The SMB - Symanteceval.symantec.com/mktginfo/enterprise/articles/b-confident_smb... · Source:...

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Redeeming the Past at TDXNet, LLC

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Confidence in a connected world.January/February 2010

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IT As Your Business EnablerSMBSMBIT As Your Business Enabler

ConfidentConfidentTheThe

Securing Growth: Protecting Business

Win Big with Windows 7

Jeffery Smith, CIOFull Court Press

Golden Temple of Oregon

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Confidence in a connected world.

ContentsçPartner Customer Case Study

Redeeming the PastIn one of the harshest and most remote places on earth, St. Paul Is-land in the Alaskan Pribilofs, TDXNet, with the help of Symantec Partner Advanced Internet Security, is forging paths of IT innovation and value for Aleuts who reside there.By Mark L.S. Mullins

>17 Features

Securing GrowthSmall in size yet big in influence, SMBs have used the Internet to extend market reach and build fruitful partnerships. But the IT tools that propel growth and busi-ness value can also leave them more vulnerable to risks beyond their four walls.By Dee V. Sharma

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Win 7, Win BigRather than viewing the move to Windows 7 as a challenge, many SMBs consider it an opportunity. And the ability to automate the processes around the upgrade is critical.

By Alan Drummer

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Full Court PressCIO Jeffery Smith is leading a full court press at Golden Temple of Oregon, one that is enabling the company to grow its business while deliver-ing substantial operational efficiencies.

By Patrick E. Spencer

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Business PerspectivesRun Your Business with ConfidenceThoughts and Analysis from Carine Clark

>3ThinkTankFollow news, technology trends, and upcoming events. Also check out the latest webcasts, blogs, success stories, special offers, and more from Symantec.

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In Every Issue

Cover Story

EDIToRIAl TEAM

Publisher and Editor in Chief Patrick E. Spencer, PhDManaging Editors Brian Heckert, Mark L.S. Mullins, Dee V. Sharma, Donna Tarlton, Courtenay Troxel Design Director Joy Jacob Contributing Writers Alan Drummer Mark L.S. Mullins Dee V. Sharma Patrick E. Spencer Web Producer Laurel BresazPodcast Producer Jon Eyre

SYMAnTEC MARkETInG Chief Marketing officer Carine ClarkVice President James Rose

Subscription Information Online subscriptions are free to individuals who complete a subscription form at http://go.symantec.com/theconfidentsmb- subscribe. For change of email address, please send an email to [email protected].

Privacy Policy Symantec allows sharing of our mail list in accordance with our corporate privacy policies and applicable laws. Please visit www.symantec.com/about/profile/policies/privacy.jsp or write us at [email protected].

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Business Perspectives

Welcome to the first issue of The Confident SMB. Small and midsize businesses are the driv-

ing force that can help turn around the economic downturn. Unfortunately, many SMBs are so caught up in handling their day-to-day responsibilities that they often times don’t have time to address best

practices that can make all the difference in grow-ing company revenues, expanding geographically, increasing revenue from existing customers, and managing cash flow better.

Consider this: In a recent study of SMBs, 59 percent of respondents admitted they have no endpoint protection, 47 percent do not back up their desktop PCs, and 33 percent lack even the most basic antivirus protection. In other words, many SMBs are at risk of losing or compromising critical business information. You simply can’t afford to compromise your business information.

Now more than ever, employee efficiency and managing costs are critical if your revenues are going to continue to grow—or even remain

stable. These days, even the smallest busi-nesses are leveraging technology to maximize employee efficiency and control costs. Smart business owners recognize that IT not only helps to improve customer experience, it en-hances nearly everything they do as a business.

And while no one can guarantee higher revenues, Symantec is here to support you to become more productive and efficient, and to help you get the most out of your IT invest-ment. So whether you’re concerned about the complexities of introducing new technologies, inadequate disaster recovery capabilities, insufficient storage capacity, or operational inefficiencies, Symantec can help you secure and manage your information-driven world.

Go ahead, run your business with confidence. We’re here to help you to do it better with Symantec software and services.

Run Your Business with Confidence

Thoughts and Analysis from Carine Clark

Regards,

Carine S. ClarkChief Marketing Officer, Symantec

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VideoCarine discusses core challenges faced by SMBs today.

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SMBs are holding on to their servers and laptops longer

these days, according to a new survey by Spiceworks, Inc. But most are also planning to invest in new hardware and software over the next six months. The study, which covered over 1,000 IT profession-als, finds that even as 68 percent of SMBs are plan-ning hardware purchases, they are squeezing an extra year out of their hardware. The average planned lifespan of hardware—desk-tops, laptops, and servers—increased 26 percent, to 50 months. Nonetheless, hardware remains the biggest ticket item with SMBs expecting to spend 37 percent of annual budgets refreshing and expanding their physical infra-structure.

New software purchases are also on the horizon, with 51 percent of SMBs budgeting for it. Security and antispam solu-tions top the list, with 32 percent of SMBs plan-ning such pur-chases within the next six months. Cloud comput-ing is a growing trend, with 57

percent currently using one or more cloud computing services. Virtualization solu-tions are also gaining momentum—44 percent of SMBs are currently using these and 30 percent plan to deploy or expand virtualization in their networks.

The most reassuring news: IT hiring among SMBs is poised to grow. While

SMBBEATSymantec Support for Microsoft ApplicationsSymantec backup and archiv-ing software solutions will now support Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and other Microsoft applications. These enhancements round off the company’s comprehen-sive information management portfolio.

The new features include direct drag-and-drop access to Symantec Enterprise Vault archives from Outlook; as a result, users no longer have to rely on “shortcut” links from their mailbox. This is now available for previous versions of Exchange and is scheduled to be available for Exchange 2010 early next year. Available now, Syman-tec Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 provides sys-tem backup and restore for Microsoft Exchange 2010.

During the next several months, Symantec is scheduled to deliver updated versions of NetBackup, Backup Exec, and Enterprise Vault, which can help

SMB Technology Spending Inches Back, Spurs New Hiring

The Road to Recovery

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SMBBEAT

to reduce storage by deduplicating in-formation stored in Microsoft Exchange 2010, as well as other applications such as Microsoft SharePoint and Windows Server 2008 R2. For more information, click here.

Symantec Partner Awards 2009Symantec announced the 2009 North American Partner Award winners at Symantec Partner Engage 2009, held at the JW Marriott in Orlando, Florida from November 4–6. The Symantec Partner Awards recognize partners who successfully combine Symantec software with their own services to solve customers’ most complex busi-ness challenges. The winners of the 2009 awards were Allen Informàtica, CDW, Forsythe Solutions Group, GTSI, Ingram Micro Canada, Lanworks Inc., Precision Computer Service, and SHI.

At the event, Symantec also rein-forced its commitment to help part-ners succeed and unveiled a variety of new resources. These include:

> SymDemo—an online tool that allows partners to demonstrate Symantec’s products anywhere, anytime

> Enhanced Enterprise Authorized Renewals Program—a revised enter-prise renewals program to help protect partners’ investment with increased

margins and current protection

> Enterprise Security Specializa-tion—a specialization certification that enables qualified partners to receive advanced tools and incen-tives for selling Symantec Enterprise Security Solutions

> Partner Community on Symantec Connect—an online go-to resource for partners and customers

For more information on these resources, click here. norton Cyber Safe ChallengeTo encourage parents to be more in-volved in their children’s online lives, Symantec held the Norton Cyber Safe Challenge on October 1. With school back in full swing, kids are exploring new activities—both online and off. And with each new grade level they’re not just getting older, they’re getting more computer-savvy. Yet, while parents are concerned their kids will come across Internet dangers, they’re not talking to them about appropriate online behavior.

The challenge gave schools across the country the opportunity to win cash awards totaling $35,000. More than 500 schools participated in the free challenge, and for families that took part Norton offered unlimited

Trends in SMB IT Spend

many are holding IT staff sizes steady, 22 percent plan to hire additional full-time or part-time staff, and only three percent plan to further reduce staff over the next six months.

For more information, check out Spiceworks’ survey. n

26% increase in hardware life to 50 months

51% plan new software purchases

44% use virtualization with more planned in the future

25% plan backup and recovery purchases

68% plan to buy new hardware

57% use some sort of cloud services

Continued from previous page

Continued on next page *Source: “State of SMB IT Report,” Spiceworks, August 2008.

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SMBBEAT

free access to OnlineFamily.Norton.

Cyber Crime Surpasses Illegal Drug Trafficking as a Criminal MoneymakerA crime is committed on the streets of New York City every three and a half min-utes. A crime is committed on the streets of Tokyo every two and a half minutes. But identity is stolen online every three seconds—that’s nearly 10,512,000 identities each year. Cyber crime is more profitable, provides more anonymity, and can be more difficult to prosecute than off line crimes. To arm Internet users with the information they need to stay protected, Symantec has launched the Norton Online Risk Calcu-lator. An easy-to-use, free tool to evaluate risk, it helps users estimate how much their personal data would be worth to criminals in the cyber underworld. For more information, click here.

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong—especially if you’re smaller and more vulnerable! That’s the lesson small businesses can take away from a recent market report on Small Business Data Protection Basics

by the Enterprise Strategy Group.1 The threat spectrum is wide—from cata-strophic natural disas-ters, power outages, or even acts of terrorism to more frequent, mun-dane nuisances such as accidents, errors, com-puter failure, burglary, and computer viruses. Yet, smaller companies have little cushion to ride out a prolonged shutdown due to these threats. Often, such security breaches could lead to lost revenue, ad-verse effect on customer

service, downstream impact on suppliers and partners, and even damage to the company’s reputation—not to mention legal liability.

Do You Have a Plan B?Disaster Preparedness Isn’t Something You Can Put Off Until Later


None Less than 1-4 5-12 13-24 More than 1 hour Hours Hours Hours 24 Hours

Small businesses (less than 100 employees), N=64

2%6%

47%

27%

9% 9%

1 Lauren Whitehouse, “Small Business Data Protection Basics: What Small Business Owners Need to Know to Ensure Business Continuity,” Enterprise Strategy Group, November 2009.

For your most critical applications, how much application downtime can your organization tolerate before you experience significant revenue loss or other adverse business impact?

50%

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Three new Business Value Analysis Market Research Reports produced by The

Alchemy Solutions Group high-light interesting trends in the decision-making and evaluation process for investments in key IT areas—backup and recovery, endpoint security, and archiving and e-discovery.

The need to contain labor costs and boost employee pro-ductivity was cited by more than 30 percent of respon-dents as a key factor for planned future purchases of backup-and-recovery solutions. Among SMBs (less than 500 employees) this rises to 46 percent, perhaps indicating a smaller firm’s greater urgency to make the most of its limited resources.

Limiting IT risk exposure is also the most significant issue for SMBs investing in endpoint security. The end-point security study found that firms tend to standard-ize endpoint security solutions on a common platform, component by component. For instance, antivirus and antispyware software are standardized much faster than others. However, SMBs are significantly less likely than

large enterprises to standard-ize device control and intru-sion prevention on the same infrastructure; it’s simply a less critical issue for smaller organi-zations.

Surprisingly, the report on archiving and e-discovery found that SMBs do a slightly bet-ter job than their larger coun-terparts in providing their IT groups with validation resourc-

es to evaluate results. Addressing the growth of data storage, the report finds that growth in stored Microsoft SharePoint Server data is slowest among SMBs, with 75 percent of those respondents indicating SharePoint Server data growth of 20 percent or less.

The reports draw on data gathered by worldwide Symantec surveys and Business Value Analysis studies produced by The Alchemy Solutions Group.

Check out the three Business Value Analysis Market Research Reports at the following:

go.symantec.com/bvamrr-endpointgo.symantec.com/bvamrr-backupgo.symantec.com/bvamrr-archive

The Business Case for IT InvestmentsResearch Presents Compelling Reasons for New Investments in IT Security and Data Retention Technologies

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WEBCASTSSmall Business Backup and Recovery Basics: Are You Pre-pared for Downtime or Disaster?What you need to know to protect your data and systems

Why Breaches Happen… And What to Do About It?Learn the causes of data breaches and find out what industry-leading security teams are doing to safe-guard their organizations

Why Hosted Security Services Makes Budget and Security Sense in Today’s Economy Why more midmarket organizations are considering Hosted Security in today’s business climate

Can You Afford an Email Outage? Best Practices to Ensure 100% UptimeThe causes of email downtime and how implementing a hosted email continuity service can help ensure 100% uptime

oFFERSSymantec Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 Small Business Server Edition TrialwareSimple, cost-effective backup-and-recovery solution for Microsoft Windows Servers

3-for-2 Endpoint Security Offering Get a three-year maintenance license for the price of two

Crop Quest

Technology solutions yield

bountiful harvest

GPD Group

Storage savings drive

down costs

Direct Agents

Endpoint protection delivers

first line of defense

Sunnyland Furniture

Casual furnishings kicks

security into high gear

McVey and Murricane

Guilty of achieving security

and data protection ambitions

Colorado Capital Bank

Banks on Symantec solutions to

secure and protect its data

SUCCESS in ACTIon

“Now, which one did the IT manager tell me NOT to unplug?”

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VideoAn easy to use, all-in-one suite to protect your critical business assets. “Symantec Protection Suite Small Business Edition White Board.”

Calculate the cost of a system outage to your business.“Risk Calculator.”

Video

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EVEnTSRSA Conference 2010Gain fresh insights, explore innovations, and be ready to meet the security challenges ahead.Moscone Center, San Francisco, CAMarch 1–5, 2010

GRoWCo 2010Lessons learned from founders and CEOs of fast- growing companies, icons in the business community, and expert authors.JW Marriott Orlando, Grande Lakes, Orlando, FLMarch 14–16, 2010

Symantec Vision 2010 las VegasKnowledge, insights, and inspiration you need to take control of your IT world.MGM Grand Hotel, Las Vegas, NVApril 12–15, 2010

Symantec Security-As-A-ServiceFree half-day seminar on what to consider when outsourcing your email security. Hyatt Regency O’Hare, Chicago, IL February 16, 2010 Sheraton Needham Hotel, Boston, MA February 18, 2010 Hilton Suites – Markham Conference Centre and Spa, Toronto, ONFebruary 23, 2010 The Magnolia Houston, Houston, TXFebruary 25, 2010

Click Here for more event information.

Find a ResellerFind the perfect partner to help you manage your IT needs

Business StoreVisit our Business Store to find solutions to protect and manage your business

Trialware DownloadsTrial version of Symantec products are available for download

Symantec elibrary: A Subscription for SuccessOne-year subscription gives you access to hundreds of Symantec training modules

Chat with a Sales Specialist nowSecurity made simple. Chat directly with a specialist now

license Renewal CenterGet continued protection for your product today

PodcastsFor people on the go, pod-casts deliver news, product information, and strategies you can use

Customer SuccessSee how other SMBs succeed with the help of Symantec

Hosted ServicesSecure and manage your information using the power of cloud computing

Education ServicesMaximize your IT invest-ment with a skilled, educated workforce

Symantec ConnectA technical community to help your IT team keep your systems up and running

RESoURCESVisit us online at Small Business Solutions and Midsize Business Solutions and take advantage of a world of resources to help you have confidence in your connected world. The Confident SMB Blog

Get insights and highlights of new content, and interact with The Confident SMB team. Symantec Facebook Page Readers with Facebook accounts can connect and share ideas with Symantec while also receiving notifi-cation of each new issue. Become a fan today. Twitter Tweeting on everything from new The Confident SMB articles, research reports, podcasts, webcasts, custom-er successes, and more, the Symantec Publishing Twitter keeps Symantec customers and partners up to date. Start following the tweets today.

Linkedln Exchange tips and strate-gies with peers by joining The Confident SMB group on LinkedIn.com.

SoCIAl MEDIA

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Cover StoryGolden Temple of Oregon

By Patrick E. Spencer Full Court PressIT Enables Golden Temple of Oregon to “Feel Good, Be Good, and Do Good”

usinesses often begin in the most unusual ways. Take Golden Temple of Oregon, LLC for example.

It started in austere surround-ings—a bakery in a garage—and extraordinary circumstances—a group of Sikh believers living in an ashram in Eugene, Oregon—in 1972. Then, in the following year, when some friends of the Golden Temple founders decided they no longer wanted to continue their granola business, the company bought it for $50. That product is now the top-selling granola in the country, with over two dozen flavors that command more than 60 percent of the bulk granola market.

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Careers also often begin in un-usual ways. Jeffery Smith was a highly sought-after collegiate basketball prospect coming out of high school in the early 1990s. He initially planned to attend an out-of-state college but elected to remain in Oregon instead. When a friend introduced him to the head basketball coach at Western Oregon University, he found the college at which he wanted to play and study. When a chance for some part-time IT work at a local healthcare facility arose, he jumped at the opportunity, as administration of a healthcare facility had been a long-time interest. And with those seemingly inconsequential deci-sions, his career in IT was launched.

Both Golden Temple and Smith have done very well following their respective company and career launches. And since their two paths joined three years ago, the pace has become a “full court press.”

Right CIo mixture and blendFollowing a reorganization in the late 1980s, Golden Temple has experienced

rapid business growth, expanding from 50 employees to more than 440 em-ployees today—with locations in North America and Europe. This growth was fueled by mature, profitable product lines, including top-selling bulk grano-la (Golden Granola), the number four brand in the highly competitive natural foods cereal category (Peace Cereal), and the number one ranked natural tea in the U.S. and Europe (Yogi Tea).

IT systems did not mature with the expansion in business, however. As a result, in 2006, the executive management team embarked on a search to recruit a CIO who could help transform IT from a cost-service center to a business enabler. Having spent six years overseeing IT for Kettle Foods, Inc., in addition to managing the transition of data center operations for the State of Oregon, Smith had the right mix of experience to take on the challenge. Specifically, at Kettle Foods, he had implemented a

next-generation ERP system and stan-dardized IT systems to enable rapid business growth. He had also overseen the deployment of two ERP solutions and other business applications at Salem Hospital.

Smith discovered there was much to do upon his arrival. “We had very

Founded: 1972Employees: 440 (340 in the United States and 100 in Europe)Brands: Yogi Tea, Yogi Cereal, Peace Cereal, Golden Granola (bulk granola), and Sweet Home Farm (natural granola) Products: Over 60 unique, organic, herbal teas; 22 natural cereals and cereal crisps grown and processed without GMOs; bulk and natural granola Facilities: 130,000 square-foot cereal plant and 35,000 square-foot tea plant, located in Eugene, Oregon and Springfield, Oregon respectively IT Team: 8 (6 in U.S. and 3 in Europe)Website: www.goldentemple.com

A Unique Recipe: Golden Temple

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small systems that ‘didn’t play well together’ and a lot of ad hoc reporting,” he remembers. “IT was seen as simply a service group, and there was little inte-gration between IT and the business.” A member of the executive management team, Smith was given the mandate to architect and build a next-generation IT program. “We sought business process improvements through the use of tech-nology,” he says, “initiatives that would not only aid the business in its revenue growth path but help it gain greater operational efficiencies.”

Standardization recipeAs a starting point, Smith instituted ser-vice level agreements (SLAs) with the business owners—finance, manufac-turing, sales, and marketing—based on the Information Technology Infra-structure Library (ITIL) standards. Concurrently, after assessing the existing infrastructure and applica-tions, Smith identified two strategic initiatives that would align IT with the business.

Brand Origins: The Harmandir Sahib

Jeffery Smith discusses the IT trans-formation at Golden Temple in an SMB Customer Spotlight Podcast.

Podcast

Golden Temple of Oregon was founded in 1972 by a group of Sikh believers who baked their own bread in a secondhand pizza oven located in a Eugene,

Oregon garage. When it came to naming the company, the group didn’t need to look very far; they turned to the name of their holiest shrine, the Harmandir Sahib, informally known as the Golden Temple or Temple of God.

Located in the city of Amritsar in the historic region of Majha in northwestern India and surrounded by a manmade lake, construction on the Golden Temple began in 1585 and was completed in 1604. With doors on each of its four sides to symbolize open-ness and acceptance, the Golden Temple was intended as a place of worship for men and women from all walks of life and religions.

The first involved selecting and imple-menting an ERP system—not just for

finance functions but for manufactur-ing and distribution as well. Smith and his team issued an RFP and looked at several different solutions, eventu-ally selecting Oracle E-Business Suite. Wanting to remain focused on IT strat-egy and building synergies with the business, Smith also decided to out-source the hosting and management of the ERP environment to Oracle Partner

OneNeck IT Services Corporation.The second core initiative looked

at standardizing toolsets across the IT infrastructure—encompassing everything from clients, to data cen-ter servers and storage systems, to applications, to security, to backup-and-recovery processes. “Our meth-odological approach around standard-

ization was really twofold,” Smith says. “The starting point was to look at the requirements of the business, where it is headed, what are the pain points, and the value sources to the business. The second is total cost of ownership and ways to reduce complexity.”

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Virtualized data protectionAs part of the standardization ap-proach in the data center, Smith and his team elected to move to a virtual-ized server environment using VM-ware ESXi. “We had around 20 servers scattered across four different racks,” Smith remembers. “We needed to

reduce our data center footprint and energy consumption while freeing up IT resources managing those ‘extra’ systems.” With the new virtualized data center architecture, Smith was able to consolidate the server footprint down to just one domain while going from four racks to two racks.

Symantec Backup Exec was initially deployed at Golden Temple in 2004. Regular updates being the rule, Golden Temple currently uses the latest ver-sion of Backup Exec. However, with the

migration to a virtualized environ-ment, the team initially tried VM-ware’s Virtual Consolidated Backup, and a full backup took nearly 24 hours to finish, a task the team could complete only once a week. Wanting to cut their backup win-dows while conducting a full daily

backup, Smith and his team added the Backup Exec Agent for VMware Virtual Infrastructure, slashing backup windows to 12 hours. And since Backup Exec allows incremen-tal backups, they can maintain full backups on a daily basis.

While the data store at Golden Temple has grown over 200 percent to more than three terabytes since Smith arrived, Backup Exec has scaled to support this increase in volume. Remaining physical servers are backed

up every Friday night, with incremental backups every day, to a Dell TL2000 tape library. Virtual servers are backed up nightly to the same tape library. The Golden Temple team leverages a num-ber of different agents and options in Backup Exec to protect data across

“We sought business process improve-ments through the use of technology.”

– Jeffery Smith, CIO, Golden Temple of Oregon, LLC

Jeffery Smith, CIO, Golden Temple of Oregon, LLC

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Golden Temple adheres to a motto: “Feel good, be good, do good.” Just as its name-

sake, Golden Temple is focused on doing good in the world. It is a major

contributor to the food banks in the Oregon community and launched a campaign in 2008 that brought to-gether 25 different companies that in-

creased the food supplies of FOOD for Lane County, Oregon, by 25 percent—equating to 33,000 meals.

Golden Temple alone has donated 30 tons of cereal to FOOD for Lane County, Oregon, over the past several years and, in 2009, donated more than 1.5 million servings of cereal to differ-ent food banks in Oregon. In addition, 10 percent of the profits from the company’s Peace Cereal product line are dedicated to organizations work-ing for peace, from helping homeless teens, to forging positive relationships among rival groups in the United States, Ireland, South Africa, India, and the Middle East.

“Feel Good, Be Good, Do Good”

the network—from Microsoft Active Directory, to Microsoft SQL Server, to Microsoft SharePoint Server. They’ve also found the granular restore fea-ture in Backup Exec particularly useful. “We’re able to restore files in 15 minutes, compared to two hours before,” he notes.

Extending endpoint securityGolden Temple has relied on Symantec for endpoint security for a number of years and upgraded to Symantec Endpoint Protection last year in order to leverage its expanded functional-ity. Smith and his team currently have the antivirus, antispyware, firewall, device control, and intrusion pre-vention functions deployed and are looking at adding application control and extending device control across a broader segment of the organization in the future.

With Endpoint Protection, the team has a consolidated endpoint security solution across clients and data center servers—both physi-cal and virtual. “Having everything involving endpoint security wrapped

into one console is a big plus,” Smith says. “We’re able to leverage a breadth of functionality without investing time and budget in training on different toolsets. Its support for VMware [ESX] was also important, as we were able to move to a virtualized environment without worrying about the underlying endpoint security engine.”

notes, Exchange, and Enterprise VaultBefore Smith’s arrival, Golden Temple relied on Lotus Notes for file shar-ing, email, and other ad hoc business functions. However, it wasn’t meeting business requirements, and Smith decided to migrate those applications over to other best-of-breed solutions. For email, he and his team standardized on Microsoft Exchange. In the process of outsourcing the hosting and manage-ment of Oracle E-Business Suite and seeing the potential benefits of simulta-neously outsourcing another business application to OneNeck, Smith simply added Exchange to the contract.

Once the migration from Notes to Exchange was complete, Smith

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found that the data store on the Ex-change server was growing at a pace that would require additional serv-ers and storage arrays. To offset this growth, the Golden Temple team was presented with a couple of options. The first was to upgrade from Micro-soft Exchange Standard Server to the Enterprise version. The hard costs exceeded $6,000, however, and this didn’t even account for the potential of system downtime and resulting lost employee productivity.

At the same time, the need to retain emails and produce them for litigation prompted Smith to look at a second option, one that would enable intelli-gent archiving and e-discovery. While Smith and his team looked at several different solutions as part of an RFP process, they ultimately settled on Sy-mantec Enterprise Vault. There were several reasons for this:

> Mobile employees who needed to access archived email when offline

> Retention and ingestion of PersonalFolders (PST) into the email archive

> Deduplication of the email data storeusing single-instance archiving anddata compression

“It was a seamless migration that was transparent to end users,” Smith recalls. “Using Enterprise Vault PST Migrator, we were able to take remaining personal folders in Notes and move them over to the Exchange environment.” The team also avoided additional server costs by deploying Enterprise Vault onto their virtualized server environment.

With an Exchange data store at 75 gigabytes, single-instance archiving and data compression technologies in Enterprise Vault slashed it by 40 percent to 30 gigabytes. And the deduplication benefits will continue

as email data grows at a clip of 43 percent annually.

new areas of focusFor 2010, Smith cites three areas of focus. The first pertains to Golden Temple’s operations in Europe. “Inte-gration of our global operations is important,” Smith explains. “Making sure the standards we’ve established in the U.S. are extended to Europe will continue to be a priority.” This includes working to ensure that the full value of Oracle E-Business Suite is realized across all of the company’s operations.

The second focus is driven by the current economic environment. “We want to find ways to leverage our exist-ing assets without incurring additional costs,” he says. “And making sure we are using all of the tools we have in

VideoJeffery Smith talks about how he is using Symantec solutions to drive business value.

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“Small and midsize businesses have unique IT challenges.”


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place to their fullest potential is impor-tant.” Outsourcing additional IT func-tions or even moving some of them into the cloud are possible options for Smith. “Both of these are attractive for several reasons—from lower TCO, to greater agility and flexibility, to broader geographical reach,” he says.

The final focus is at the very heart of the transformation Smith began three years ago. “Bridging the gaps between IT and the business remains the lens through which we view all of our activities,” he says. “My ap-proach has always been to listen to the challenges and requirements of the business and not simply offer up a set of IT projects. This gives me greater insight into the business and the particular business segment with which I am engaged with at that mo-ment. IT is really no longer simply IT,

but what I call information business systems.”

A good offense beats allSmall and midsize businesses have unique IT challenges according to Smith. “You simply don’t have the leeway for decisions that are mis-guided and IT projects that go awry,” he relates. “Decisions and errors are magnified. As a result, it is extremely important to make sure IT priorities are aligned with the business.”

Smith uses a basketball analogy to describe his approach. “A really strong offense almost always beats a good defense,” he relates. “Likewise, successful IT strategies are forward-thinking and do not wait for the busi-ness to come to them. This includes identifying emerging technologies that drive significant business value.”

The initial founders of Golden Temple established a corporate motto—“feel good, be good, do good”—that has been a guiding principle for the company over the years. It is much more than words; it is truly an embodiment of what the company does.

Until recently, IT has largely not played a pivotal role in helping the company to enact this vision. Howev-er, with the full court press Smith and his team is executing, IT has become a key enabler of this vision, a role that most assuredly will expand further in the future. n

Patrick E. Spencer (Ph.D.) is the editor in chief for the The Confident SMB and CIO Digest and the author of a book and various articles and reviews published by Continuum Books and Sage Publications, among others.

n Symantec Backup Execn Agents include Microsoft Active

Directory, Microsoft SQL Server, VMwareVirtual Infrastructure, Microsoft Share-Point, Enterprise Vault

n Options include Advanced Disk-BasedBackup, Advanced Open File

n Symantec Endpoint Protectionn Symantec Enterprise Vault

n Microsoft Exchange Archiving n Microsoft Exchange PST Migrator

“Bridging the gaps between IT and the business remains the lens through which we view all of our activities.”


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Partner Customer Case StudyTDXNet

One of the harshest and most re-mote places on earth, the Pribilof Islands lie in the Bering Sea, 200

miles north of the Aleutian Islands and 750 air miles west of Anchorage, Alaska. The four small islands serve as a summer breeding ground for northern fur seals and other sea mammals, as well as doz-ens of species of birds.

Today, about 500 descendants of Aleut slaves who harvested seals for the fur trade live on St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs. When the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act became law in 1971, Tanadgusix Corporation (TDX) was formed to provide economic well being for the village.

Expanding commerce beyond the villageTanadgusix means “our land” in the Aleut language, and the first order of business for TDX was to bring basic ser-vices to its own community. “Being a remote village in the middle of nowhere, we had to develop our own services, as large corporations didn’t want to come here,” explains Ron Philemonoff, TDX’s chairman and CEO. “Later, we used the experience we gained to expand our businesses beyond St. Paul.”

For example, electricity previously cost an exorbitant 45 cents a kilowatt hour on the island. “We recognized that we have some of the best winds in the world, so we developed our own wind farm,” Phile-monoff quips. “Now, TDX Power develops energy projects across the country.”

Similarly, nature-loving tourists to St. Paul initially got TDX into the hospitality business, and the firm now has hotels in Anchorage and the Pa-cific Northwest. TDX began doing en-vironmental cleanup when petroleum products left by the U.S. military were found to be seeping into St. Paul’s

Redeeming the PastTechnology Drives Commerce for a Resourceful People

By Mark L.S. Mullins

The Aleut village on St. Paul Island, Alaska

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water table; this resulted in the formation of Bering Sea Eccotech, which now provides environmental services nationwide.

And the history of TDXNet, the company’s IT services subsidiary, can be traced back to TDX’s efforts to bring telephone, cable TV, and Inter-net services to St. Paul in the 1990s.

Rebuilding IT from scratchTDXNet itself is a relatively new sub-sidiary, having spun off from the par-ent company six years ago. When TDX veteran and board member Julie Shane was named president of TDXNet in 2007, she assumed charge of a compa-ny that was still struggling to get off the ground. “Even the other subsidiaries of TDX were not using our IT services,” Shane recalls, “because the infrastruc-ture just wasn’t there yet.”

There was no standardization across the subsidiaries of TDX, or even within them. “Every group had a different email system—EarthLink, AOL, you name it,” Shane relates. “With hardware, each purchase was whatever was cheapest at the time.

And antivirus was whatever came with each machine.

“In the two-plus years I’ve been here,” Shane continues, “we’ve standardized every-

thing. Employees at each of our sub-sidiaries now use a common email system. Our hardware is now stan-dardized. We now provide a high level of security; in fact, we have some subsidiaries that are doing top secret

government work in other parts of the country, and we’re still able to take care of them. And our data is backed up dependably.”

The first challenge presented to Shane was to provide IT security for TDX Power, which needed to meet the strict requirements of a new job as subcon-tractor to a major aeronautics company on a project at Fort Greely, Alaska.

“We got rid of the hodgepodge of servers at our corporate office, bought brand new ones from HP, and brought enough capacity online to eventually connect all of the TDX subsidiaries to one system,” Shane explains. “I wasn’t even worried

Members of the leadership team of TDXNet, LLC, left to right:

Julie Shane, President; Steve Vandagriff, Director of Enterprise Operations; and

Ron Philemonoff, Chairman and CEO of parent company Tanadgusix Corporation.

Founded: 1971 under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement ActKey Business Activities: Wind energy development, environmental services, hospitality, ecotourism, telecommunications, and IT servicesHeadquarters: St. Paul Island and Anchorage, AlaskaLocations: 10Employees: 320 for Tanadgusix Corp.; 12 for TDXNet, LLCWebsite: www.tdxnet.com

Tanadgusix Corp.: Benefiting the People of “Our Land”

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about outside business at the time; I was focused on standardizing every-thing for the 20-plus subsidiaries of TDX.”

Bringing together an effective teamShane’s team engaged Symantec Gold Partner Advanced Internet Security, Inc. (AIS) to assist with the next phase of

this crucial standardization initiative: building a scalable and effective infra-structure for messaging, security, and data protection.

Based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, AIS is a small, veteran-owned firm providing IT services to small and midsize businesses and local govern-ments across the United States. “One

thing we’re known for is our willing-ness to go to out-of-the-way places,” says AIS President Gary Cannon, “and we have worked with several custom-ers in remote parts of Alaska.”

After assessing the situation, the AIS team recommended the deployment of Symantec security and data protection solutions for the new hardware infra-

Descendants of Asians who crossed the Bering Land Bridge 10,000 years ago, the Aleuts lived peacefully for

centuries until Russian sailors first encoun-tered the islands in 1741. Others followed, attracted by the abun-dance of seals and other sea mammals with their valuable fur.

The small Aleut popu-lation was quickly forced into slavery—harvesting

furs that their captors sold to Russian and Chinese merchants. After Russian sailors discovered the Pribilof Islands, the seals’ summer breeding ground, Aleut slaves were brought there to work the harvest.

In 1867, the United States purchased the territory of Alaska from Russia, but the lives of the Aleuts did not change much. In-terested in tax revenue derived from the fur trade, the government contracted with a private firm to administer the seal harvest, and later administered it through the De-partment of the Interior. While their official status was as paid laborers, the Aleuts of St. Paul were not allowed most basic free-doms for much of the next 80 years.

When the Japanese invaded the Aleu-tian Islands during the Second World War, the U.S. government evacuated all Aleuts and settled them in internment camps on islands in southeastern Alaska. They were deposited in remote, wet, and densely forested terrain with few structures and no

basic living facilities. Disease was rampant, and an estimated 10 percent of the popula-tion died during their three-year stay.

Discovery of oil on Alaska’s North Slope and plans for a new pipeline made the set-tlement of Alaska Native land claims more urgent. In 1971, President Richard Nixon signed the Alaska Native Claims Settle-ment Act, which transferred land titles to 212 Alaska Native Village Corporations and mineral rights to 12 Alaska Native Regional Corporations.

The U.S. government left St. Paul Island in 1984, and the close-knit community has been able to build an economy based on fish processing, ecotourism, and income from Tanadgusix Corporation’s far-flung enterprises.

Slaves of the Harvest: The Story of the St. Paul Aleuts

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TDXNet

structure and a new Microsoft Exchange email system.“TDXNet previously didn’t have a standardized infrastructure, and we knew that these solutions would ad-dress their technical needs and improve efficiency,” states David Kramer, vice president of AIS.

Not long after AIS began its work, Steve Vandagriff began as director of Enterprise Operations for TDXNet. During 20 years in the U.S. Air Force, Vandagriff served in a variety of IT and project management roles. “I’m an avid outdoorsman and my wife grew up in Alaska, so Anchorage was the natural place for us to settle after the military,” he relates. Prior to joining TDXNet, he worked for several years for Science Ap-plications International Corp., providing IT services to the oil industry in Anchor-

age, and also from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez along the Trans Alaska Pipeline.

“With TDXNet, I could see there was an opportunity to have a ground zero impact on bringing best practices to all of TDX,” he recalls. “And I knew that working to benefit the St. Paul Aleut

community—people whose faces I know—would be far more reward-ing. So, in September 2008, I came on board, and we hit the ground running.”

Standardizing and consolidatingVandagriff’s first day on the job involved flying to St. Paul with Kramer, who was just beginning the deployment phase of the project. “I was fortunate to be able to get to know David and some of the folks at St. Paul

in my first few days,” Vandagriff says. “It got several key partnerships off to a good start.”

The TDXNet and AIS teams worked together to deploy the email system, protected by Symantec Protection Suite Enterprise Edition, and subsequently deployed a data protection and disaster recovery strategy based on Symantec Backup Exec and Backup Exec System Recovery (see sidebar “Rolling Out the Solution”).

The entire transition took less than six months, and it was an eventful time. “Between business development trips and implementing the solution at our re-mote sites, I was traveling a lot in those days,” Vandagriff recalls.

It was a busy time for Kramer and the AIS team as well. “I made only two trips to Anchorage and one to St. Paul during the project, and I did the rest of the work remotely,”

“I could see there was an opportunity to have a ground-zero impact on bringing best practices to all of TDX as an employee of TDXNet.”

– Steve Vandagriff, Director of Enterprise Operations, TDXNet, LLC

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The TDXNet leadership team expounds on their IT success with the help of Symantec and AIS.

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The team at Advanced Internet Se-curity, Inc. (AIS) deployed Syman-tec security solutions concurrently

with a new Microsoft Exchange email system and Active Directory domain that brought all of the subsidiaries of TDX together into one network for the first time. Vandagriff and other TDXNet staff traveled to each remote site to deploy the new system, between mid-Septem-ber 2008 and early January 2009.

Implementing messaging securityWith the deployment of the Exchange server, TDXNet also deployed Symantec Brightmail Gateway. TDXNet had just be-gun virtualizing its server environment, so AIS deployed Brightmail on a VMware ESX server running on HP hardware. “It was my first deployment of Brightmail to a virtual server, and it went smoothly,” recalls David Kramer, vice president at AIS.

The results were dramatic and imme-diate. “With more than 88 percent of our total incoming email being spam, filter-ing that content at the gateway makes for a more stable system overall,” says Steve Vandagriff, director of Enterprise

Operations at TDXNet. “It has saved our employees a lot of time in finding the legitimate messages among the many unwanted ones.”

A Business Value Analysis study by The Alchemy Solutions Group projects nearly $2.5 million in business value over three years through improved end-user productivity as a result of the Brightmail deployment.

Securing the endpointAs each location was connected to the Exchange environment, the AIS team de-ployed Symantec Endpoint Protection to all local desktops and laptops. In addi-tion to the virus and spyware protection, the TDXNet team is using the product’s desktop firewall and behavior-based intrusion prevention features.

“Before we consolidated systems and deployed Symantec, we had two employ-ees who would spend five hours each per day dealing with virus issues across our multiple systems,” Shane recalls. “Today, those employees spend two hours per week, at a maximum, on these tasks.” This is projected to yield more than more than $240,000 in business

value for TDX over three years, accord-ing to the Business Value Analysis study.

Protecting critical dataPreviously, backups across the TDX organization were sporadic at best. “Each location had its own solution and its own policies,” Vandagriff states. “We were flying through the air without a net, which made me nervous, and we were spending a lot of extra staff time as well.”

In January 2009, while the TDXNet team was deploying the messaging and security infrastructure at the last few remote sites, the AIS team kicked off the deployment of Symantec Backup Exec and Backup Exec System Recovery Server Edition.

Backup Exec was implemented in a disk-to-disk-to-tape architecture. Weekly full backups and nightly incre-ments are going to an HP file server for two weeks, and then transferred to tape.

“We’re currently backing up 2½ terabytes of data from our Exchange, application, and file servers—including our four VMware machines,” Vandagriff notes. The results are impressive: the

Rolling Out the Solution

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Kramer reports. “The project has gone well, and the TDXnet team has been very good to work with.”

looking to the futureTDXNet recently acquired its second private sector customer out-side of the TDX organization, and it is preparing for rapid growth in its IT services business. “One area we’re looking at expanding into is managed services,” Vandagriff explains. “If we do move in that direction, we’re going to strongly recommend an environ-ment based on Symantec solutions to our clients. It’s what we’re familiar with, and it’s what we know to be effective.”

“In addition, we’re certified in the Small Business Administra-tion’s 8(a) program,” Shane adds. “This enables us to compete for government contracts alongside larger corporations. I expect this to bring us a lot of additional business. We’re starting to spread our wings.”

Shane, who is a member of the St. Paul Aleut community, could not be prouder of the progress the company has made. “Our char-

ter is to bring economic benefit to our people. Because of our back-ground, we have become a very resourceful tribe, and we have expanded into many successful businesses ventures. I’m proud of the part I have played in that success.” n

Mark L.S. Mullins is a managing editor of The Confident SMB and CIO Digest and senior manager of Symantec’s Global Reference Program team.

Business Value Analysis study projects more than $115,000 in IT staff time savings in backup adminis-tration over three years.

Providing for disaster recovery “Backup Exec System Recovery is hitting our critical servers for disaster recovery,” Vandagriff continues. “Thankfully, we have not experienced a crisis yet. But David Kramer of AIS came back up this past summer to do a health check as to where we were. We actually restored our domain controller, restored our Exchange server, and created a lab environment based off of recoveries from Backup Exec System Recovery. It brings a lot of peace of mind.

“While he was here, David also helped put together a formal backup strategy,” Vandagriff adds. “And he showed us how to really use the tool—setting policies, alerts, and so forth. Our backup infrastructure is more robust because of that visit.”

Deploying machines efficientlyTDXNet has used Symantec Ghost Solution Suite to deploy images on desktops and laptops for several years, but with no standardization in hardware, much of the work still had to be done manually. After standardization, however, the TDXNet team upgraded to the latest version of Ghost and began creating standard images for each subsidiary.

“We can have a new laptop with the TDX Microsoft Vista image provisioned in about 20 minutes,” Vandagriff reports. “We also plan to be early adopters of Windows 7 and will be relying on Ghost to make that transition happen smoothly.”

n Symantec Protection Suite Enterprise Editionn Symantec Endpoint

Protectionn Symantec Brightmail

Gatewayn Symantec Backup Execn Symantec Backup Exec System

Recovery Server Editionn Symantec Ghost Solution Suiten Symantec Partner: Advanced

Internet Security, Inc. (AIS):www.advintsec.com

Rolling out the Solution…Continued from previous page

Coming Home to Symantec Solutions


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Securing Growth Feature

Securing

An IT Shield to Protect and Empower Business

There’s not only power in small, but magic too,” Jaime Clarke once said. He’s a Canadian explorer who scaled Mount Everest and four other treacherous summits, step by careful

step. In the global economy, the power of small has achieved impressive results.

Consider this: small and midsize businesses (SMBs) account for nearly 99 percent of all businesses world-wide, employ more than half the world’s workers, and generate more than half the global gross domestic product. In the United States, SMBs have generated 64 percent of net new jobs over the past 15 years.1

Yet in a struggling economy, even more is expected of them.

Small in size but big in influence, SMBs have used the Internet to extend market reach and build fruit-ful partnerships. Business productivity applications have helped them grow while staying lean. But the very tools that propel growth can also leave them more vulnerable to risks beyond their four walls.

Growth“

By Dee V. Sharma

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Cyberattacks, data loss, system failures—these are real threats to sus-tained SMB growth across industries.

Increasingly aware of these risks, SMBs are likely to spend a full percentage point more of their IT budgets on security in 2009 than in 2008.2 “The Internet has become the computing platform for small and midsize businesses,” says Giu-liana Folco, research vice president, European Industry Solutions, IDC. “So while it’s true that they are more exposed, it is also true that they are beginning to realize this. Our surveys find that improving IT security is the most urgent technol-ogy priority for SMBs.”

What are the building blocks of a secure IT infrastructure?

The Confident SMB spoke with SMB IT professionals to learn how they’re protecting their infrastructure and data assets without breaking the bank.

Protect your IPKnowing what you need to protect is a good starting point. “Securing your information systems is about knowing what is valuable to your business and how to protect it,” says Michael Kaiser, executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA). “It’s about understanding the technologies your users need and the network you operate in.”

Direct Agents, a New York-based advertising agency that specializes in interactive marketing, maintains a

“Clients will sometimes ask us for a briefing on our security procedures. The fact that we’re enforcing end-user policies and using a solution from Symantec helps gain their confidence.”

– Nate Schilling, Technology Manager, Direct Agents, Inc.

Nate Schilling, Technology Manager, and Dinesh Boaz and Josh Boaz, Co-founders, Direct Agents, Inc.

Founded: 2003Location: New York’s SoHo DistrictEmployees: 40+IT Staff: 2Website: www.directagents.com

Direct Agents Inc.

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network that is, by choice, entirely unfiltered. “We must deliberately expose ourselves to some of the more malicious content on the Web,” explains Nate Schilling, technology manager of Direct Agents’ two-person IT team. “We work with such a large universe of online Web publishers that we cannot afford to miss any commu-nications. We simply cannot leave the spam filter on or avoid suspect URLs.”

That’s a compelling reason for the company to safeguard both corporate and client confidential data that is stored internally, online, and at dis-tributed third-party sites. “Symantec

Endpoint Protection gives us the high level of protection and the flexibility we need,” Schilling says. “Before de-ploying it, I had to remediate three to four infected systems a day. Now, at its worst, we see maybe one incident of remediation a week.”

Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) attracts more than 500,000 visitors a year and features major exhibits that can take years to arrange. Email communications are critical for organizing events and are often the only legal proof. MCA learned firsthand the dangers of exposure. “Years ago we had a network-stopping security inci-dent. And our website was hacked into,” recalls Euan Upston, the museum’s chief operating officer.

Euan Upston, Chief Operating Officer, Museum of Contemporary Arts, Sydney, and Sean Murphy, Principal, Nexus IT & Communications

“When I outsource my IT, innovation is an incentive for both of us. I can control my budget and not worry about security, and work together with my IT partner to set milestones for future investments.”

– Euan Upston, Chief Operating Officer, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

Founded: 1991Location: Sydney, AustraliaEmployees: 150+IT Staff: NonePartner: Nexus IT & CommunicationsWebsite: www.mca.com.au

Museum of Contemporary Art

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Upston turned to Nexus IT & Communications, a Sydney-based Symantec partner. One of the first things Nexus IT did was implement Symantec Protection Suite Small Business Edition, which includes Symantec Endpoint Protection and Symantec Premium Anti-Spam. In the four years since, there

hasn’t been a single security-related disruption.

“IT security is a business im-perative,” explains Sean Murphy, principal, Nexus IT. “Contempo-rary art takes on many multime-dia forms. The kind of protection you might expect a museum to

apply to its physical assets, we also have to apply to our digital assets.”

At CBSA Architects, a 75-year-old architectural firm based in Hickory, North Carolina, the most valuable busi-ness assets—architectural drawings—are generated, stored, and transmitted to clients and contractors digitally over the Internet. “Excessive spam is an inconvenience that can slow us down. But if we experienced a malware at-tack, it could shut down work and we might just have to send some of our people home,” explains Candy Hensley, systems administrator at CBSA. “That has never happened thanks to Syman-tec Mail Security preventing hundreds of spam messages a day from reaching our mailboxes.”

On the recommendation of Voice-and-Data Corporation, a Symantec partner, CBSA has been protected by Symantec security solutions for almost 10 years. About 60 percent (nearly

How Safe Is Your Business?

One innocuous spam, then a deluge that jams your network. One suspect download that

wipes out weeks of business-critical data. A tape backup destroyed in a burglary. These seemingly mundane incidents can have a long-term impact on the bottom line of SMBs.

So what are they doing about them? Not enough, according to a survey of 1,500 U.S. small businesses by The National Cyber Security Alli-ance. Conducted in partnership with Symantec and Zogby International, the survey finds that 75 percent of small businesses use the Internet to conduct business with customers, and most store vital business data in their systems. Yet for nearly a quarter, cyber security is still just “a nice thing to have.” View complete survey.

SMB Survey Highlights:> Sixty-five percent store customer data, 43 percent store financial re-cords, 33 percent store credit card data, and 20 percent have intellectual property and other sensitive corporate content online.

> Eleven percent never check their computers to ensure that antivirus, antispyware, firewalls, and operating systems are up-to-date. Yet only six percent fear the loss of customer data.

> Only 28 percent have formal Inter-net security policies, and 35 percent provide training to employees about Internet safety and security.

> Sixty-six percent of employees take computers or PDAs containing sensi-tive information off-site. Twenty-five percent do not ensure password pro-tection for their wireless networks.

VideoThe Direct Agents’ team discusses their security strategy.

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http://www.nexusnet.com.au

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http://www.symantec.com/business/theme.jsp?themeid=ncsa&depthpath=0&header=0

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3,000) of incoming mes-sages a week at CBSA are spam; and they’re blocked by Symantec Mail Security for Micro-soft Exchange.

Define the guardrailsLack of adequate IT secu-rity policies is often the Achilles heel for SMBs. NCSA’s research discov-ered that only 28 percent of U.S. small businesses have formal Internet secu-rity policies and less than

a third train employees about Internet security. “At a minimum, you need to define policies and educate employees about what is acceptable use of your systems,” notes NCSA’s Kaiser.

CBSA’s Hensley recalls an incident when one laptop had been out in the field for more than three weeks and came back infected because its virus definitions hadn’t been updated. “The user also had a 15-year-old son who had access to the laptop,” she

laughs. Fortunately, such incidents are now few and far between. Recently, the firm upgraded to Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition. It uses a single agent to put antivirus, antispyware, firewall, and intrusion prevention technologies on the servers and on each desktop or laptop, all managed from a single, centralized console.

“Few small businesses truly understand what information secu-rity means or how they should set up and enforce policies,” says John Koval, president of Voice-and-Data. “You have to be careful not to give information security too narrow an interpretation. Security is more than passwords and protecting data from being stolen or damaged. It also means being able to quickly recover from a breach.” So, Koval is planning for even greater business resilience ahead and CBSA will soon deploy Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery to begin image-based backup of servers and desktops.

Direct Agents’ Nate Schilling be-lieves he can count on the common sense of his company’s young, tech-

Founded: 1934Location: Hickory, North CarolinaEmployees: 10+IT Staff: 1Partner: Voice-and-Data Corp.Website: www.cbsa-architects.com

CBSA Architects

Candy Hensley, Systems Administrator, CBSA Architects

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savvy employees to maintain security standards. Still, he isn’t taking any chances. The company uses Symantec Endpoint Protection to restrict and define administrator access. “It’s just being sensible,” he says.

For Schilling, application and de-vice control are two important as-

pects of security: policies are set to automatically scan any executable programs as well as external devices connected to a user’s USB port. “When employees bring in devices for troubleshooting, I’ve found it to be a best practice to connect their system to my USB port, which sees it as an external hard drive,” explains Schilling. “I have set Symantec End-point Protection to scan and disinfect

their systems before I work on them. This way I can find threats that might be hid-den. Symantec Endpoint Protection identifies and blocks a threat in this fashion at least a couple of times a month.”

Meet external requirementsSMBs also need to conform to the securi-ty policies of the organizations they deal with. “SMBs work with larger enterprises or government agencies that have to meet a host of compliance and regulato-ry guidelines,” explains IDC’s Folco. “It’s important to have a holistic approach to security that encompasses data protec-tion, retention, and access and then set up policies to implement it.”

As a private, non-profit organization, MCA is subject to arduous gov-ernment regulations. “We

have to deliver a very exacting level of security and compliance that the board of directors can sign off on, yet do it within the budget of a cultural organi-zation,” explains Murphy. He must also consider other factors such as provid-ing contributing artists secure and easy access to MCA’s systems.

Direct Agents’ experience shows that security standards can be an important selection criterion for clients. “Clients will sometimes ask us for a briefing on our security procedures,” notes Schil-ling. “When they do, the fact that we’re enforcing end-user policies and using a solution from Symantec helps gain their confidence.”

Maximize your resourcesOften, small businesses don’t have staff dedicated to maintaining IT systems. At CBSA, Hensley wears many hats. She’s executive administrator, manages the firm’s marketing, promotions, and 3-D rendering, develops project specifica-tions, and takes care of IT. Not surpris-

“IT security is a business imperative. The kind of protection you might expect a museum to apply to its physical assets, we also have to apply to our digital assets.”

– Sean Murphy, Principal, Nexus IT & Communications

Candy Hensley describes CBSA Architect’s experience using Symantec security solutions.

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ingly, she’d prefer to spend as little time as possible on IT.

Fortunately, with Voice-and-Data by her side, she doesn’t need to. “It’s absolutely necessary to be able to have faith in your IT partner and the solutions they recommend,” Hensley says. “Because of this, I rarely have to think about whether my server is protected and whether I need to be worried about data getting corrupted or lost.”

For Direct Agents’ two-person IT team, cloud computing helps mini-mize the time it spends on maintain-ing IT security. “Hosted and cloud resources are robust and secure far beyond the ability of a typical small business to recreate. We don’t need to worry about things like data encryp-tion, data integrity, or backups—our service providers take care of those things,” explains Schilling.

Hosted services offer a cost advan-tage as well. “We’re seeing a 75 percent savings in total cost of ownership using cloud services versus trying to host an

equivalent infrastructure in-house,” Schilling says. Josh Boaz, Direct Agents’ co-founder and manag-ing director, admits he was reluctant to trust cloud services at first. “But Nate persuaded me

it would be secure and cost-effective. This has proven to be true.”

Innovation is another benefit of rely-ing on an IT partner. “We’re investing in a $50 million new facility that will have cutting-edge technology built into it,” explains MCA’s Upston. “As I studied the IT departments of other museums, a common complaint was that the IT crew can itself become change-resistant. They hesitate to adopt new technolo-gies, sometimes because of security concerns, that we in the art-educational world might want. When I outsource my IT, innovation is an incentive for both of us. I can control my budget and not worry about security, and work together with my IT partner to set milestones for future investments.”

Sean Murphy, the principal at MCA’s IT partner, agrees. “I can afford to provide technological innovations

and solid security because I have the consistency of Symantec’s products behind me. I need a toolset that gives me the confidence to be able to do a quality job and budget for a whole year in advance without feeling exposed.”

At the end of the day, SMBs’ security requirements are simple—a well-oiled system that works in the background, without impacting the productivity of end users. “When SMBs invest in IT security, they’re considering more than just the products,” says IDC’s Folco. “They’re look-ing for customer service and support.” n

1 United States Small Business Administration, www.sba.gov.2 “The State of SMB Security: 2008-2009,” Forrester Research, www.forrester.com.

Dee V. Sharma is a managing editor for CIO Digest and The Confident SMB, and an executive at NAVAJO Company. Her work has also appeared in publications such as The Economic Times and Times of India.

n Symantec Protection Suite Small BusinessEdition

n Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition

n Symantec Mail Security for MicrosoftExchange

n Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery

Are your data and systems are pro-tected? Check out the podcast “Plan for the Best, Prepare for the Worst.”

Podcast

What are the top threats to your environment? Check out the podcast “Symantec Report: Threats to Your Confidential Information are Increasing.”

Podcast

Security Layers

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SMBConfidentThe Windows 7 Feature

In a story from medieval times, a traveler walking

down a road comes upon three stonemasons.

“What are you doing?” he asks each in turn.

“I am cutting stone,” says the first.

“I am making bricks,” replies the second.

“I am building a cathedral,” says the third.

How big can your vision get?

How Businesses Turn Migration

Win BigWin 7,into Transformation

By Alan Drummer

Win BigWin 7,

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Windows 7 Feature

More than 90 percent of the world’s computers run on Microsoft Windows, and with support for Windows XP currently scheduled to end in 2014, many businesses are moving or considering a move to Windows 7.

Most see the move as necessary and want to complete it with the least disruption possible.

Some, however, see a bigger op-portunity. They’re not just “cutting stone.” They see a chance to rethink user environments and systems, simplify endpoint administration, and optimize endpoints to accelerate productivity.

“At some point, Windows users will need to transition over

to Windows 7 because XP will no longer be supported and Vista just didn’t take off in terms of adoption,” says Steve Brasen, principal analyst at Enterprise Management Associ-ates (EMA). “The ability to manage and automate the processes around upgrading to Windows 7 will be critical for organizations.”

Does your business need a migra-tion—or a transformation? What are other businesses doing to turn a migration into a makeover that boosts business results? And what are they doing to make migration easier?

To help you think about your own vision for user environments, The Confident SMB gathered top insights from key business decision makers and analysts.

“The speed and responsiveness of Windows 7 compared to Windows XP is just night and day. It’s faster to boot up, faster to shut down.”

– Greg Topf, Director of Information Technology, NewBay Media

Greg Topf, Director of Information Technology, NewBay Media

NewBay MediaFounded: 2006Location: New York CityEmployees: 130IT Staff Managing Client Systems: 3Website: www.nbmedia.com

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Windows 7 Feature

Windows 7 is a better operating systemThe three businesses interviewed for this article had all used Windows XP. None had seriously considered Windows Vista—for the most part because it would have required hard-ware upgrades.

All three, however, have migrated or are migrating to Windows 7 quickly, for a number of reasons.

Faster performance. “The speed and responsiveness of Windows 7 compared to Windows XP is just night and day,” says Greg Topf, di-rector of information technology at NewBay Media. The company, based in New York City, has 130 employ-

ees and produces more than 40 publications, 50 websites, and 30 electronic newsletters, including the magazines Guitar Player and Tech & Learning.

Migration is in progress at New-Bay, and soon the company will have moved all PC-based employees to Windows 7. “It’s faster to boot up, faster to shut down,” Topf adds. “There are far fewer installations that force you to reboot. And gener-al operating system responsiveness is dramatically increased.”

Better search. Axon Computer Systems Limited (Axon) is the largest private New Zealand-owned provider of ICT services. It’s a Symantec Platinum Partner with offices across New Zealand and 270 employees.

James Walls, Service Management Solutions Manager, Axon Computer Systems Limited

“PC Transplant technology in Altiris Client Management Suite reduces three to four hours of work at each system to a half hour. That can add up to a huge savings.”

– Donald Long, Auckland Consulting Manager, Axon Computer Systems Limited

Founded: 1986Location: Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, and Christchurch, New ZealandEmployees: 270IT Staff Managing Client Systems: 140Website: www.axon.co.nz

Axon Computer Systems Limited

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Windows 7 Feature

One of those employees is James Walls, service management solutions manager. He’s more productive be-cause of the Windows Search feature in Windows 7. “If I need to find some-one’s phone number, I just click on the “start” button, type the name and the word ‘phone,’ and Windows 7 will search my computer instantly as well as my email and I’m likely to come up with that phone number much more quickly,” Walls says. “It’s a great fea-ture for everyone.”

Better diagnostics. Windows 7 is much more intelligent than Windows XP, NewBay’s Topf points out. “If there’s an issue with network con-nectivity, or application compatibility, Windows 7 guides the user through suggested settings and diagnostics, and that solves so many problems. It reduces employee helpdesk calls and, that’s tremendous.”

Re-stage your businessOver the years, business require-ments can change faster than a work-station’s ability to keep up.

This was the case at Rutherford and Chekene (R&C), an 85-person San Francisco-based engineering firm with a long list of awards for structural and geotechnical engi-neering. R&C had 90 custom-built workstations, but each was limited by Windows XP to maximum of three gigabytes of RAM.

“Meanwhile, our industry is at a tipping point,” explains David Blei-man, executive principal at R&C. “Design documents are now in 3D, and models of complex, high tech buildings have expanded exponen-

tially. There are hospitals of one million square feet and their models are detailed down to the placement of keyboards and mice. Some 3D files can be as big as 250 megabytes. On Windows XP, we had to wait for ma-chines to respond with every click of the mouse.”

The answer was to adopt the 64-bit Windows 7 operating system, which has enabled an upgrade to 12 giga-bytes of RAM. R&C also took the op-portunity to standardize disk images and motherboards across its custom-built systems.

“We surveyed our users and for the first time came up with a standard set of applications for every engineering workstation,” says Bleiman. “That will save the firm a projected 20 percent in deployment and administration time,” adds David Irvine, president of Irvine Consulting Services, a Syman-tec Partner that provides R&C’s out-sourced IT services.

The most important benefit of the Windows 7 migration is more RAM and performance, Irvine observes. “Windows 7 is taking a situation that was really un-workable and making it very facile. The

Seven Steps to Windows 7 with Symantec*

1 Assess the environment and plan your deployment

2 Build standard Windows 7 images3 Prepare your applications4 Capture user settings and

personality variables5 Automate and assemble the

migration process6 Migrate systems7 Measure and report

* Summary of a white paper with this title on symantec.com

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Windows 7 Feature

improvement in speed alone is making everyone all smiles.”

Transform users into advocatesWill some users resist migration to a new operating system? How much training will be needed?

Says Axon’s Walls: “We’ve learned to market a change in technology to em-ployees before we deploy. So the first step we took was to email staff about the project and present the benefits of Windows 7. We invited them to enter a competition with prizes for telling us what they thought was the cool-est thing about Windows 7. We asked them to name the features that will make their lives easier.”

Walls was surprised by the response. “Out of a staff of 270, we had over 80 entries,” he notes. “Our employees became strong advocates of Windows 7 and asked us to give it to them quickly.”

What makes migration easier?Get the standardized image just right. “Get a mature standardized image,” advises NewBay’s Topf. “That’s the most important take away about migration.

Create a fresh build—never leave on the system all the extra soft-ware that comes from the system vendor, because you can never uninstall it later. It took a couple of weeks of effort for us to get the perfect, solid foundation. We had to wait for some application versions to mature—and that’s worth waiting for.”

Both NewBay and R&C use Symantec Ghost Solution Suite to clone standardized images to new machines. “Ghost is simple and it works,” Topf says. “I’ve used it for 10 years. It exponentially reduces the time deployments take. If there are multiple machines that need to be prepared at the same time, we can multicast the image to them.”

The advantage of multicasting is that it can send a five gigabyte image

over the network to hundreds or thousands of machines with a single click, and only

five gigabytes total travels over the network. The image deploys simulta-neously on all machines, this minimiz-ing traffic.

“Symantec Ghost Solution Suite saves us a couple hours per endpoint

Founded: 1960Location: San Francisco, CaliforniaEmployees: 85IT Staff Managing Client Systems: 2Website: www.ruthchek.com

Rutherford & Chekene

David Bleiman, Executive Principal,Rutherford & Chekene

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Windows 7 Feature

in application deployment time,” says Irvine at R&C.

Says EMA analyst Brasen: “An auto-mated system management platform can bundle up the image and send it out to many machines as part of an automated process. Companies will experience a lot of pain upgrading to Windows 7 if they can’t get an auto-mated platform in place.”

Reduce data to be migrated. Migra-tion was easier at NewBay, Topf says, because “We used the File System Archiving feature of Symantec Enter-prise Vault to go through old systems and weed out old files. Some of our systems were archaic. We were able to move close to a terabyte of data to the Enterprise Vault archive, reclaim-ing valuable storage and saving mi-gration time.” When Enterprise Vault archives files, they become indexed, deduplicated, compressed, and easier to search.

Deploy faster with simultaneous project streams. How fast can Windows 7 be de-ployed on over 260 endpoints? Necessity was the mother of invention at Axon.

Axon CEO Scott Green came back from the Microsoft Worldwide Partner

Conference and announced that “by the launch date of Windows 7 (39 working days away), we will be 100 percent Windows 7 deployed in a standardized manner.”

The team was concerned. As Walls remembers: “If you had asked any of our team beforehand if we could achieve that, or any of our competition if anyone could achieve that, everyone would say no.”

Adds Donald Long, Auckland con-sulting manager at Axon, “we had done similar-sized projects deploying Windows Vista, and those had taken over 90 working days.”

The team abandoned its past meth-odologies and decided to use parallel streams of effort. Explains Walls: “We had one stream investigating what a desktop should look like. At the same time, we had an iterative stream testing our common and business applications. Simultaneously, a separate business liaison and communication stream gath-ered requirements for each stage and marketed the effort back to the company.”

The project was complet-ed in 38 days, with one day to spare. The new method-

ology is now a business asset. “Axon developed a lot of intellectual proper-ty around deployment in this project,” Walls says. “We can offer clients these sorts of implementations at a greatly reduced risk, a fixed price for work of a defined scope, and a speed of ex-ecution that’s hard to rival.”

The team uses Altiris Client Manage- ment Suite from Symantec to interro-gate machines on the network, assess which ones are ready for Windows 7, deploy an image, and move settings from the old PCs to the new ones. “PC Transplant technology in Altiris Client Management Suite audits exist-ing machines and gives us options on what we do and don’t want to move,” Long says. “It reduces three to four hours of work at each system to a half hour. That can add up to huge savings.”

VideoWho is moving millions of desktops and laptops to Windows 7? Check out “The Symantec Great Windows 7 Drive.”

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After deployment: maximizing productivityOnce Windows 7 is deployed, it’s impor-tant to help people take advantage of it, Axon’s Walls points out. “We will have failed if we implement the new technol-ogy and everyone continued to use it in the old way.”

Axon’s answer was to give its staff, from the CEO on down, half-hour sessions of guided tips and tricks tailored to what each could actually use in real life. “A lot of the tips we got from the staff them-selves in the competition, where they told us what was exciting about Windows 7,” Walls says. “It enabled us to communicate the right messages back to the whole staff in a manner that was going to resonate.”

long range endpoints vision At NewBay, 50 of 130 endpoints are Macintoshes, and 80 are Windows PCs.

Macintoshes are widely used in the edi-torial and design departments. Although Topf doesn’t see either platform as better overall, he’s seen that each one is better for users who are familiar with it.

At R&C, Bleiman regards Windows 7 and the new workstations as a further step towards a paperless office. The

firm’s staff needs to review and approve hundreds of shop drawings, and they spend as much as 70 percent of their time receiving, handling, and shipping paper copies and only 30 percent on actual quality assurance. Soon, big new workstations will open PDF versions of drawings for electronic review, and Bleiman estimates that with this 90 percent of time will be spent on quality assurance and just 10 percent spent on handling paper.

Axon was among the first organiza-tions in the Asia Pacific region to be 100

percent Windows 7 deployed. “That has opened a wide range of discussions with our clients,” Walls says. “After the release of Windows Vista, perhaps five percent of our conversations with customers involved its deployment. Now we have spoken with virtually 100 percent of our major clients about our experiences, and they are showing huge interest in moving to Windows 7.” n

Alan Drummer is Creative Director for Content at NAVAJO Company. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Examiner, Create Magazine, and on The History Channel.

n Migration and Endpoint Managementn Altiris Client Management Suite n Altiris Deployment Solutionn Symantec Ghost Solution Suite

n Security and data loss preventionn Symantec Endpoint Protectionn Symantec Protection Suiten Symantec Data Loss Prevention

n Backup and Recoveryn Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery

Desktop Editionn Symantec NetBackup Desktop and

Laptop Optionn Application Packaging and Virtualization

n Symantec Endpoint Virtualization Suiten Altiris Wise Package Studio

* Symantec Windows 7 Resource Center for Business Customers

Symantec Solutions for Windows 7*

“Symantec Ghost Solution Suite saves us a couple hours per endpoint in application deployment time.”

– David Irvine, President, Irvine Consulting Services

Windows 7 Feature

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