It hardly needs me to tell participants that the way the Travel Industry operates in NZ has changed for ever. Aligning with some international patterns, it is possible we will see only a partial return to travel shopfronts following the huge impact of that little pandemic we are all struggling under.
Not unexpectedly, we have experienced a new growth of migrations to our cloud-based Desktops as businesses are squeezed out of shopfronts into working from a range of locations – generally people’s homes. Mobility of operation has been the emphasis throughout COVID lockdown, and has come more easily to some than others, but where to for operating platforms in the future?
If contemplating a decision do be aware of a few points…
• No computer systems are infallible, what matters more is the ability to obtain timely support from a team interested in retaining your business• How secure is your data; home PC secure, home server secure, small service provider secure, data centre hosted secure, offshore location secure?
• Backups rule – do you have multi-level backups of your operational data and how easily can you access those backups? Check your supplier.
• Some have pushed potential savings & central control of small businesses into Microsoft 365 services but have missed the reality that it is the end user’s responsibility to maintain good, local backups
• Our Helpdesk takes numerous calls from users who have accidently deleted or overwritten precious data which can be retrieved from our incremental backups but not necessarily so for other platforms – check your supplier.
• Microsoft hosted services (eg 365) could never fail – hmmm, not so when we see tech reports of regular minor outages through to last week’s global authentication problems for all users over several hours.
Note: Millennium Computer Services have been supporting the Travel Industry for 20 years and providing onsite or cloud-based portable Desktops since 2010.
