Turning Real Estate Into A Rental

Many homeowners looking to sell their home have quickly found that the downturn in the economy has turned the real estate market into a buyer's market. This means that it might take a little longer than usual to sell a home. As a result, many homeowners have given up on trying to sell their home, and have instead turned their home into a rental property.

With a buyer's market, the buyer has the upper hand in the purchase of a home. Therefore, the homeowner has no choice but to either sell their home for less than they paid for it, or let their home continue to sit on the market until they receive a better offer price for the home. This leaves many homeowners with no choice but to offer there home as a rental property because it can be financially difficult to pay a mortgage on two homes, especially if they have purchased a new home before finding a buyer for the old home. Renting a property will sometimes have added expenses related to maintenance and wear and tear. However, this is sometimes a better option if the home cannot sell because it allows the homeowner to maintain the mortgage on an unsold home.

With more homeowners choosing to offer their unsold home as a rental, there are more real estate agents who are also offering property management services. This is beneficial to the homeowner because the real estate agent will handle the tenant screening process to find the right tenant. Many times the real estate agent can find a rent-to-own tenant, which gives the tenant the option to eventually purchase the home.

The Advantages And Disadvantages of Managed IT Services

It can often be convenient and affordable to arrange to lease servers that are located elsewhere and watched over by another company rather than going to all of the trouble and expense of building and setting up your own server room. If you have chosen to do this, your next step will be to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of managed IT services for your business.

* Management By Experts - A contract with a company to provide you with managed IT Services will mean that your servers will be managed by people who have this type of activity as their sole job. This will often mean that it will be handled more efficiently and schedules for activities like patching and running backups will be followed more strictly than they would be if your company handled the server management for itself.

* Costs - The way that the costs work out for a management contract can vary. If you already have people within your business who can take on the extra role, it may not make financial service to contract with an outside firm to do so. On the other hand, you can save yourself the expense of hiring and training people if your company does not already possess this expertise.

* Software Choice - You should make sure that you have a clear idea of your software needs in advance so that you can discuss them with the company that would be doing your Managed IT Services. If you have a particularly unusual software package that is required for your business, you may discover that their contract will not include support for it. On the other hand, most common software programs should be available.

Nearly anyone can buy a couple of computers and set them up as servers, but setting up a system that is secure and reliable is a much more complicated and time-intensive process. If handling large numbers of servers isn't part of the core operations of your business, it may make sense to outsource this work by making arrangements to hire another company to provide Managed IT Services.

Backup Service

These online file hosting services or file storage services are designed to store static content such as large files not web pages. By definition these online backup services allow web and FTP access. In most of the cases the sites that provide these backup services are optimized for serving to many users. Even so we can say that some file hosting sites are optimized for single user storage. Here is made the difference between the hosting and storage. The common services provided by these specialized sites are video sharing, virtual storage or remote backup.
A category of shared files for hosting are the software products. The providers of shareware software are usually confronted with the problem of sharing their products. This involves another costly problem such as the bandwidth cost. This type of hosting provides additional services such as statistics or marketing features.

Personal file storage is a lot different from file hosting. This alternative is addressed especially to private individuals and allows them to create so called network storage for different reasons starting with personal backup, file access file distribution. They are able to share their files and make them public but there is the second alternative too. They might want to protect their data from other users of the file storage web site and might agree with the usage of a password.
It is also good to know that these personal file storage services are not affordable for everyone because of the high costs. That is why these off-site backup services are not commonly used.
Companies with major internet presence might use services specialized in distributing cached or static content such as Akamai Technologies, Amazon S3 or Redswoosh. These situations are seen when the mentioned companies encounter bandwidth congestion problems.

It is well known that we can see if we look for them both free and buyable file storage services. Some sites that provide these services will require the usage of software that makes the files available only for computers which have the mentioned software installed.

Other services allow users to retrieve files through any web browser. It is also known that the increased inbox space offered by the webmail providers may be used by some persons as a virtual hard drive.

Another thing that is good to be known is that some sites offer the free unlimited file storage but along with a limit in the file size.

Backup Service

Iceland Seafood International (ISI) has numerous offices located in ten countries and sells seafood products to UK retailers, and in order for the headquarters in Iceland to manage the business on a global scale, it is important that the data generated in all of its satellite offices is protected. ISI was previously using a tape-based backup service, which was not efficient or effective in its subsidiary office locations in the United Kingdom and Germany. The tape-based backup was "just about" manageable in the Iceland offices, but it was proving difficult to manage the tape backups on an international scale: The tapes weren't being changed at the stipulated times, it was difficult to recover data from tapes located all over the world and there was the additional concern of tapes potentially going missing.

SecurStore Remote Backup Service used all its knowledge and experience to bring the most effective and efficient solution to ISI by using Asigra Televaulting. ISI's multi-office corporate structure demanded a backup/restore service that respected remote data and ensured that it is protected to the same level as corporate data. ISI turned to SecurStore to eliminate these problems with their agentless distributed backup software service, which does not require tapes and allows a company with geographically dispersed offices to back up and recover data from a single location. Data protection is assured as encrypted data is backed up via disk over the WAN and stored offsite. SecurStore's high-calibre services guaranteed ISI successful and fast retrieval of any data they require from any office location around the globe.

"Within minutes of starting the test phase of the SecurStore Remote Backup Service we realised the benefits distributed backup and recovery would provide us with, not just from a cost perspective, but also from a global business continuity perspective," said Runar Bjarnthorsson, IT Manager of Iceland Seafood International."We chose SecurStore because their service eliminates the possibility of human error and allows us to protect our entire company's data from every global office location, which can all be managed from our headquarters in Iceland," continued Bjarnthorsson. "We saw very quickly from initial tests how much cost we could save with agentless software by paying for the amount of data stored and not for each machine that is backed up.”

SecurStore Remote Backup Service, provides ISI with an agentless backup/recovery environment for the entire organisation, including information residing on desktops, laptops and servers. This allows ISI to protect every system on the network without the hassle of agent-based license fees, agent installation, agent-induced performance loss and annual agent upgrades. Whenever a new PC is added to the ISI network, there is no need for a backup agent to be installed, which is a complex and costly burden. ISI only pays for the total amount of compressed data stored.

Alexander EIRIKSSON, Director of Securstore Business class Online Backup Service.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Alexander_Eiriksson

Backup Services

Backup and recovery continues to be an important but perplexing part in an otherwise solid data management and protection plan. The usual suspects include growing data loads, nonexistent backup windows, too much network traffic or poor performance, inefficient storage hardware, media management problems and poor backup reporting. However, these problems generally all stem from one common source: A lack of in-depth understanding of the storage environment and how it satisfies business objectives.
Many business environments have data consisting of mainly small and medium-sized files--and a lot of them. Others may have fewer larger files, and still others a combination of small and large. The complicated nature of data management makes backups a crucial issue in IT. Businesses need to be assured their backups are successful and that they're backing up what really needs to be backed up.
Data type may vary dramatically (such as e-mail, databases, multimedia and graphics) and data may serve one or multiple related applications. Data also exists under differing degrees of confidentiality, such as company financial information, employee records or customer transactions. There may also be a significant amount of prohibited data if company policy is against employees keeping MP3 files or unauthorized software on the network.Advertisement
Depending on the size and nature of the organization, some decisions about backup and recovery may or may not be flexible. Federal, state and local governments have imposed requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley to ensure that enterprises are conducting business properly. You may be subject to regulations from the ATF, DOD, DOE, DOJ, FAA, FDA, IRS, SEC, and a handful of others.
In order to better manage disparate backup needs and requirements, and before acquiring new storage hardware or adding another layer of network complexity to achieve better backup, perform a thorough assessment of the storage environment and the data itself that correctly identifies the problems. Are backups taking too long because unchanged, obsolete data is being backed up too often? For example: Are there a small number of large files to back up, or a large number of small files? Is the data available during its scheduled backup, or is it in use? And if it is in use, is it always or sometimes? Are unnecessary or old data files being repeatedly backed up. Once you have thoroughly evaluated the data and the available storage resources, you will likely find more options than reactively purchasing hard disks or ever-larger tape libraries to solve a data management problem.
To make an intelligent decision on data protection, you need visibility into the backup and storage environment. The first step in gaining visibility is finding out why the data exists, who owns it, where it resides, when it was last accessed, what level of archiving versus availability the business application requires, and then determining whether current technologies can meet these needs.
Once the data itself has been evaluated in relation to application and usefulness, a more granular view of the environment is achieved by proceeding to an evaluation of the repositories where data is kept and where it must be duplicated for backup and recovery. This includes DAS, NAS, and SAN resources, file servers and application servers such as DNS servers, SQL and Exchange, as well as desktops and notebooks, which may contain data that is just as valuable and irreplaceable to the operation as data stored on servers.
As part of your assessment, note the storage capacity both in use and available for backup destinations to estimate the overall health and lifespan of these systems in order to help with capacity planning. This task may require a forecasting or trending tool depending on the size and complexity of the network, preferably one that will also identify wasted storage space or 'islands.' Some questions to consider include: Is server consolidation an option? Is it possible to compare allocated versus unallocated storage space? Which are the fullest systems, and what is the likelihood of maintaining them at present capacity?
Once the data and the storage environment have been evaluated, the next step is to consider the requirements for protecting the data to determine if these requirements can be reduced. Determine how necessary it is to access the data, how frequently requested the data is, and how quickly it must be recovered--including how tolerant executive management may be in the event of downtime.
An assessment of your storage environment and backup systems is the first step in establishing and clarifying effective policies and procedures for managing data. Policy-based tools to manage storage resources are gaining in popularity and usability. This category can include information lifecycle management, compliance with data retention regulations, assigning certain applications performance priority, assigning certain departments access priority, and other operational goals to be met.

Backup Service

Online backup services are one of the most revolutionary ideas of the internet age in my opinion. All computer users who rely upon their computers for their day to day operations know how important it is to have a recent backup at all times. Technology has simplified our lives in so many ways; however, technology is not fail proof. Because we are so highly dependent on it in this day and age, a technological failure or a simple spurt of human error can throw us back, seemingly into the stone ages, especially if we do not have our computer data backed up where it can be quickly and easily recovered.

Of course we all have good intentions and plan to do regular backups "some day". Some companies even require computer users on their staff to make regular backups as a matter of policies and procedures. However, in both cases we are relying on humans to take care of backing up data so it will be available if unexpected hardware failures occur. Humans don't always do what they are supposed to do, and making backups is one of those tasks that gets overlooked more often than others. Automating the process of making backups on a regular basis using online backup services diminishes the odds that you will caught in a bind without a backup of your electronic data.

Another major advantage of online backup services is that they provide an offsite backup of your computer data. Sometimes the backup is even stored on a separate computer network in a remote location that is in a different geographic region. This is a remarkable advantage of online backup services because not only is the backed up data safe in case of a hardware failure, it is also protected against catastrophic events like fires or floods at your place of business as well as being protected from loss in case of a natural disaster like a tornado, a hurricane or a major earthquake. Online backup services can literally save the day, and the business, when such disastrous events occur.

With online backup services you can schedule backups to be done through an automated process at regular intervals throughout the day. The frequency of your backups conducted through online backup services is pretty dependent upon your business and the volume of business you do in a day. With most online backup services, the frequency of the backups affects the cost of the services, so this is something to consider when deciding how frequently it is necessary to backup your computer systems.

Different online backup services also have a range of packages with different levels of online backup services and relatively varying fees. Pricing structures for online backup services generally fluctuate based upon the level of service provided. The cost, automation capabilities, security and the availability of the backups for immediate restoration are important considerations when selecting online backup services for your business.
The price of online backup services usually increases along with the amount of storage needed in terms of megabytes or gigabytes. So, before you choose a particular plan for online backup services, be sure you know what data will need to be backed up, the intervals at which the automated backups will need to be made, and the storage space required from your online backup services to house your data.

Regardless of the type of business you operate or the size of your business, the use of automated online backup services is recommended. Online backup services give you peace of mind knowing that your backups are safely stored in a remote location and available for restoration whenever you need them. Online backup services that are automated also ensure that backups are made in a timely manner at preset intervals that you have determined are necessary.