Several times over the last few months we have been called in to businesses that were having major performance and communications issues.
- The Accounts/ERP Systems people were saying it was a Network Problem.
- The LAN/WAN people were saying it was a Citrix/Remote Access problem.
- The Citrix/Remote Access people said it was a Broadband/Bandwidth problem.
- The Broadband people said it was a CCTV Remote Viewing issue.
I could go on, but the net result was the customer was left “Holding the Baby” and the problem was dragging on for weeks, causing huge disruption and making the IT Systems unusable for a large proportion of the working day.
Because the company had no In-House IT resource or an Independent IT Professional who had no vested interest to call upon, the individual suppliers were able to quote technical terms at the customer and blame everyone else.
After looking at the problem and talking to all the suppliers we were able to establish that the problem was caused by a number of issues;
- The Security company was inadvertently streaming CCTV from the customer site 24 Hours a day using large amounts of bandwidth. We were able to get them to only stream video based on event triggering.
- The LAN/WAN people had added an extra broadband connection to the VPN and the routing of traffic over the networks had not been adjusted to take advantage of the new connection.
- The Citrix and Broadband suppliers had not co-ordinated and optimised their parameters to make sure they were working to maximise the speed of the connection.
- There had been an upgrade to the ERP System that installed a module which was not required, but was using large amounts of the server processing power.
We were able to increase the overall performance of the systems by 80% in a few days and by 100% within a couple of weeks.
Because of our depth of experience, gathered over twenty five years in various industries and business sectors, we were able to get to the root cause of the issues and allow the company to concentrate on their core business and stop wasting time arguing with the various IT Suppliers.
If you find yourself in this type of situation, don’t wast time fighting with IT Suppliers. Talk to an Independent IT Professional who will ultimately save you a lot of time and money. Better still develop an ongoing relationship with a professional who knows your system and can make sure any changes don’t have a knock on affect on your existing systems.
Should you moderate comments on your blog?
I had always thought that the safest thing to do, to prevent potential libellous comments being posted on my blog, was to not allow any comments that might have issues to be posted to the blog by moderating all comments.
However having listened to The John Murray Show on RTE Radio1 yesterday I have had to change this. A solicitor pointed out that by moderating comments you might not be able to avail of the hosting defence.
The hosting defence says that, as soon as you are aware of a third party posting information to your site that might have issues, and are so informed, then if you remove the content promptly then you cannot be held libel.
However if you edit the content in any way, including moderating or even correcting spelling mistakes, then you are the publisher and cannot avail of the hosting defence.
I now do not moderate comments but will monitor them carefully and remove any I think are dodgy.