Smart Tech Spending
Smart Tech Spending is a podcast designed to help growth-driven businesses and mission-driven nonprofits gauge the success of their technology investments and overcome the challenge of measuring their tech ROI. Hosted by Nicole Lefsky, cofounder and managing member of Jersey IT Group, each episode features an interview with an executive or thought leader discussing topics like: Are you spending too much or not enough when it comes to technology services? How to avoid unplanned tech expenses? What technology drives profitability? This show is ideal for business owners, managing partners, CFO's and office managers who oversee technology spending for their companies.
Smart Tech Spending
How to Keep Business Up When the Internet’s Down with Adam Lefsky
In this episode of Smart Tech Spending, I’m joined by Adam Lefsky of Jersey IT Group to discuss the importance of having a failover Internet connection for businesses that rely on the Internet for business operations. Adam explains what failover Internet is and why it’s important to budget for it, especially for companies that have moved to the cloud or are using hosted applications.
Key Takeaways
-The financial impact of Internet downtime on productivity and revenue
-Budgeting for a failover Internet connection to ensure uninterrupted access to key applications and keeps business running smoothly
-The pros and cons of the limited options for high-speed Internet in New Jersey
Adam’s Bio
Adam Lefsky is the founder of Jersey IT Group, which provides outsourced IT services to small and mid-size businesses throughout New Jersey. With security top of mind, he oversees all aspects of technology management for Jersey IT Group’s clients from strategic planning and budgeting to implementation and ongoing support. With over 25 years of experience, he advises companies about their risk and how their technology decisions will impact their business’ bottom line.
Connect with Adam Lefsky: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamlefsky
Connect with Nicole Lefsky: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolelefsky
Contact Adam: adam@jerseyitgroup.com
Contact Nicole: nicole@jerseyitgroup.com
Jersey IT Group’s Website: https://www.jerseyitgroup.com
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[00:00:00] Adam Lefsky: More and more applications, core application for businesses are being hosted. That presents a problem because if your, if your main internet goes down and everyone that's used Comcast or you know, Optimum knows that it's subject to going down, bad weather, whatever. It's not uncommon. Then what do you do?
[00:00:21] How do you get to those applications that are hosted? You don't.
[00:00:25] Jersey IT Group: You're listening to Smart Tech Spending, a podcast designed to help businesses gauge the success of their technology investments. If you're looking to overcome the challenge of measuring the ROI of technology tools and services, avoid unplanned expenses and uncover hidden costs, you've come to the right place.
[00:00:46] Let's get into the episode.
[00:00:48] Nicole Lefsky: Hello, and welcome to Episode Eight of Smart Tech Spending. I am so happy to have my partner in crime here today with me. My business partner and husband, Adam Lefsky. He is the co-founding member of Jersey IT Group and oversees all technology, strategic plans, budgets, and support needs of all of our clients and is a great resource to many in the community.
[00:01:16] So I wanted to introduce you to Adam, who's joining me as our guest today to share some very insightful information.
[00:01:23] So I approached Adam with this question, as, as some of you may know, that are listening today, Adam and I started Jersey IT group back in 2004. And I can tell you that we have conversations aside from our regular work day and our scope of responsibilities that differ in the company, but in our free time, we talk about some topics that the average person may not find so interesting. However, they're really pertinent to when you're running a business and you're making decisions around IT and around tech spending. So I approached Adam and let me give you a little bit of the backstory here.
[00:02:01] I was having a conversation with someone that I would say, business owner, and I would say is fairly, not technically savvy, but is knowledgeable about risk and is knowledgeable about the cyber space. So with that being said, I'm having a conversation with this person and he was telling me how his office used to have a server and he used to have it, you know, all the computers would access the server and the backup was in their office and now everything's hosted.
[00:02:33] This is going back about a year or so. So after COVID, but it really wasn't just from COVID and having to work remotely, it was the nature of their industry. All of their applications became hosted. So it just made sense to move everything to be hosted. So as I'm talking to him, I just casually brought up to him, you know, you do have it like a failover internet connection, right?
[00:02:57] You know, just in case he was using Comcast as his main internet connection, and he responded to me with a "Huh?" And as we went on to talk, I said, well, you know, being that you rely on the internet to access all those apps and throughout your workday to make work happen, do you have a backup to that internet connection?
[00:03:23] And. Of course, his response to me was "No". So I had concern and I then said to him, well, you know, there is such a thing, unfortunately, he wasn't aware of it, but you know, it opened his eyes to something that he should be considering. And then we talked about the cost and things like that.
[00:03:42] So, fast forward to this morning, I said to Adam, "Adam, what percentage of companies do you think, just from your, close to 25 years of experience now working in this space, how many do you think actually have a backup or failover internet connection?" So, let's take it from there. I thought it would be fun to have Adam come on. Not to talk about how it works and the technical aspect of it, because Adam oversees every aspect of the technology for all of our clients, as well as our own company at Jersey IT group, but is the forward-thinking member of our organization to really look at where things are going and what makes the most sense for our clients.
[00:04:28] So, Adam, would you like to share with me what your response was?
[00:04:33] Adam Lefsky: I said to you while I don't know the exact statistic, I said, it's going to be low. You know, I'd be shocked if we're higher than 20 percent. It may be lower. Overall when we bring on new clients, they mostly don't have it. They're familiar, but don't have it.
[00:04:55] Nicole Lefsky: Okay. So let's back up a step. Let's talk about what is failover internet and why is it important?
[00:05:03] Adam Lefsky: Failover internet, or basically a second or a backup high speed internet connection, if you will, is there if your primary internet connection, which typically, for most people, most companies today is going to be either cable or in a much smaller number of cases, Verizon Fios, cheap- relatively high-speed connections. And that's what we're talking about. So everyone's got typically a cable connection. In New Jersey, it's Comcast or Optimum. You have one connect, basically you have one cable company, unfortunately, per town. So then you hope you have Fios if you need a backup that's cheap.
[00:05:45] The big problem is after you get a primary connection, if Fios isn't around and Fios, Verizon Fios isn't around in a lot of places in New Jersey, then for a high speed, you're going to have to go to Fiber, which is expensive.
[00:06:02] But really the need for it is, it wasn't a big need for it as long as you had on premise servers, and so your only need was to get out to the Internet for as a tool to browse sites. You know, everybody is jumping these days, more and more applications, core applications for businesses are being hosted. That presents a problem because if your, if your main internet goes down and everyone that's used Comcast or, you know, Optimum knows that it's subject to going down, bad weather, whatever, it's not uncommon. Then what do you do? How do you get to those applications that are hosted? You don't. What do you go home? Send everybody home, or you, you try to find a backup internet connection that's fast.
[00:06:56] As I said, the choices are almost nil because a long time ago in New Jersey, unlike a lot of other states, New Jersey decided there should only be, there should be no competition with cable, with cable companies so that each town has one cable company and one cable company only. No other options. That was fine for cable TV, but when they started carrying high speed internet, then what do you do?
[00:07:24] If that, if Comcast goes down and you need to get to the internet, you've got a problem. And so, you know, companies are now saying, well, what do we do? And there aren't a lot of options.
[00:07:35] If you're lucky enough to have Fios in your town for your business, then that's a no brainer. You've got comparable speed to Comcast and potentially better pricing. So it's great.
[00:07:48] But if Fios isn't there, then you're going to be sitting there trying to figure out, well, what do we do? My main internet is down for a half hour or an hour or more, what do I do? How do I get to my information now? If you don't have it, you could possibly, you know, if you have wireless, you might be able to do a wireless backup, even your phone as a hotspot, if you're using a laptop. I've seen some people do that in a pinch. That's not practical, but short term you do whatever you need to do. But otherwise you really don't have many other options. DSL is way too slow for a company of more than two people. Satellite, anyone who's got satellite tv, same thing, you know, it's subject to weather way more than any other internet connection, bad weather, you might, you're going to have problems potentially. And they give you a maximum that you can use during, typically during a month and after that, they slow your internet connection. It could be down to the old dial up days. So that's not an option for a company larger than a few people.
[00:08:56] A company larger than a few people, you really, your only other option is fiber. So Comcast offers fiber. Optimum offers fiber, but the problem there is, it's very reliable. Unlike coax, the traditional cable connections, it's far more reliable. The uptime is incredibly high. The problem is the cost. Instead of Comcast, you know, Comcast will cost you a hundred and something dollars a month for some pretty good speed, fiber is going to cost you easily hundreds of dollars a month. 300, 400, 500, 600 plus dollars a month, if you want some really good speed. That's a budget that unless companies are familiar with it, they haven't even contemplated. So it's something you got to look at. Can you build that into your budget?
[00:09:51] Now that everything's hosted, and that's really what companies have to look at. If they're going hosted and a lot of companies are, whether they decide to do themselves or their vendors of choice have decided that, well, we're going to take everybody hosted, and now the companies are saying, okay, well, we've got to go hosted. What are we going to do? You really want to budget a high-speed internet backup in.
[00:10:19] When a company's planning on going predominantly to hosted apps, you know, let's say through their browser, one other thing, you know, that they have to, obviously they're looking at costs and in a lot of cases they don't have a choice because the vendors aren't.
[00:10:37] They're going hosted. They're ending an option to install their application on a server, on premises, and they're saying from now on with QuickBooks, you know, Intuit is doing just as an example. They're, really going all in, in the cloud. And that's great, but typically we find that, that our customers aren't ready for that necessarily before we want to do some planning.
[00:11:03] If you're going predominantly cloud, then you are absolutely dependent on a high speed internet connection, not slow speed, not gaps. You're not just, you know, going to ESPN to look at the latest scores. You need something that, you know, if you need to stream, if you need a constant, quality internet connection, and that is high speed.
[00:11:29] Everybody has one high speed internet connection in New Jersey, pretty much. And that's, as I said, their cable company. But you need to budget. If you're moving to the cloud, one other thing that you need to budget in there, that's key is a high-speed interconnection failover.
[00:11:50] Nicole Lefsky: You're not talking about major money here. You're talking about a really wise decision to continue workflow.
[00:11:56] Adam Lefsky: Yeah. And you have, you really have no choice. I mean, you have to think about that. You could say. Well, I'm going to just try it with my current internet connection. I'm not going to pay out for a failover monthly fee. And I'm just going to see what happens. Maybe Comcast or, or Optimum online, maybe they'll stay up a hundred percent of the time, Monday to Friday, maybe Saturdays, depending on what our company, you know, looks like, and I'll be okay. From what we've seen, you know, some companies try it. Some, some companies say, no way I've got to budget this in. We're getting fiber. It's just a new cost and that's it.
[00:12:39] For the ones who decide, all right, I'm going to go, we're going to go hosted, but I'm just going to try it to see if I can live with it. Maybe, maybe I'll be all right. They typically are fine. Then, they typically hit a speed bump sometime during the month. There's bad weather. There's, you know, something happened to your Comcast is down. Cable Vision or Optimum Online, it's down.
[00:13:07] And then they say, okay, how long are we going to be down? 15 minutes is okay. A half hour is okay. It's been two hours. Uh, what do we do? Do we send everybody home? Maybe that'll be okay, as long as the predominant amount of your staff doesn't live in the surrounding region. That's also out. So they won't be able to do any work from home either.
[00:13:29] For a company that's predominantly online now for doing their work, I think it takes one really protracted downtime of a Comcast for them to decide they're going to have to carve out a budget because the old adage, time is money.
[00:13:45] They've just lost two or four hours of productive time and it's significant enough to them. Because look, any company can equate. They look at their total revenue. They, you can equate it to, you know, 40 hours in a week. How much revenue do you make in 40 hours in a week? You divide, you know, you figure out per hour, you multiply it by the four hours you're down and they decide that's unpalatable and their next call, you know, they call us and say, What do we have to do? I know you mentioned it. What do we have to do?
[00:14:18] Nicole Lefsky: Listen, all great tips we know as a standard with people we work with, obviously recommending a failover internet for companies who rely on their internet service for the functioning of their business and the operating of their business is just a common recommendation. I don't think we've had any company that we've met with in the years that it's been available in our community that has declined that option.
[00:14:44] And I know one of the other reasons that we've gotten calls at times is certain businesses, where they reside and their Comcast connection is, if that's their primary internet, there are accidents on, especially if they're on main roads, and then the Comcast internet goes down due to the accident. We've gotten a ton of calls over the years for that. And they're out of luck. The employees can't work. We've, we've seen that occur also.
[00:15:10] So I want to thank you for joining me today and sharing some of this really important basic information. Something you said to me, which I made you pause so I could record it, which prompted this whole topic today, was you said to me when I asked you, "What do you think about failover internet and how many companies do you think are actually implementing one?" And you said, "Not enough and it's a small price to pay." And I think you summed it up well when you said that. So thank you for joining me today on Smart Tech Spending.
[00:15:44] Adam Lefsky: Sure.
[00:15:45] Jersey IT Group: You've been listening to Smart Tech Spending hosted by Nicole Lefsky.
[00:15:49] Make sure you never miss an episode by subscribing in your favorite podcast player. And if you enjoyed this episode, we'd appreciate it if you'd rate and review the show. Thanks for listening.
