Within the Big IT Decisions, with which I help small nonprofits make, there are several foci, that in particular pique my interests. The exploration of these foci are the intended purpose of this blog. Through researching, presenting what I find, and conversation with others, I intend to better inform my recommendations to my clients.
It is my hope, that those of you who find one of these foci interesting will join the conversation.
- Unified Threat Management (UTM): does brand make a difference in a Mac environment, either in controlling the gateway/router device or in cross platform VPN client options?
- Outsourced IT Admin: what IT roles need to be accounted for in the small nonprofit organization and which of those can be outsourced?
- Green IT: what does it mean and what are the savings that can be had:
- Utility costs savings through purchasing decisions and policy/proceedure.
- Virtualization of servers and/or client operating systems
- Terminal Services– virtual Mac clients on generic hardware, what is possible and what is the benefit?
- Paperless offices– how far can we go, what infrastructure is most cost effective toward that end, and what to do when the electricity gets turned off?
- Cloud computing: what cloud services can be used to advantage by what kinds of small nonprofit organizations and what are the pitfalls– again, what to do when the access gets turned off?
- What if the hosting organization changes their model or goes out business?
- If you were lawyer investigating government wrong doing and bringing it to court, where do you feel comfortable storing your client data?
- E-mail and collaborative services: Google Apps vs Kerio, when is one a better choice then the other, and why?
- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Return on Investment (ROI) by platform vs cloud– when does it make sense to support multiple platforms on the desktop or in the server room? Under what circumstances, does a particular platform or hosted solution have a better TCO or ROI, than another, or do we just make blanket statement? I don’t think so. We need to make better choices than that.
- IPv6 Transition– IPv4 addresses are being quickly depleted and IPv6 addressing for URLs will be required within two years. How does the network infrastructure need to be changed to be ready for IPv6?
- OpenSource in a Mac environment– what OpenSource software is indisputably wonderful and when might one not want to take the chance? Firefox is OpenSource software that I put on every machine. I have also bought into OpenSource software that had a large investment of learning and then the developer community fell apart? When is it OK to jump into the water and under what circumstances should an organization wait-and-see?
Those are my questions for the present. They will change over time, but I hope to engage each over the next months– maybe, a new posting weekly.
Tags: NGO, Nonprofit, NPO, OpenSource, Out Source, Outsource, Small Organizations, System Management
