As a sponsor and a volunteer I wanted to post about a great opportunity for Job Seekers around the Austin Texas area. This is a job fair with a twist put on by the Wilco Entrepreneur Network. They have over 150 positions for 20+ companies. It is a completely volunteer organization and with the economy it is a great cause.

Come check it out on Monday, October 3rd! Check more information and register at http://talentconnectaustin.info.

When Microsoft announced that they were jumping into the Cloud Based office arena with Office 365 many were excited. Don’t get me wrong Google Apps is a very strong platform and works well for many organizations of all sizes. However there are many people who are just more comfortable at this time with Microsoft Office.

As many did I wanted to check it out and see how this might benefit the small and medium business organizations that I deal with. So I signed up for the beta and gave it a try.

vAusTek, LLC has setup a new partner portal to handle our "Trusted Partner Program". Due to the nature of our business we work with other organizations that provide solutions that compliment our Virtual CIO and Consulting Solutions. We offer different levels of partnership including; Referral, Channel and Alliance.

We have set up our new partner portal at: http://partners.vaustek.com

Lack of an IT policy can be costly to a business of any size!

Throughout the history of comparing large corporations and the SMB, Small and Medium Business, you have generally seen different methodologies for how the business is run, in large part due to budgetary reasons and the sheer difference in size.

I was reading an article on Network World about a poll done with IT professionals and their preferences and plans for moving parts of their data centers to a share resource like the cloud. To be honest this does not really surprise me in any way. If you read my article on Cloud Recovery, you know that I feel that moving to the Cloud involves a lot of re-thinking and planning.

As with many “hot” technologies, many organizations got infatuated with the Cloud and quickly started moving everything over and thinking this is it, it is elastic, it can’t go down, and this is our production and disaster recovery all in one.

One problem, it did go down. At least for Amazon and their very public Cloud outage (link) and even with VMware’s not quite as public outage (link).

One of the most popular questions I get when talking to current or potential clients is, what is a vCIO (virtual CIO) and how does it differ from technical consulting. I can see where there is a confusion of the difference as there are similarities in the two.

Due to the growth of both our Virtual CIO consulting practice as well as the Product Management services we have decided to move the Product Management services to a new website ( http://vauspm.com ). The new Product Management site is going to be a work in progress for the next week, so please be patient.

vAusTek partners with Lithium Networks to provide a complete managed IT solution for Austin area organizations.

This is the first of what will be many announcements of strategic partnerships for vAusTek, LLC.

RISE Austin through LifeSize, the Austin-based HD video conferencing pioneer, will be streaming some of the sessions. This is great for those entrepreneurs that have sessions at both end of town and/or can't make all the sessions.

I was talking to a colleague the other day when the subject of disaster recovery came up. Like vAusTek he works with a lot of companies in this line of work and is amazed just how many do not have any business continuity / disaster recovery plan in place. We are not talking about just the small businesses, but businesses with $100 Million in revenue plus as well. It seems like most want it, but for some reason or another have never went past the idea of it.

It seems like common since that before you reach the finish line, you must first get past the start let alone everything in between. Yet you see it all the time where organizations envision the finish line, but forget that they must first figure out where to start and then plan out the best route to actually make it there.