Creative Solutions Help Schools Deploy Chromebooks and Google Apps

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Schools looking to engage students and deploy one-to-one technology programs face many challenges, including limited budgets, annual budget cycles, and the need to select technologies and services that integrate with curriculum goals and objectives. To overcome these challenges, schools are turning to creative funding solutions like those offered by Cumulus Global through its strategic partnership with First American Education Finance. By offering deferred initial payments, flexible payment schedules, short term rentals, and lease rates as low as 0%, the newly announced alliance offers schools more ways to fit Chromebooks, Google Apps for Education deployments, and related services into their curriculum and their budgets.

“Chromebooks make a great choice for student computing as they enable web-based learning and enhance student-teacher interaction,” notes Allen Falcon, CEO of Cumulus Global. “Chromebooks also work well for schools as they cost half to a third of laptops and tablets, and as much as 80% less for administration, management, and support.”

Adding value beyond traditional financing services, First American Education Finance provides a web-based asset management system that reduces a school’s cost of tracking and managing devices, device assignments, and refresh cycles. Cumulus Global and First American Education Finance will also help schools dispose of older technology, applying funds to new purchases and lease payments.

“We are uniquely positioned to help schools acquire and deploy Chromebooks while saving them time, effort, and money,” added Falcon. “Schools can obtain equipment now, and pay for it as their budget cycle allows.”

Chad Wiedenhofer of First American Education Finance echoed Falcon’s statements. “As a finance company committed to the education community, we are excited to make Chromebooks more easily available to Cumulus Global customers. We are committed to developing innovative finance solutions that help schools to acquire leading classroom technology.”

Schools interested in Chromebooks for Education and financing options can contact Cumulus Global for more information at http://www2.cumulusglobal.com/Chromebook_funding.

About First American Education Finance
First American Education Finance is dedicated to bettering your student’s lives by providing your school with the resources to succeed. First American provides competitive leasing, financing and asset management solutions that help schools budget and manage new technologies. First American is a City National Bank Company.

About Cumulus Global
Cumulus Global (https://www.cumulusglobal.com) is Cloud Solutions Provider and a Google Apps Premier SMB Reseller helping small and mid-size businesses, non-profits, governments, and educational institutions move from in-house systems to cloud computing solutions. We align technology with our clients’ goals, objectives, and bottom lines. In addition to Google Apps, Cumulus Global offers a range of cloud-based security, storage, and server solutions.

On-Premise IT: The Bad, The Good, and the Ugly

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We do not hate or dislike Microsoft.  But, looking at the company and its products, Microsoft often provides us great examples for some of the issues with in-house systems for small and mid-size enterprises.

Case in Point: According to ComputerWorld, Microsoft will issue 12 security updates for 57 vulnerabilities across Windows, Office, and Exchange.  In an extremely unusual move, 2 of the updates are for Internet Explorer (IE) from version IE6 through IE10.

The Bad:  The scope and severity of these updates are the largest since April, 2011:

  • 5 of the updates are “critical”, the rest are “important”.
  • The vulnerabilities addressed are in every version of Windows from XP Service Pack 3 and Vista through Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows RT.
  • Updates are needed for all current versions of MS Office and for MS Exchange.

The Good:  Microsoft is able to fix the vulnerabilities found, even though some of their products continue to fail security tests.

The Ugly:  While these updates make on-premise IT environments more secure, they come at a huge cost, particularly small and mid-size businesses.  Applying these updates means touching every server, workstation, terminal server, and Windows RT tablet — some more than once.   While larger companies may use images to update workstations, applying these updates still requires building and testing the image before distribution. Hours of work and multiple reboots mean time and money — even if the work is done after hours.

Perspective:  One of the major drawbacks of on-premise IT solutions for small and mid-size enterprises is exactly this kind of maintenance.  For hosted and cloud solutions designed for large-scale multi-tenancy, like Google Apps and others, pushing out updates is automated, fast, reliable.  And, these updates rarely if ever require local updates.

Moving to a cloud or hybrid computing environment can save you time, money, and aggravation, while providing a more secure, more reliable system.

Interested in learning more, read what companies that have moved to the cloud and Google Apps have to say in this white paper.

Cloud Security Focus Shifts to Data Protection

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This blog post is the first in a series on Data Protection issues and practical solutions.

When companies began moving to cloud computing solution, a great deal of time and anxiety was spent on security.  For most considering the move, the questions were basic: Will my vendor access my data?  Will my vendor prevent unauthorized access to my data? How secure is my connection to my data? With the maturing of security standards (SSAE-16, ISO 27001, FISMA, and others), these fundamental questions are less of a concern to most businesses.  Top tier providers not only create secure infrastructures, but build commitments to customer data security and integrity into their contracts, Terms of Service, and Service Level Agreements, or SLAs. That said, security in the cloud requires thought and planning.  In addition to basic access concerns, organizations need to be as vigilant with cloud-based data as they are with in-house data when it comes to data integrity, exposure, and loss prevention.  Holistically, the focus should be “Data Protection”. As we look at Data Protection in this blog series, we will focus on the areas of greatest risk to your data:

  • User Identity and Account Security
  • User Actions — accidental and malicious
  • Data Leaks /Permission Errors
  • Mal-ware
  • Rogue Applications

For each of these issues, we will look at how the risks change (or not) when data is in a public cloud service, as well as practical solutions for mitigating the risks.

Risky Office365 Update to Take 10 Months

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According to reports on ZDnet, Microsoft will begin rolling out updates to Office 365 as early as this month.  The addition of new features will take 10 months, and should be completed by November 2013.

Included in the update:

  • Office 2013 Components
  • Updates to the Exchange Management Console
  • Office Web Apps will move to the latest versions
  • Lync will include multi-person video conferencing

For many users, however, they will need to upgrade desktops and on-premise servers.  An update to Exchange is needed to use the new management console features and the Office 2013 components require Windows 7 or Windows 8 on the desktop.

This upgrade is a test for Microsoft and its customers, triggering a series of webinars and meetings between Microsoft and its partners.  Under the prior BPOS service, Microsoft never provided an upgrade.  Rather, customers had to start over with Office365. With this upgrade, Microsoft is testing its ability to perform the same system upgrades its customers want to avoid on a massive, multi-tenant scale.

In comparison, Google rolled out Hangouts and Hangouts on Air to Google Apps for Business customers over a 3 week period with zero customer disruption.  The difference is that Google Apps is designed for innovation and enhancement.  The underlying architecture of Office365 relies on old models of complex, periodic service packs and upgrades applied to virtual servers on shared hardware.

An outdated architecture and higher costs of ownership and use — a winning combination for your business?

 

A Peak Behind the Scenes at Google

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Ever wonder where the Internet “lives”?  Curious about what the inside of a Google data
center looks like?

Google recently published a pictorial overview of their data center operations

National Moment of Silence

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Friday 12/21 9:30 AM EST

Sandy-Hook-National-Moment-of-Silence

 

Case Study: Google Apps Supports Strategic Growth at Merrimack Mortgage Company

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The Company

Founded in 1983, Merrimack Mortgage Company (MMC) continues to be a leader in residential mortgage lending throughout the Northeast and is one of the region’s largest independent mortgage bankers.

MMC prides itself for being the company that delivers the same products as the big lenders but with the high quality service levels inherent in a small lender. This winning combination of finesse and strength has led Merrimack Mortgage Company to its exceptional growth during the past three decades. The company’s success is attributed to its core strategy of providing a high level of customer satisfaction at a competitive price.

The Challenge

Merrimack Mortgage Company relies on extending its operations by expanding the size of the company’s geographic market area with new satellite branches. The IT department is challenged with bringing these loan officers located in satellite branches into the company’s processes effectively and quickly to allow them to be up and running as fast as possible.

The Solution

With integrated communications and file services, the transition to Google Apps was part of a strategic initiative to put the company in a competitive position to enable it to expand its operations effectively, from a primarily New England-based operation to cover their expansion outside of New England. This expansion included enabling a homogenous environment to all of the company’s loan officers while still complying with SOX, GLBA, ISO and other internal governance and audit requirements.

“The business side of me saw Google Apps as a slam dunk from a ROI and TCO perspective, and the technologist in me also couldn’t argue against introducing variable costs, scalability, availability, and OS and hardware independence. Cumulus Global recommended and helped us deploy CloudLock and Backupify for compliance, policy enforcement, risk mitigation, and data protection. This allowed us to fully embrace Google Apps and made both my Chief Compliance Officer and CFO very happy.”
— Matthew Seaton, CIO Merrimack Mortgage Company

Integrating Google Apps and CloudLock, Merrimack Mortgage Company extends its security perimeter to the cloud. MMC ensures its use of email, calendars, contacts, and files stored and shared via Google Drive comply with regulations like SOX, GLBA, ISO and other internal Acceptable Use Policies.  Backupify protection data across Google Apps accounts against data damage or deletion due to user error.

“I am not sure if I would have felt confident with my decision to move our company’s communication and collaboration needs to Google Apps for Business without the solutions and assistance from Cumulus Global. The integrated solution has relieved my anxiety over having our company data hosted by a third party,” said Seaton.  “Our management team was relieved by the value proposition.  We pay as we grow rather than making large up-front capital investments.”

Since MMC’s initial Google Apps for Business implementation in June of 2011, MMC has increased sales staff by 15% and the number of physical locations by 26%. Operations staff increases have been minimal in comparison. The greatest benefit, in regards to increased sales staffing and locations, is the ability turn-up new team members literally in minutes. In more recent months, MMC has seen back-to-back monthly company record breaking sales numbers.

To learn more about Merrimack Mortgage Company, visit: www.merrimackmortgage.com.

The Video Service in Google Apps

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OK, it is not really new.  But, major changes are in the works.   By the end of this year, Google Video for Business will be shut down with companies’ videos and the service capabilities moving to Google Drive.

Google Drive has many advantages over Google Video for Business. including:

  • Uploading and streaming HD quality video
  • Captions/subtitles in over 100 languages, and multiple tracks for each language
  • The ability to embed a video on any page
  • Advanced sharing controls, including the ability to prevent viewers from downloading the video
  • SSL streaming for secure watching of videos
  • User comments on the video page
  • API access to manage videos

Migrated Google Video for Business video files will not count against the user’s Google Drive storage quota (new videos will), and all links to them will be automatically redirected to Google Drive.  As the migration happens, videos will be stored in a folder named “Google Video for Business.”

Best Practices

While migrated videos will not count towards Drive storage quotas, future videos will.   Uploaded videos go through the same processing and compression as they did with the Video for Business service (a 30 minute video we uploaded uses only 28K), organizations that heavily use video may want to setup an additional user account to serve as the owner of videos.  By creating a central account, managing additional storage, when needed, becomes easier.

More Information

For more information, feel free to contact us.  Google has also published a nice help article on the subject.

 

Gmail and Drive: Finally Together

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The wait is over!  With the next release cycle of Google Apps, you will be able to insert/attach any file up to 10GB in size from Google Drive.   Rather than sending files which may exceed size limits on many email services, recipients receive a link and the ability to open or download the file via Google Drive (no account needed).

And, if you are sending a file to somebody without access permissions, the smart assistant will let you know.

For more info, visit the Official Gmail Blog.

 

 

Microsoft: Pay More for the Same Old CALs

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Back in July, we blogged about how Microsoft’s new server pricing model, combined with the end of the Small Business Server package, would result in significant cost increases for many small businesses (see SBS End of Life: Microsoft Punishes Small Businesses).

Starting December 1, 2012, Microsoft is increasing the pricing for User CALs (client access licenses) across most of its product lines.   The higher CAL pricing does NOT include any new or additional functionality — just a higher price.

As most readers are aware, Microsoft offers two types of client access licenses.  Device CALs allow unlimited users to connect from a single physical device.  User CALs allow a single user to access servers and services from an unlimited number of devices.  According to Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet, “Microsoft has positioned User CALs as being the optimal choice if company employees need to have roaming access to the corporate network using multiple devices …”.  As such, most companies purchase User CALs.

Without adding any new features or capabilities, Microsoft is increasing the price of User CALs across all of the following products (in alphabetical order):

  • Bing Maps Server CAL
  • Core CAL Suite
  • Enterprise CAL Suite
  • Exchange Server Standard and Enterprise CALs
  • Lync Server Standard and Enterprise CALs
  • Project Server CAL
  • SharePoint Server Standard and Enterprise CALs
  • System Center 2012 Client Management Suite
  • System Center Configuration Manager
  • System Center Endpoint Protection
  • Visual Studio TFS CAL
  • Windows Multipoint Server CAL
  • Windows Server CAL
  • Windows Server RDS, RMS, Terminal Services CAL

When asked about these changes, Microsoft tells ZDNet, “These CAL changes include a user-based option that offers more value in support across unlimited devices …”

What Microsoft fails to mention, however, is that “These CAL changes” are not real changes at all — user CALs have always supported unlimited devices. The only “change” is the higher price.

For companies with Enterprise Agreements, Software Assurance, or other volume licensing agreements, the higher prices kick in at the end of your licensing term.  For everyone else, December 1st marks the day companies will need to pay more for the same old CALs.