Bruce Naylor: Hi, welcome to the Frugal technology show I am your host Bruce Naylor where every week we talk about small business technology. How to make money with your computers, how to save money with technology? What's good, maybe what's not so good and we are always glad to have you join us and every week we have a theme for our show and this week's theme is talking about file servers. What are they? Why you need one? When you need one and so I thought we take and spend a little bit of time about that because servers tend to be a very significant investment for a small business.
So I guess some of the question is why should you buy a file server? Well if you think about it, on your network or if you have a network or maybe you don't, they are on your different desktop PCs, you got people keeping data everywhere. So a file server is a way to bring all that data together in a centralized location. It is another way to share equipment. It's expensive, scanners, multifunction peripherals, copies. All these sort of things can be generally shared when they are hooked up to a server. You can run more powerful applications, run business applications when you have a server, maybe requires an SQL database, we call SQL, but more powerful line of business applications that require a server to run on.
It's a centralized place to back up all of your company data. So that's a good reason to have it and finally there is better security. With Windows and some other operating systems you have a way to authenticate a user and set permissions of what they can and cannot do on the network. So that's all part of having that server. They are efficient, they are scalable, they tend to be more reliable, they are more powerful, than using a desktop PC maybe in a workgroup kind of environment. You will see that a lot of times when we go out in the field, a lot of small companies maybe have an XP Pro Box and they have got some shares on it and people are saving their work to that. It is not the same thing at all. You don't have the authentication involved, you don't have the security involved, you don't have the ability to run server applications on it.
It's a way to get started, but you need to sit down and ask yourself when is the right time to buy a server and I was doing kind of research for this show and come across an excellent pdf file from Intel and so they provided a real nice pdf and in it says, is this the time to buy a server? So the first question that comes up in your business you kind of make this little checklist and see those buyers views that you -- or example you need an efficient reliable way for multiple computers in your business to share information and if you do that's a good sign that your company is now ready for a server. How about if you need to protect your business information and network from unauthorized users? Hey we all have to deal with that sooner or later. Maybe you have cleaning people or you have got other people coming in and out, you place a business everyday, you don't know.
It's a good idea to lock that network down where you require user names, passwords, strong passwords, etcetera, to protect the valuable data that lives on your company network. You need to back up information on a regular basis and I don't know how many times a company has had a real issue, a real problem. They have had a failure of some kind and they have lost data and now it's a big, big problem because they did not keep or maintain regular backups. Well they didn't have a server, this guy copied some of his stuff to a USB drive and maybe this guy has got some of the data on a thumb drive and maybe this one didn't backup anything at all and of course the other email is lost.
It could just get real ugly and these companies when they don't do this, it costs a hell of the lot of money to get the data back and that's not counting things like fire or theft or any of the other things that can happen to your small business.
So it doesn't make a lot of sense to have this central repository to keep your data for backups. Another thing is the benefit from sharing equipments such as printers and scanners. Laserjet printers are an expensive investment and it makes a lot of sense to share that printer among many users rather than trying to get everybody their own printer. You can also sent policies on printers, especially to one connected to the server. Maybe the time and day they can print you can find out who was printing what. So you are saving a lot of money on these expensive pieces of equipment. Your employees need immediate secure access to company information and resources away from the office and products like Microsoft's Small Business Server with remote web workplace allows your employees to do just that.
They don't have to buy a service like GotoMyPC or anything like that, they can just connect right through the server and then right through their desktop PC and get access to the files they need. They can get Outlook over the web, access SharePoint. They can view all this stuff by virtue of this running in a server type environment. You and your employees need simultaneous access to share files, email or applications.
It's going to happen, and probably -- or it's already happening in your business and wouldn't it be great to have that central repository. You will ask what a server does? You can have your own email server, file server, print server. You can like I said, there is Microsoft Small Business Server that kind of combines all those different server applications into one.
You need to implement then software applications such as the CRM tools and again there is one we were referring to early about more powerful line of business applications. These are some great applications to make your business better, make it more efficient, take customer service to whole new level, but they are not going to run on a workstation, we call a peer-to-peer network or a workgroup. They have to run on dedicated server platform. But all this investment is going to make you money in years, which you have to look at, your return on investment on the purchase of the server. You need to host your own website and email system, well there is certainly in internet -- for example share point services which runs on a server application or Microsoft Share Point Server.
Hosting your own email such as Exchange requires to run on the server operating system. It depends where you are at in your business, certainly may or may not be necessary but certainly you maybe there at that point and have a need for that. You need to communicate more effectively with customers, employees and suppliers.
Again this kind of comes back to different line of business applications, hosting your own email, CRM etcetera. And you want access to comprehensive business data and information inside into your business health. Again it takes different server applications, operating systems and Microsoft Small Business Server and Window server, they have what they call health check. So this system certainly is checking the state of its hard drive, CPU utilization, memory utilization the various aspects of a healthy server and issues you reports.
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