean the person, the time it happened, every single change you can go back. So it's like, you know, why did Rhonda go and put this wrong number in this spreadsheet? I mean, it's like, you can, it was Rhonda at this time, and we can go back to that exact time. Oh yeah.

Jason Null: Come on. And I don't think you have to worry about your data quality either in the cloud.

I, I think that it's pretty much, I think they're using such high end systems that the data is intact in the past on-premise, I, I, data quality wasn't too bad of something to worry about, but we were running check disks, running d frags, making sure. Information stores were repaired, and today I don't worry about if my data's having any issues, if there was some kind of hiccup on a drive [00:25:00] somewhere that caused some minor corruption in data.

I I in the cloud, I just, I, I just don't even think about it. I mean, I don't really

Austin Doans: think about it. I mean, I don't, I don't worry about it if it's on-prem or, or cloud for, for our customers anyway. To be honest, we have so many different layers, right. So many different layers of backups that you would, the world would literally have to end before the data's gone.

Right? Unless somebody really made up a huge mistake or something. But I don't really worry about it. I mean, like we, like we have the, the way the data is, is stored. Like if a hard drive fails, it's fine. You know, if maybe two hard drives fail, it's still fine. And if, if all the hard drives failed, if the burning, like we talked about before, if the building catches on fire, if somebody.

Got pissed and went and took the server and threw it down a stair stairwell it, it's fine. You know, it's backed up to a device that's on site. We can take that and restore it. If somebody knows what they're doing and burns the whole building down because they're pissed, then that's fine too. We have it backed up to cloud.

Yep. So we're gonna restore [00:26:00] that. And that cloud is, you know, backed up itself.

Jason Null: You know, many different ways. Well, we can restore it to the cloud, which is cool. Mm-hmm. So if we had an onsite premise mm-hmm. And we went office space on it, like the fax machine took the baseball bats to it, right. And beat it up.

We could restore it into Azure or AWS, depending on whatever product we're using. Which is, which is kind of cool. Again, the biggest problem we have is, It's just how long will it take to come back online? Yeah. Right? Mm-hmm. I mean most, I mean, if you can wait 24 hours, I think even we had a recent large scale outage of a partner.

Mm-hmm. And we had data, we were able to get data back up and very quickly, you know, within a day for some of the bigger pieces. But like a lot of the servers were coming back online instantly because of just the right pieces to restore. Having the ability to run it on a, a temporary device until the primary device is fixed and then, you know, just having fast drives, lots of.[00:27:00]

You know, 10 gig connections helps all that. So it's just a matter of time. And if the, I think that it comes down to communication. If you communicate with the customer, the partner, and let them know expectations that, hey, yes, this is backed up. You're out OnPrem, it's gonna be a little while. I think that they get it.

I mean, it's, it's physics.

Austin Doans: Yeah. It's, it's all scalable to what is, is failing. So like we, like if a hard drives fails, it's as easy as putting in a new hard drive. Mm-hmm. If the whole server's dead, then you know, we've been implementing, we can talk about this as well. A solution like their backup solution itself can start running the environment like instantly, or almost instantly as, as fast as you can take to call us or we find out it's broken.

You know, So it could be as fast as is an instant restore. If something happens you know, if that's not available or something happens to the backup device, then you know, then it would take a little longer. And if that, if that's, if that's the case, then there's [00:28:00] probably, it could be the case that there's something physically wrong with the building, right?

And if the building's burned down, then I think people are maybe gonna be a little more res, receptive to time, the longer time it's gonna take to restore. Hopefully you hope so.

Jason Null: Yes. So some people do have unrealistic expectations, you know, but in case of fire, you're gonna be done a little bit,

Austin Doans: you know?

Right. So it depends on the scenario and I, I think it, it all scales with the scenarios. One,

Jason Null: the nice thing about cloud is I just, it's just, it's just seems to be there. You know, we haven't, I, I, I can't think of any major h hiccups that have happened. Occasionally, one of these vendors will have a minor outage or a platform outage.

It doesn't happen that often, especially today, 10 years ago when it was a younger technology, it happened. I mean, if you're

DIY-IT - Ep07 - Data: thinking

Austin Doans: about the, the pro, the, the solutions and the products and the businesses that we work with, I mean it Microsoft data stores. Like aws, Amazon, Google. I mean, these are, these are companies that if they failed or if they had a large [00:29:00] scale scale failure, then your business wouldn't be the only thing having a problem.

It would be worldwide. Yeah, a worldwide problem. So like the

Jason Null: solar flares we just had, man. Right.

Austin Doans: So you wouldn't, you wouldn't be the, you wouldn't be the only one. So yeah, and, and who knows? I mean, maybe, maybe we would have an unprecedented event like that where a large company would, you know, have a big problem.

But I mean, you know, we, we could have another solution available potentially like that. If we talked about local backups, I mean, that would be a scenario and un. Four foresee scenario that we potentially would've planned for. Yeah,

Jason Null: so I mean, I think that with, if we're backing up, obviously we're backing up SharePoint, OneDrive down to a local device.

If we had to get those back up online locally, we could, yeah. We've gotta get the data presentable to somebody to use. But that mean that's, we're never really looking at that scenario. We're looking at restoring usually a file because somebody deleted it, it hit the recycle bin, hit the [00:30:00] retention point.

And now it's 90 days and they're like, oh, I need that back. And because of the way we do retentions, we can recover the file and get it back up to, you know, there is still a limited time because it is, it comes down to space and retentions. You get what you pay for.

Austin Doans: Yeah. So we have that discussion with our, with our customers.

Jason Null: Correct. If you want data forever, you're gonna, your, your backup costs are gonna increase exponentially every month. Mm-hmm. To supply that type of storage. If you can go two years, One year, whatever. I mean, your, your, your costs go down just because of the retentions. I, I mean, I, I personally like cloud. I think it's changed the way we do business.

I think it's changed, you know, business for small businesses. We talked about the startup in the past episodes for small businesses. They're no longer needing to have meet with an IT firm. And spend thousands of dollars. Amy, with an IT firm like us, tell us what they want and we could have an infrastructure in place and up and running in [00:31:00] hours for them to be able to kick their business off from phones instantly to storage and email all moving forward so that they can.

Now start making money and move to the next level. So

Austin Ringland: yeah, I think it's definitely like a time saver. I mean, for an MSP and for the, for the, for the partner, honestly. I mean, anything that saves us time is really saving them time. Even from like, if you need a new, like if you're VM needs more RAM or. More resources of any kind.

It's literally two clicks for, for Azure, I mean it's in, the downtime is very minimal compared to if you're running a physical server. I mean, hopefully you have extra RAM and resources, but if not, then that's someone had to go out and install that stuff and you know what I mean? So it's. It's really

Jason Null: just a time saver.

I always wonder about your generation, I mean you guys and even, even younger than you as are coming up. These are technicians and young men who have physically never worked on a server, like stuck their hands into dealing with Ray controllers [00:32:00] and stuff like that. It's like as we continue to move like this, That's a, a different, you're now administrate, truly administer storage, security, and the cloud for people versus in the past you were doing that, but at the same time, you're also having to worry about all the physical pieces.

I think it's a nice, it takes away a huge headache for us. You know, we're not having to worry about what that extra piece now, is the building secure? Is the box running? Okay? How do we monitor these hard drives? How do we get these alerts for Ray controllers? What kind of remote card do we need to be able to get into a server?

I don't have to deal with that anymore.

Austin Ringland: Yeah. I mean, it's definitely much more productive from, from our standpoint, if things are in the cloud, in my opinion, for the most part. Especially data and phones, like really anything that can fail. If it's in the cloud and it's secure, then

Jason Null: our build times are so much faster because of that.

Oh yeah. Because, you know, we're not, not now, we're not having to order stuff. We're not having to wait on hard wire. We don't have to go out Yeah. [00:33:00] Implement it. Yeah. Someone else has already done all that, ordered all that. We're just like, boom, I need this much resource. And it's available and having infrastructures, upgrades in place.

I love too that because of cloud, we're not like, so I'll give you this example. Office 365, right? So if I'm a small business and I'm entirely in Office 365, I'm using SharePoint, I'm using OneDrive. Obviously I have email. I may even be using, you know, stream internally for internal YouTube for training and stuff like that.

And all these other products and teams. All this great stuff. I mean, I don't have to worry about anything, you know, I don't have to have any type of hardware anymore. I don't have to have any type of expense like that. I could just be up running. I'm golden. I feel like that's, that's changed

Austin Doans: everything.

We may be having the same conversation in 20 years, but for per personal PCs, Yeah, I mean, [00:34:00] they've already started doing, Microsoft's already started offering, you know, PCs in the cloud that can be built instantly virtual. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I could easily foresee no one having a, an actual hard, like a hardware, computer, laptop anymore in the next 20 years.

They could just be using their phones as a thin client, you know, they, they bring the one device. Everywhere. They use it for everything and they access their work stuff. Every, they just, they, you could plug your device, your phone into a monitor. It would bring up a cloud computer and you don't need anything

Jason Null: else.

Well, here's my question, right? We move into like docker and containers and stuff like that. We're truly moving out of an operating system, right? From that sense needing, do we really need an OS like that? Just make word available to me or whatever. And I think that's Office 365 is doing that for me.

Mm-hmm. I'm now not, oh, I know where I was going earlier. I totally like, That sidetracked was licensing. I don't have to worry about licensing at all anymore. And that's even with the virtual machines? Yeah. I don't have to worry about buying [00:35:00] word anymore cuz it's in my subscription. I don't have to worry about the revision, the version of it.

Am I running word 2013? Am I running Word 2016? I'm running the latest version. Because one, if I even install it, it'll just self update. Right. But majority of the time I just work out of it outta the cloud. And you talk about phones, I mean, I could just get in and start writing Word documents now and I don't even need Sure.

A computer per se. Yep. Right. So yeah, I think that's interesting when you say that. Like how, how are desktops, laptops, whatever we're using, as are. Main interface to the cloud. How is that gonna change over the next 10 years? It's already

Nate Jewett: changing for like, like gamers too. I mean, you can have your cellphone, it's just a, not really a super high powered device.

You plug it into your TV and you can just stream your games and stuff.

Austin Doans: Same concept. It's the same conver, same conversation as having physical games [00:36:00] versus digital games. Right. You know? 10 years ago, Microsoft had a huge debacle on their hands when they released the Xbox One, because they said that they were gonna require their games to be digital and people had a fit.

But today, I mean, that's most of what everyone does. They don't buy physical games anymore. So, I mean, it's just gonna scale to everything else I feel like. I mean, and there there's positives and there's negatives to everything, right? Yeah. So I mean, yes, it's, there's, there's convenience to this clearly, but there's also less sense of an ownership.

So maybe you don't have a physical device in your hands. You don't have the physical, you know, DVD in your hand anymore. It's all in the cloud.

Jason Null: I think music started there, right? Right. I think music was the first probably best example of data going away of owning a song. Right. And now we all have subscriptions into music.

Austin Doans: Right. And no one owns songs anymore. No. Especially when you stream them. Huh? I

Jason Null: have so many MP3s sitting on a server at home of mine. Yeah. That I never listened to, but I spent a lot of time, I [00:37:00] do too. Ripping all my old CDs, even my DVD library and blue you know, Blu-ray disks. I have an entire collection of that, but I don't even buy those anymore.

Mm-hmm. You know, everything I have, I, I can't think of, I, I mean, I do buy movies when I want to keep 'em on my, my, my personal puck server and stuff like that. But majority of the time it's streaming. It's just the convenience. Yeah. I mean, I'm paying for services to stream everything. I'm streaming movies.

Yeah. So from one standpoint, that's good because now I'm reducing my storage needs, right? So I'm not having to continue to add drives and increase my storage. I'm just using somebody else's storage. You don't have to

Austin Doans: have a wall, this whole office of VHS tapes to watch your favorite show anymore either.

So I missed those days, but, you know, and you don't, you don't actually

Jason Null: anything. I mean, I feel like, like for music

Austin Ringland: and, and movies, the cost kind of, I think probably benefited the consumer. I mean, you pay 10 bucks a month for Spotify before, I think iTunes, like an album was like 12

Austin Doans: bucks, dollar 25 song or something.

Yeah.

Jason Null: You buy one album [00:38:00] and that's, that's every album right now available to you per month. And then

Austin Ringland: even with movies, I mean like, you know, the average HPM Max, whatever you want, it's like 10, 15 bucks. I mean, a Blu-ray was like, what? When they first came out, like 30 or 40 bucks. Oh

Jason Null: yeah. Yeah. So you know, if you had HBO Max and Disney Plus, and half the time you're getting Disney plus free with something mm-hmm.

If you're using Verizon or T-Mobile, so you, you know, you may only be paying $30 a month in streaming costs and like you said, that's one Blu-ray. Right, right. So that's one movie where now you have this unlimited library between two or three services. Of every Blu-ray that's probably been out there, or however you wanna look at 4K HDR film, which is kind of cool.

And now again, we're not having to store it. I mean, I think one of the things that we used to run into all the time in the old days was people storing their MP3 s on servers in companies. Mm-hmm. You know, and then they start, well, I mean I, we started blocking the ability to store MP3s on servers cuz [00:39:00] people started dropping their libraries.

They wanted songs at work, you know, nowadays. We're blocking Spotify at work because everybody's streaming Spotify, and so they're using up all the bandwidth because nobody turns on the radio anymore. You know, we're all listening to everything digitally. What is the radio exactly? I dunno what that is.

Sirius XM thing. The commercials, when I turn it on, it is. Okay. Yes. And you had tune it, get the right

Austin Doans: station. They play like the same song like every five minutes. Is that That's

Jason Null: pretty much what? It's pretty, yeah. Okay. Yeah, so I mean, when you start thinking of all the how things have changed everything in our society, Has changed and all of these subscription services in the end have all benefited the small business and how we manage small businesses, how we can take our partners to the next level and run them like enterprises, but for a small footprint, for a small fee.

I

Austin Ringland: mean, I think like the only, like, it's just like anything in, in [00:40:00] it to be honest. Like if you're not into it, you don't, you have to explain to somebody why the cloud, why the cost of the cloud could be beneficial. Like, I mean, you know, you, you get Spotify cuz you see the price difference of. Paying for a album or just paying for Spotify and the convenience, you're like, and then for a consumer you're like, oh, that's no-brainer.

Realistically, sometimes the cloud can be that way too. It's just breaking it down to the partner to understand why it is that way, and that's where Nate comes into play.

Jason Null: And what do you do again, because I can't remember what your title is. I don't know. Here's a

Nate Jewett: few. I'm, I wear all the hats. You wear all the

Austin Doans: hats.

Well, I think the conversation is the biggest. The biggest thing, right? Determining what they need. Yep. Is the

Nate Jewett: largest part what they need, how long they need it for, you know, how much of it they need. Correct. Do

Jason Null: you really need to take every piece of data that your company has ever created mm-hmm. Across the last 50 years?

Do you really need it in SharePoint online, or can you just take the things that you've been using in the [00:41:00] last two years and move it up and somehow. Store that in a, instead of cold, cold storage solution. You know, thinking of like something like Glacier that Amazon had for a long time, products like that, or putting it on, you know, maybe getting rid of the server on site and just using a local NAS as you're like, it's a little bit easier device to manage.

The costs are a lot cheaper and just storing your legacy data there. For now, and then getting your, your teams into a, a more modern solution for managing their data, for having access to their data anytime, anywhere, any place. And then having all the cool benefits that come with that. So that's, and going back

Nate Jewett: to the, you know, talking about the cloud and, you know, the convenience factor also the, the scalability.

Like we talked about, you know, some, we've had instances with some clients where they're like, we're running out of storage. That's when we have to have a [00:42:00] conversation and say, well, we can either buy more hard drives, get more storage, or you're gonna have to remove some data.

Jason Null: We have that with email. Yeah.

I have gotta have every email ever sent to me. Like, okay, there's a fee. Yep. If you're fine, paint it. I don't care. And here you go. You're 50 gigabit mailboxes now. A hundred gigabit. God, I, we were

Austin Doans: talking about cloud and data storage. Isn. The, the biggest benefit I've ever seen is getting rid of exchange.

OnPrem Jesus.

Jason Null: Yeah. Getting rid of exchange on-prem. We've had that conversation. I think several episodes now, how much we all love Microsoft Office 365 or even Google Mail, just not having email on premise because email on premise as good as it was. And how awesome it was, was a nightmare to manage. Maybe in 2000.

Austin Doans: I don't know. Yeah, it's, I can't imagine a life where I'd want

Jason Null: that, but I, I, I got used to being an exchange administrator for years, since Exchange five, five, and [00:43:00] managing information stores over and over again. I didn't go back to Lotus Notes. I mean, you wanna talk about a nightmare. Lotus Notes has an email system.

I can go back to mainframes in running CC mail. That's a nightmare. I'm so

Nate Jewett: glad that I'm not old, like

Jason Null: I can see. So glad I've never seen a green screen in my life. I see the hair coming out this bald

Austin Doans: head.

Jason Null: Yes. Doing email in green screens and on mainframes was a nightmare. So modern day email is so much better.

Yeah,

Austin Doans: that's a solution. I just, there's no benefit like these days to keeping it local anymore. No,

Jason Null: there's nothing. Yeah. Why would you even, why would you even have mail local? It makes no sense. Right? When Google's there, Microsoft is there. I mean, and you look, if you even look at the bigger partners out there, right?

Who used to have email solutions, I'll use one as an example, is GoDaddy. I mean, they used to provide pop services, so you could build your own little email server out there. [00:44:00] They resell Office 365 now. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So when you see major companies who used to have little email servers everywhere, Go to these massive solutions.

It just shows you that nobody wants to deal with it. Let the company that created it, deal with it. They'll run it the best. You know, whether that's Google or Microsoft, I mean those, I can't think of any other email solution really out there. I would want betwe, you see, besides one of those two. Yeah, maybe aol, I mean, oh yeah, for sure.

Austin Doans: Yeah, I mean that's just, that's just one example that makes me think that, I mean, today it is a conversation we still need to have, you know, if you wanna have local versus cloud. But that example is something that makes me think that the next 10, 20 years, that there is not gonna be like, just like that example, I mean, Maybe we're gonna be thinking, why did we want anything to be local, you know, 10, 20 years?

You know, why would we want that now? You know? And maybe it's gonna be the same conversation. I don't know.

Jason Null: Yeah. I mean, cuz in, in 10 [00:45:00] years, in 20 years, if I just kind of think about it, I mean, information should just be available to us anytime. Anywhere. Yeah. I mean, more so than it is today. Like everything you've ever wanted, whether it's a song, a movie, Or every version of a file that I've created at all time, I'll have access to

Nate Jewett: think about how fast we can get to any information that we want right now, too.

Austin Doans: I mean, as infrastructure improves yeah. I mean you're gonna, the, the gap is gonna narrow of the benefit of, of it being either across the, you know, the, the hallway or across the country is gonna, that gap is just gonna continually narrow.

Jason Null: Well, that's cool guys. I appreciate your time and talking about, Our data and how much data we have and some data that we don't even have anymore on site.

So I appreciate it. So our next episode is episode eight, digital Transformation. We ask all of you to join us for that, and if you want to head [00:46:00] over to mis.tech/diy, you can catch up on all the previous. Six, seven episodes we've done, which is crazy to believe we've been talking about it for that many episodes already.

You can find full episodes, clips, additional resources, blogs, guides, checklists out there that go along with all the information we've talked about. Over the last seven episodes now. So follow along on social media, on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and of course, I'm sure nobody in the room has Twitter account anymore.

We've all moved to Mastodon Wright. You guys, I mean, you're supposed to be the young guys. I don't know what Facebook is. That's for old people. Facebook. Yeah. Well, I forgot to mention, you know, last time we talked about our wonderful. Other solution we used for before Facebook. MySpace? Yeah. Mm-hmm. We head over to our MySpace page.

Wow. We were the only ones up there left. No, just kidding. But we know a Adam brought that up. It was kind of funny. Like go out to our MySpace. So [00:47:00] thanks again for coming. Appreciate it. Like, subscribe, follow us.