New Article on Improving System Security with KnowBe4

While speaking at a conference recently, a cybersecurity expert whose company offers email user testing and training stated that KnowBe4.com‘s solution was the best they’d ever seen. Little did they know I was in negotiations on The Church’s behalf with KnowBe4!

Click here to read my brief article on the details!

New Article: March is IT-Be-Green Month!

March is the month of St. Patrick’s Day, whose modern-day associated color is green. When we think ‘green’, we also think of doing things that are friendly to the environment. What are some quick tasks we can do to make IT more ‘green’?

That's the article's intro... want to read more? Click here!

2018 ChMS Article is Published!

I get the privilege of writing an article that is the most referred-to resource for churches and ministries looking to make a ChMS (Church Management Software) purchase or change. Perhaps it is the most referred to resource because it is completely objective and free... regardless, I am blessed to do it.

If you'd like to read a free copy (an advanced copy because the journal publisher won't have it on the streets until next month!), click here!

New Article: Helpful Computer Hacks

A hack is no longer an inept person, but a helpful way of doing things that increases effectiveness and efficiency! Who knew!

I released an article to the publisher of some helpful computer hacks that will likely help every computer user. You can get to a free copy posted on my firm's website by clicking here.

Mobile Devices, Apps, & Other Exciting Technologies

I just released an article to the publisher with thoughts on how to manage all of the new options we have in technology. Want to read it? Click here to see the copy posted on our website!

New Article: What's Your Backup Plan?

Many believe the highest priority of IT (Information Technology) is disaster recovery preparedness; the ability to recover after a major data loss. Or after ransomware. We often call that a backup plan, because it all starts with good backups. So, what's your backup plan?

That's the opening of a new article I just released to the publisher. If you'd like to read a free copy on our website, click here!

New Article: O365’s Email Solution – Caution!

 
Microsoft’s O365 has many features that interest churches and ministries– especially because of the generous charity license Microsoft provides. Some aspects of O365 are good, but we found enough problems with their hosted email service that it’s worth posting an Enter at Your Own Risk sign.

I just released an article to the publisher; want to see a free preview? Click here!

New Article: What Churches Should Learn from the Recent DDoS Attack

 

Late last month, the world saw a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack of historic proportions. Anyone who uses a computer, tablet, smartphone, or web-enabled technology—including many churches and church leaders—needs to understand the significance of this attack and what they can do to minimize their vulnerabilities when future attacks occur.

Want to read a free copy? Click here! 

New Article: Microsoft O365 - What You Need to Know

I just sent an article to the publisher on issues related to migrating to Microsoft's O365. It includes some good news, details some of O365's limitations, and concludes with a creative way to save money!

Interested? Click here to read a free copy!

Microsoft Resolves O365 Charity Licensing Issue for Churches!

I just released an article to the publisher announcing that Microsoft has resolved the non-discrimination language in its O365 charity licensing agreement. The Lord used MBS in that process, and we are excited to announce it!

Click here if you’d like to read a free pre-release of the article via the MBS website!

MBS Datacenter Maintenance Window Announcement (1/16/2015)

In the tradition of Tim Allen's Home Improvement character, we need to add more power to our rack! To date we have been on a 20amp circuit, and are changing over to a 30amp circuit. The circuit's been installed for us, so it's just a matter of putting new power distribution units (PDUs) in our rack and moving all of the equipment's plugs to them.

We decided to do this 'live' to test our power redundancy strategy. Because we have designed full redundancy into our rack's power (two circuits with all devices being plugged into both), we anticipate zero downtime for our clients. But we thought we should let 'em know-- just in case!

We plan to begin the cutover at about 3pm Pacific time (6pm Eastern, etc) on Friday, January 16th.

We chose Friday hoping that it would minimize the possible impact on the more than 100 servers we host and those who depend on them. If you are one of our hosted clients, please let your user community know of the planned maintenance window so they can anticipate it. And we welcome your prayers!

Thank you again for the privilege we have of serving you and your team! We are very thankful to be partners with you in ministry.

New Article: All Data Is Vulnerable

I just released a new article for publication addressing how vulnerable our data is, and some simple steps to improve that. Here's the opening paragraph:

Sony. The US government. The news is often filled with 'the latest' cyberattack. It seems like all of our data is vulnerable. What should we do about it? What can we do about it?

I put a copy of the article on our website, and you can read it for free; just click here!

MBS' Recommended Backup Strategies

A client recently asked why we spec the backup solutions we do. It was a great question!

First, let me say that anytime you get ten network engineers in a room and ask for the best way to do something, you'll likely get at least ten different answers. That doesn't mean they're all wrong, just that based on each one's experience a particular strategy has become their preference.

MBS' Recommended Backup Strategies
We did some fairly heavy research not too long ago on the subject of backup systems. There are lots of possibilities, but we found that tape was still preferred by most of corporate America that had small-to-medium sized networks-- and even some very large systems like digital media archives.

Here's what we learned:

• Large networks rely on SAN devices (Storage Area Networks) in larger onsite and offsite datacenters, and their replication capabilities make backups unnecessary. Those devices typically cost a minimum of $25-$30 thousand each, and larger units cost six figures. (Some people try to accomplish SANs on the cheap using Drobo and Buffalo drives, but they're unreliable; in our opinion they're not enterprise grade.) For our largest clients we recommend using SAN devices.
• Online backup is good for restoring single files or folders, but is inadequate for restoring entire servers in a disaster. And disaster recovery is something that must be planned for. This is the strategy we only recommend for our friends' home computers.
• External hard drives seem like a good idea except that they have many moving parts that, when transported offsite (which should happen often as part of the disaster recovery plan), can-- and often do-- fail. The manufacturers will replace them under warranty, but without any data on them; not good if that happens during a disaster recovery scenario. We never recommend this strategy.
• Tape technology continues to move forward in development. Our clients typically only need LTO5 or LTO6 (Linear Tape-Open) specs (1.5tb and 2.5tb native capacities), but LTO7 - LTO10 are slated for release. I'll be surprised if they get there, however, because an organization with that much data will usually be at the size where they're investing in SANs.

MBS' Datacenter
In our datacenter we use SANs that send their backups to another enterprise-grade device called a NAS (for Network Attached Storage) that has large capacity. We use that strategy in the datacenter because we're not there to change tapes on a daily basis.

New Article about CITRT - The Community of Church IT People

Most people who work at churches and ministries are in behind-the-scenes positions. There is a group of these modern day heroes of The Faith who focus on IT that began gathering as peers in 2006 to and encourage each other. They have formed the Church IT Network, and their impact is huge!

If you'd like to read this article, click here!

IT Can Be Amazing!

Yesterday our team had a scheduled maintenance day in our datacenter. Our goals were rather large:

• Remove two retiring Dell PowerEdge Servers (R710s, 96gb RAM, 4-Core Processors)
• Add three new Dell PowerEdge Servers (R620s, 128gb RAM, 8-Core Processors)
• Increase RAM in two 1-year-old R620s to bring them up to 128gb
• Expand RAM in our VCenter Server to 96gb
• Apply firmware updates to all hardware
• Shuffle everything in the rack
• Move the entire Hypervisor system (the basis for our private cloud computing infrastructure) from VMware 5.1 to 5.5

Our intention was to do this live, with approximately 100 client servers and services running. We were in different locations around the country as we worked on this project:

• I was the only one at the datacenter, about 12 miles south of Las Vegas, NV
• Gary, our lead engineer, was in his office in Nashville, TN
• Rick, one of our engineers, was in his office in Milan, IL
• Ed, one of our engineers, was in his office in Columbia, SC

We had a plan, we had each prayed for God's grace and wisdom, and we began at about 7:15am Pacific time. We had a GoToMeeting conference call session running the entire time, so we were in constant communication via our telephone headsets and could share screens when helpful. It was as though we were all in the same room together!

I had emailed each of our clients earlier in the week, so I knew we were being prayed for. And God was merciful; he delivered! Here are our company tweets throughout the day (so clients would know how it was progressing):

1. I am in the datacenter, staging the upgrade!  (8:26am) [This was a little more than an hour after getting to the datacenter, unboxing the new servers, and getting them to our rack.]
2. One old host (#1) is out of the rack! Its space has been filled with two new hosts, currently in place and being configured.  (9:15am) [A physical server, when used the way we use them to serve clients, is referred to as a host.]
3. 1st new host is live! Servers have been moved to it and it's/ they're happy!  (11:18am)
4. 2nd old host is out of the rack! Configuration of 2nd new host in process.We're making good progress! 2 old hosts retired, 2 new hosts configured and running. 1 add'l new host in and ready to configure!  (12:14pm)
5. So far, zero downtime for our clients. w00t!!  (2:06pm)
6. Well, always plan for the unexpected in IT! One of the hosts that is surviving this update just had a redundant power supply issue! We're on it!  (4:24pm)
7. Ok... the three new hosts are running perfectly! All servers relocated to them and running happily as we resolve issues on the two 1-year-olds.  (5:36pm) [This is a great testimony to the maturity and power of VMware. There's a reason it runs more than 70% of cloud servers!]
8. I work with a GREAT team! All issues have been defeated on the two 1-year-old hosts, and we are upgrading their VMware!  (7:14pm)
9. Whew! We're almost done! Hosts 4 & 5 are nearly done! It's been a great day, and our clients were up and running the entire time! #blessed  (7:45pm)
10. What a great day! We are done! Just a little load balancing and that's it! Thanks to everyone who was praying for us!  (8:13pm)

And then I packed up my gear and began the nearly 4-hour drive home.

As I reflect, the things that stand out to me are:

• God's grace and mercy as he worked through our team. Our clients are all churches and ministries, whose mission is the most important work on Earth. He made it possible for our clients to keep about their tasks without interruption while we did all that!
• The Lord has given us a terrific team! I am truly blessed to be working with these guys.
• Technology, when it works, is terrific! The fact that we were in different parts of the country and yet were working as though were all in the same room is amazing!

New Article on Surprising Email Facts

There is a surprising vulnerability in email most don’t know about that I’ve written a brief article on. I also included a brief section on how email and internet traffic is routed that may surprise you.

If you’d like to read it, it is freely available on our website… just click this link:
http://www.mbsinc.com/surprising-email-facts/

Fun at the Datacenter!

This week we increased our hosting capacity by 25% and doubled our backup data storage capacity! It's so exciting to see how The Lord is using MBS as a private cloud host for Christian churches and ministries!

MBS is hosting more than ninety servers in our rack after just two years of offering this service to The Church, and we're barely scratching the surface of our capacity! Here are some of our stats; we have:

• One rack in The Switch SuperNAP datacenter in southern Nevada (four legs of power, 29 internet trunk connections). The rack is about two-thirds full, which means we have plenty of room to add hardware as we continue to grow.
• Two 1gb fiber internet connections plugged into two cross-connected DMZ switches for HA (high availability). Our peak data throughput volume, though we're capable of 1gb (1000mb-- and can scale to 10gb), is just below 20mb. Lots of room to grow there.
• More than 500gb of RAM alone!
• Our Barracuda SPAM Filter 600 processed more than 70,000,000 emails last year! (About 85% were SPAM of some sort and got rejected.)

It was fun going up there and expanding our capacities as we get ready to add more hosting services! We hope that by Valentines Day we'll be hosting data file storage and synchronization that works a lot like Dropbox-- very simple and easy for users, but more secure and private.

How to Set an Early End to Your IT Career

While at a conference this week I spoke with a church about needs their current IT vendor weren't meeting. The main issue was that the vendor will not support any workstation platforms other than Windows. I suggested they talk with the president of that firm before making a change in case they were working on a solution they hadn't yet announced.

One of the key issues those of us in IT focus on is the rapid change of technology. But we cannot limit ourselves to any single platform or software solution for very long if we want our opportunities to serve to grow. We must constantly look for trends that are meaningful to our clients and, anticipating them, have solutions ready when our clients request them.

I have said many times when speaking to IT groups that restricting oneself to a platform or software solution is a sure way to put a horizon on one's career.

My path went from DOS to Windows to Mac; from landlines to cellular to Palm PDAs to Blackberry to Android and iOS; from Everex to Compaq to HP to Compaq (which HP then bought) to Dell and Apple; from AmiPro to WordPerfect and Lotus 123 to Word; from standalone computers to Novell NetWare to Windows Server to our private cloud. You get the idea.

If you're in IT, I encourage you to look at your client base, get a pulse on where they're headed, and begin researching and testing solutions they'll be asking for so that when they do, you'll already have expertise in that space.

New Article About Backup Strategy & the Solutions We Recommend

I just released a new article for publication that briefly works through backup strategy and recommended solutions. If you'd like to read a free copy, click here!

Church IT Round Table was Awesome!

Every time I attend a CITRT event I am so thankful!  Last week was the national event in Phoenix, hosted by Christ's Church of the Valley (in Peoria, actually); here are some of my takeaways:

• Incredible relationship building with peers.
• Great opportunity to serve my peers by sharing information, processes, and encouragement.
• Solid time of learning hi-tech details that will help on some items on our project board.
• Terrific times of worship and challenge from CCV staff.

The next national event is October 21st - 23rd this fall at Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City, KS (actually in Leawood, KS), and I strongly encourage you to go if you are involved in church and/ or ministry IT at any level.

The event to watch is http://www.churchitnetwork.com/, and the Twitter hashtag is #citrt.