The schools are about to break up, and it’s nearly time to head off for more reliable sunshine than Scotland offers.

We reckon it’s got to be good for body and soul to forget all about business once in a while – but if you really want to keep in touch from the beach, can we ask you to let us know your plans two weeks before you go rather than two days?

Delivering your email fully synchronised to whatever you gadget you use and wherever you want to go is not too difficult these days but to set it up we need to deal with phone companies who move at their own speed and no-one can make things happen any more quickly.

The more notice the better please – and remember to send us a postcard!

All of their phone and internet services have been ordered through business-class providers who are not part of the BT group, and all the services were installed and working in the new office long before our client moved in.

In the course of refurbishing the building – or perhaps even before, no-one knows – a telephone cable and distribution box belonging to BT have been removed by persons unknown. Even though it wasn’t in use then, is not required now, and was perhaps 20 years old I think everyone agrees it shouldn’t have been removed; the cost of cable and the distribution box might be £50 for new equipment; second-hand it’s worthless.

We would therefore love to hear from BT Openreach why they think they can try to charge £960 plus VAT to a company who have neither agreement nor contract with them to reinstate equipment which is not needed, and which would not be used even if it were to be reinstated.

The politest descriptions we’ve heard have been “chancers” and “jobsworths”. When will they learn that this sort of nonsense, including threatening legal action to a business which has no contract with them, does not do them any favours with anyone?

We in the business know they will tell lies to our clients to try to boost sales and do unnecessary work – we almost expect that behaviour from any part of BT – but it’s the unsuspecting business owner who believes their nonsense and pays up for whom we feel sorry.

Ultimately, the telephone system in this country means that BT will have a technical involvement in getting almost every telephone or internet service into your business. However, it is quite easy to get the services you need without having to deal with their slippery business practices; call us if you would like help.

Our customer was looking to cut their telephone bill, and decided to transfer their telephone line to Opal Telecom (The B2B division of Talk Talk). The first we knew about it was the early morning phone call: “We don’t have any internet access today”. After checking the router and line were okay we spoke to their ISP, Lumison who were able to tell us that BT ceased the ADSL service. Great. We’re not in a blame game here, but surely there can be some procedure where Opal/BT/ISP flag up to the customer “You are about to kill a well used ADSL service, are you sure?!”

Anyway, the client had a “spare” BT phoneline, and we arranged for Lumison to reprovide the ADSL service on to that one – still, it takes a week. (Why so long? BT Openreach. It could easily have been more than two weeks if they didn’t have the spare line.)

In the meantime, since our client is on our Silver support package we provided them with Internet access via the Vodafone network. It’s pretty limited, but at least they could still send and receive email.

Moral of the story: if you are thinking about doing anything with your phonelines, speak to your IT company who might just be able to save you a week of downtime.

Everyone got email in the late 90′s, then usefully fast internet acess in the early 2000′s, and now email everywhere has improved from lightweight consumer services (Hotmail, Gmail) to reliable and secure managed corporate mobile email.

This leaves marketing departments wondering “what can we sell next?” and one of the answers in our market sector is “online backup”.

The idea is appealing at first glance – use your broadband internet connection to run an automatic backup off to a data centre somewhere on the internet and hey presto, no need to worry about changing backup tapes ever again.

We don’t like to rain on someone else’s parade, but we’re not convinced it’s as simple as that when you look at time, cost, and quality.

Take time first – on a standard broadband connection the upload speed is perhaps one-fifth of the download speed, making it a slow process to get your data “up the pipe” to the data centre. We can get round that by running a full backup only once at installation time, and configuring the system to take a daily backup of only the data that has changed that day.

What we need to watch for are any databases (business applications and probably also your email message store) because these are usually very large files which change every day and must be backed up every day. To put numbers on it (always follow the numbers!) it can take all weekend to upload 3GB of data; we typically see clients with message stores of 10GB to 15GB which should be backed up daily; it just isn’t going to fly.

Online backup can be seen as “cheap” because you don’t need to buy a backup tape drive, backup and cleaning tapes, and the automation software. Following the numbers again, crudely I admit, an online backup service giving an automated backup to 200GB of data space on a secure server can cost £300 per month. We have architect and surveyor clients with only 10 or 15 staff who have more data than 200GB.

A good quality tape drive of 200GB to 400GB capacity including 20 backup tapes, a cleaning tape, backup automation software and our time to install, configure, and train you in operating the system will cost between £2,500 and £3,500. If you have a Waverley Lane Service Agreement we will monitor the success of your backup every day and physically test the system monthly or quarterly depending on the Agreement. Not such a bad deal compared to £3,600 a year to push your data slowly into a data centre.

And finally, quality – you need to know that you can get your data back when the manure hits the fan. We have one client, a one-person business working from home, who used to use a well-known online backup service of his own choosing. His laptop, with all his data on it, ate its hard disk and our client quite correctly replaced the disk and restored his system from his online backup service. It worked very well – he got all his data and his computer configuration back again perfectly – but it took two days. Can your business work with two days’ downtime for a network server?

These are all technical and financial issues I’ve raised, but you also need to think about your broader business requirements. Is it appropriate to have your sensitive information in a data centre which could be in a different legal jurisdiction with different disclosure legislation? Do your professional indemnity insurers have data backup compliance requirements to be met before they will cover you for loss of data and consequential losses?

All points to ponder before signing up for easy, cheap, and fast online backup.

PS – all that’s missing, besides “easy”, “cheap”, and “fast” are “fresh” and “organic”, but I couldn’t find a way to work them into this post…

David Bickerton is chief information officer for British Gas and he says in the article: “The investment is around having the right people and capabilities internally to develop the relationships and provide the kind of integration you need” and this just about sums it up from our side of the fence as well.

At Waverley Lane we ask that our clients nominate a single point of contact to work with us. That person doesn’t need to be especially technical – it’s more to act as a conduit for our client to raise issues with us and for us to work with either on immediate issues or, especially, on the bigger picture for the longer term.

Yes, of course we make allowances for people being on holiday and for emergencies when the contact person can’t be found, but the real point is that outsourcing your IT shouldn’t be a “pay the bill and forget about it” matter. As the provider of outsourced IT services we need to be gently managed by our client and a dialogue needs to take place; that is the way in which a trusting and productive working relationship gets to be built up over time.

Why, you might wonder, do we want to add to the digital media overload – bloggers and tweeters all throwing their tuppence-worth into the great digital pond, mostly to sink without Google-trace?

Two reasons really – firstly, we hope our blog will give you an insight into our team here at Waverley Lane – what we do, why we do it, and the good ideas and some of the really stupid ones we come across along the way.

Secondly, of course, it might just be fun to have a platform for our thoughts and views!