Graeme Niven, Technical Director, Escape Business Technologies, offers advice to new and growing businesses on how to get the most from an IT system.  Escape is an Aberdeen-based Microsoft Gold Partner IT firm specialising in virtualization, managed IT services and consultancy and IT outsourcing.    

Startup equipment

It is useful to consider your business growth when you start out. Where will you be in a year's time? When you have several staff, it helps users and IT support people dramatically if you have the same equipment and software on each desk and each computer. We recommend that you buy computers from a major manufacturer such as Hewlett Packard or IBM with a full 3 year warranty from the manufacturer. This gives you the peace of mind that if any hardware breaks it will be fixed quickly as part of your cover. 

Security

Each machine must have anti virus software running on it and be set to update its anti-virus software on a daily basis as new threats come out all the time. 

We recommend that you don’t open any email attachments or web links within emails that you are unsure about. If you didn’t expect an email from Paypal or a bank, for example, then don’t open the attachments on the email or click on any of the web links it may request you to. If the email is legitimate and urgent then they will resend it if you haven’t responded. Similarly, be wary of unknown websites as these can contain malicious code that can harm your computer. Good antivirus software such as Trend Micro or AVG antivirus will protect your computer against many forms of harmful software but it is still important to be vigilant. 

Recovery from software crashes

Keep all your software disks. The disks that come with your computers are specific to that model and obtaining this software 2 or 3 years later can be very difficult. If you keep all the manufacturers disks for your computers somewhere safe it makes recovery in the event of a failure much quicker, much easier and hence much cheaper. 

Resilience and backup

We recommend that you buy a backup system. This can be as simple as a USB drive that plugs in to your computer and that you just copy information to periodically or can be a complex tape or internet based system such as Nimbus DR (Disaster Recovery).  Systems such as Nimbus allows data to be protected continually using the internet to connect to your computers with a back up system.  This is a virtually maintenance and worry free set up with minimal input from staff so can be appealing to business owners that have to focus on other areas of the company but still want the security of knowing the data is safe.

If you do use tapes or a USB drive, be sure to take it away from the office in case the worst happens to your computers there. We recommend taking your backup away from the office on a daily basis.

Legitimate software

It is essential that you buy legal software and retain the disks and license keys for it. It means you are much less likely to have severe crashes and makes recovery in the event of failure much easier. You will also qualify for any updates and optional product upgrades in the future.  

Whatever size your business is your IT system is an essential part and can be an important investment in the long term growth and success of the company.