 Thank you very much. Good evening. My name's Andrew Donoghue. I'm the managing director of Blue Packets. I'm here this evening to talk about managed services and the cloud. I'll quickly cover what I'm going to run through. So now's your chance to go to the toilet. First of all, will this presentation be useful for you? What are managed services about trusted configurations and system life cycles? A quick introduction to cloud computing, about cloud computing and managed services, getting to the cloud and your systems in the cloud. First things first, should you be watching this presentation? If you need your IT systems to be working, the answer is yes. Going back 10, 15 years ago, IT could be down for half an hour or an hour. Life went on. You go and do your paperwork, shuffle things around. Now your paperwork is your IT system. If it stops, everything inside your organization is probably going to stop with it. There are a few exceptions to this, I should note. There are some people who can get away with their IT for half a day or a day, but those businesses are becoming less and less as time progresses. Next thing, what are managed services? Think of these as a systematic approach to delivering IT servicing. It varies greatly from the paper hour model that a lot of you might be used to. So instead of having someone come out for an hour block or two hour block or five hour block to deliver services, it's based on an outcome. So that means the provider can deliver the service in the most efficient manner. As mentioned, often under managed services, specific tasks are undertaken for a set price. So this means things like backup testing, security updates, hardware health checks if you've got hardware on site, reporting, monitoring and general management and perhaps some reactive servicing is bundled in with that price. There's an efficiency dividend here. This means the provider can provide the outcome in the most efficient way possible. They don't get tied up in red tape asking you for permission to spend five or minutes solving a task. They go and solve the task with the problem themselves. That way next month, the problem doesn't exist. They can give a good quality solution and a faster outcome. It also helps solve bill shock too, which is a big one. And this comes down to the old school thinking of fix it when it breaks is no longer good enough. Now get my car serviced every 10,000 Ks or so. Yes, the mechanic makes money out of me along the way, but my car is never ever broken down. I hope it doesn't. It provides greater uptime for me. It's there when I need it. And I don't have any nasty things like the oil running out and downtime because the car's not working. It's a bit of a leap frog, but talking about trusted configurations. So if your ICT provider is giving you advice about what hardware to use and you still need devices, this applies to both on-premise and off-premise in the cloud devices. It's important to listen to them if they're giving good advice about how you connect, what you purchase to get to the cloud. They're a different device and some are very expensive, some are cheap. The cheaper option is always attractive. Often the cheaper options can be have a shorter lifespan, be slower and much more expensive to manage. So while you might have a few dollars right now over the life of the product or the life of the service, it'll probably cost you a lot more. The next question is what to manage because managed services come at a price. So you might have dozens of systems lying around and you might have one that's only used by a few staff. The simple answer to that is if you can't afford it to break, then manage it. If it's going to be too costly to manage, consolidate, move it on. There's a whole bunch of options out there for you. If it's a server or a device running in the corner that only a few staff could use but you can't afford to turn it off, then something's wrong. You can either turn it off or you need to look after it. If it's not worth managing, as I said, get rid of it. And everything will eventually fail. So if you're just waiting on it to break, you're waiting on a disaster and you're better off dealing with it now. Managed services are good at making your systems run a bit faster. Cleaning out your temporary files, running security updates, making sure the experience as a whole is a nice one. The problem is you can get this illusion that your system's gonna run forever. So yes, the provider's doing a great job. Things are working. Things are working. Things are working. Things are still working. There is a point there where software updates, maintenance, and general IT support cannot make that device work forever. Well, that system work forever. Presume sometime it's gonna fail. Don't wait until it's time to fail. Get in early, plan ahead. Even if you don't execute that plan for two or three years, have that plan ready. So when you decide, you decide to move on your terms and it's not a rushed decision because rushed decisions will cost you a lot of money. Cloud computing. Besides a fancy marketing term, perhaps the simplest way I can describe it is a resource that is used outside of your network. So it's something your company doesn't own or operate. It's an IT service provided by someone else. This could be as simple as email, external email, anti-spam, anti-virus scanning, offsite backup, who go all the way through to a complete managed virtual server or software as a service where your application is delivered to you as a finalised product. And this is where the type of service becomes very important. If it's a raw service, as I said, like a virtual server, who is checking your backup and system status? Who is running security updates? Who is going through making sure the latest version of software within that virtual service is applied? Who is looking after the integration and general support? It's working great. It breaks. Who do you call? And do you have a way to manage the cloud services efficiently? So you might have one, two, three, four different cloud providers. There might be applications for this, a virtual server there. If you have a new staff member to start, do you have to add accounts in all those places? Who ties it all together? How much time do you spend adding a user account? Beyond premise wealth has done it quite well now. In most cases, if you have everything in sight, you can add a new user within 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes. If you have multiple cloud providers, how long is the same thing going to take? I should step one, one bit back. That's where the value of a managed provider comes in with a cloud, is actually taking that step and helping you manage part of that process. So instead of you being on your own and trying to get to the cloud and manage it, a managed service provider should be able to tie it all in for you nicely. And if it's not nice in it, it should be able to manage the process for you, document it, and be able to action the request on your behalf. So you've got the cloud, it's outside your office, you still need to have an on-site network. I'll come back to reliability about this. Is it fast enough? There's no point having this great system out in the cloud that's outside of your network if you're stuck on a connection from last century. It's got to be fast, that does cost. It's got to be congestion-free. You want something fast, it's going to be responsive. And even with the NBN and other bits and pieces coming out, there still is latency. The pipe that gets between your business and the outside world is still relatively small. That'll improve over time, but it will take time. What happens when the internet goes down? If your network is heavily reliant on a very fast connection, you may be in trouble. Internet failures still happen. Almost, might be not uncommon, but you can see half a day to a day of outage per year. If you take all the five, 10-minute, 15-minute, one hour blocks put together. If you're reliant on the internet to be functioning for this, that's quite a serious disruption to your time. So if you imagine an office full of people who are doing billable work and you take the daily, the hourly rate, times it by a day, you're going to lose one day of that per year. That's quite a hit and quite an expense. And make sure you've got a plan in place. So when it does go down, you can get back up and running efficiently and it's not half an afternoon off. You don't have to run back home. Other phones, cloud-based, are they going to work still once the internet goes down? And make sure you test it. Importantly, if you have in-house servers, your data's on the server. It might not be being backed up properly, but you don't know. You've got to make sure if someone's looking after it. But you can see it. It's physically there. As long as your building doesn't burn down, it should be okay. If your data's, if everything's in the cloud, it might be hundreds of kilometers or even thousands of kilometers away. So you've got to make sure you back that up. If you have multiple cloud providers, it is worth engaging a separate cloud provider to back up your data. I can't speak for everyone else here, but if we lost our data and our systems would be in serious trouble, it is worth protecting that data like it is your lifeline. And without it, you'll be in serious trouble. So make sure you've got a plan to back it up. Make sure it is being backed up and make sure that any extended outages can be dealt with. I say it's a very low likelihood, but the impact is massive. So it means you've got to deal with a risk. So in summary, if you need those systems to be working, make sure you manage them. Don't ignore it. The cloud services and cloud offerings are a great opportunity for everyone, both in terms of efficiency and cost reduction, and risk exists both on-site and off-premise. By putting your systems into the cloud, you don't reduce that risk. It's still a risk that's got to be managed, so make sure you look after it. That's it. Excellent. Cheers. Thank you.