Office Document Strategies Blog

A recent Gartner report looking at the worldwide market for PCs in 2016 shows the fifth year in a row where sales have declined substantially.  In the report it sales that the 2016 level of sales equals that of 2007 almost a full decade ago. 

The CES show in Vegas is the annual event which sees much of the showcase for current and future trends in technology.  As its name implies (Consumer Electronics Show) the focus is at first on consumers but much of what appears here has implications for the commercial and business market as well.  

As the new year starts off it is common to look at what the researchers are saying about the newest trends in IT, technology in general and what may be the flavour of the coming months. 

Its the final days of 2016 and we thought it might be a good time to revisit a few of the key stories of this past year before we moved into 2017.  

Any organization that has set out to build a new website after having built its presence over time will acknowledge that creating the revised site can be a difficult and monstrous task.  When that new site is designed to become the online portal to the government of Canada it is easy to see that it will become controversial and will be a major challenge.

Canadian cloud services users have always had to be cautious in their choice of providers if they want to make sure that their data remains in Canada and subject to Canadian legislative jurisdiction.  

At the risk of appearing to hammer the topic to death it is time to take another crack at warnings about Ransomware Malware attacks.  

This time of year is potentially even more challenging to IT managers and users alike as everyone is rushing to get things done before the holiday season really locks in.  It means that normal caution can easily be thrown away as people try to clear their email, deal with online activities and perhaps not take that extra two seconds that avoidance can take.

Why now?  Simply because the predators can.  A recent IT World Canada article outlines how late last month Carlton University had over 3000 of their computers affected, some in research labs by an attempted ransom ware attack.  It appears that the IT people got it under control pretty quickly and it was isolated to only a portion of the university network.

It did mean however that thousands of students, faculty and administrators were unable to use the network for a period of time while the details of the attack were sorted through.  Eventually, users were advised they could login to their network but many hours of productive time was lost due to the issues.

Another attack in Calgary saw that university paying out $20,000 to the ransomers.  Again much time and effort was expended to deal with the circumstances.  These are just two of the known instances where Canadian organizations have been impacted by such attacks.

The are for certain many others where users and organizations have not publicized their problems with malware.

 For some reason Canada is reported as being more prepared to send compensation for removing the attack when compared to other jurisdictions.  Why this would be the case is subject to speculation but unfortunately if it gets known in the perpetrators world it could lead to Canadian targets becoming even more frequent.

What do you do?

The first line of defense is the users on the network.  Encouraging everyone to take a little time to investigate whether an email from an unfamiliar source is legit.  If a user is not CERTAIN of the sender then the default response should be to NO OPEN IT.  Either delete it and take the chance someone legit has to try again, or contact IT support to have it checked out.  

If you have been a user of DropBox, Google Drive, Boxx etc. then you should look at Datto Drive right away.

As part of their introductory offer the first 1 million signups will receive one year's access to 1Terrabyte of storage FREE.  This permits substantial use of the service to easily test whether your need is worth considering a paid subscription thereafter available at a low $10 month for unlimited users after first year.

There are many file sharing services available that start as a primarily consumer focused product and which can expand into a business and enterprise solution.  For most of these there are limitations built in either from a cost or a security based approach.  In addition for Canadian based businesses there are concerns with data jurisdiction since being able to specify where you data is stored is not necessarily one of the features of most of them.

In the next few days and all of next week we are going to continue to be inundated with ads for all kinds of Black Friday related promotions, offers and specials.  In addition the popular media will be telling stories of all kinds of things people are doing to be sure they get to take advantage of the Black Friday deals whether it is camping out to be first in line, working as a team to make sure they get to all of their preferred sales or simply stories about how important this period is to the success of retailers. 

Of course in Canada Black Friday is not as key to everyone's lives as it is in the US since the sales are not as giant, the weekend is not always the biggest sales day of the retail year and the focus is a little less hectic since we have already celebrated our Thanksgiving and our retailers usually save their best for Boxing Day.

Then there is Cyber Monday next week which kicks off the primary online sales period designed to match Black Friday and extend the frenzy into the online sales fields.

Commercial markets don't fully mimic retail

For businesses focused on the commercial market and who sell primarily to other businesses Black Friday is not quite the same.  Since most commercial business is less emotionally driven than consumer sales the excitement of a Black Friday is pretty hard to build and is hard to replicate across varied industries.

There are however periods in every business type where opportunities can exist both for sellers and for purchasers to create something with a part of the energy that seems to fill the Black Friday period.

Think of Open Houses, Anniversary Sales, Industry Workshops, Trade Shows as some of the commercially supported Black Friday proxies designed to bring buyers and sellers together in ways to make deals happen.

Characteristics

To become a Black Friday proxy the activity needs to exhibit some specific characteristics:

• Offer enough special value to get people talking about it
• Be time sensitive, with only a short duration to take up the promo
• Offer limited range of special promotion items or services
• Be publicly promoted at least to a set target potential group of purchasers
• Provide unique value that is not going to be replicated soon again
• Focus on rapid deployment and as close to instant return as possible.

Recent announcements about Microsoft contracting for massive amounts of wind generated power to run several of its data centres causes me to think that this kind of  renewable energy just may have a good life without massive government structured subsidies.