In this episode of the RIA Tech Talk Podcast, David talks about onsite servers and even though many RIAs still have them, they’re unnecessary and better solutions are out there.
What does your onsite server in your office do today?
Servers today are largely used for files only. Most of today’s email is “hosted email” and is commonly hosted with Microsoft 365. Most applications RIAs and financial advisors use are web based so an onsite server isn’t required for them. There is less and less that needs to be hosted onsite in most modern businesses.
What are the big problems with onsite servers?
- They are often clunky to manage or old technology.
- Expensive to maintain.
- Access with a VPN works well when you are in the office but less well when remote.
- Backups are required.
What risks do onsite servers bring?
- For many, their onsite server isn’t backed up properly. Request confirmation from your IT partner to confirm when the last time your server was backed up.
- Hardware failures can mean days or even weeks to recover your onsite server, if recovery is even possible.
How to move from an onsite server
At RIA WorkSpace, we have an onboarding team that typically does this within the first 60 days of working together. Here are the steps we follow:
- #1 Move your files to SharePoint (not OneDrive)
- #1b Create security groups for your files/folders so everyone has access to only what they need access to
- #2 Set up Active Directory/Domain Controller
- #3 Set up a next generation clientless VPN so your work is the same from anywhere
- #4 Create a security wrap around & IT compliance for your computers so if you are working in the office at home.
- #5 Set up printing, scanning and more so it works the same without an onsite server
- #6 Set up any server-based applications and create Single Sign On to access your web-based apps
- #7 Set up additional advanced settings like data loss prevention, email archiving, and others depending on needs
What is the cost to move from an onsite server to Microsoft cloud?
You probably already have SharePoint included in your Microsoft subscription, so there’s no additional cost from a licensing perspective. Check with your IT provider for other costs.
Listen To The Audio:
Read The Transcript:
Todd Darroca:
Hello and welcome to the RIA Tech Talk podcast, brought to you by of course, RIA Workspace. I’m Todd Darroca, and alongside me is always Mr. David Kakish. And together we’re on a mission to simplify the complex world of technology for RIAs just like yours. Now in this podcast, we’ll be your tech guides breaking down those often confusing tech topics into plain and practical terms for you. And so we hope you join us for each episode as we dive into the latest tech trends, share our expert insights and help you navigate the ever-changing world of RIA technology. And so today, Mr. David, we are looking at onsite servers. So specifically ditching your onsite server and how kind of a simple guide for RAs to do that, right?
David Kakish:
Yeah, that’s what we’re talking about. And every time you say, Mr, I look behind to look for my dad, it doesn’t matter how old I get, I’m always going to turn around and look and say, Hey, is my dad behind me? Alright, so what we’re going to talk about today is ditching your onsite server, A simple guide for RIAs, and I use the word onsite server. It could be a network attached storage, it could be a shared computer, it could be a shared drive, whatever you want to call that. There’s still a good amount of R talking about the cloud is all the buzz and this and that, but it made a lot of sense for RIAs that invested in an onsite server to go ahead and leverage that, right? So if you bought an onsite server, you want to maximize your investment and go ahead and leverage that.
And today we’re going to talk about how and why you want to ditch your onsite server and move to the cloud and how to do that. And really the best way for you to do that as an RIA. And again, as a reminder, this isn’t going to be a super detailed technical discussion that’s designed for an IT tech person. It’s really designed for you as a managing partner or as a chief compliance officer. We’ll touch a little bit upon the technology, but not too much. We’re going to geek out just enough for a managing partner or a CCO to understand, not for an IT manager to understand. So we always try to do go deep enough but not too deep where we lose you. So that’s kind of how we do that. And so by the end of the session today, you’re going to learn how to get rid of the onsite server while you’ll never want to buy an onsite server again. And to also understand even if you don’t have an onsite server, how does security and how can you secure your cloud environment when you do get rid of your onsite server? That’s a pretty common concern and fear that people have when they move to an onsite server. So go ahead real quick. It sounds
Todd Darroca:
Like you want to question how often do you see clients with onsite servers? I remember my dad when he was running his private medical practice, he had two, three servers in the back room and it was always crazy to me. So how many clients do you see on that on average, or is it pretty minimal? Now
David Kakish:
By the way, is your dad still practicing or is he retired?
Todd Darroca:
He’s kind of like a professor doctor, so best way I can describe it, but no, yeah, he’s retired after 40 some years. Alright,
David Kakish:
Sounds good. Yeah, so to answer your question, in terms of an onsite server or network attached storage or something of that sort, what I see a lot is the email has moved to the cloud, but there’s still an onsite file server or maybe it’s running an application or something like that. I would say there’s still a good percentage out there. Maybe a third of RIAs still have some kind of an onsite server in some capacity. So out of every 10 people I talk to, three people have that. And again, it’s not a bad thing. They’re just maximizing the investment that they bought. So definitely it’s not like a majority of RIAs out there, but still it’s about 30%. But even the 70%, even if you’re listening to us and you don’t have an onsite server, you still want to tune in because I’m going to help you understand how you can secure your cloud environment and really kind of best practices what we’re doing for other RIAs. But that’s what it is, Todd.
Todd Darroca:
Alright,
David Kakish:
Nice. Yeah, so I feel like where we’re at now, it’s sort of an end of an era and it’s the end of the onsite server era, and it’s hard for people to believe this, but in the world of it, it’s like dog years, right? True. And by the way, dog years, is it one
Todd Darroca:
Seven years, years one human year, seven is seven years in dog years? Yes, yes.
David Kakish:
My dog’s what? Six, six times seven. Okay. All right. So that’s how old my dog is today. So when you think about email, right? I can’t remember the last time I talked to an RIA that still had an onsite server that was running email. So if you think about 10 years ago, over 10 years ago, almost everybody, a lot of people started moving their emails from an onsite server to the cloud, whether it was Microsoft or Rackspace or Intermedia. Those are some of the big players. Rackspace was a really, really, really big player for a long time before Microsoft came onto the scene. But if you think about that, your email running on an onsite server, and remember you had to have a lot of redundancy and if you lost power, you potentially lost email. And Microsoft had small business server and exchange server and this and that, and there was just all this complexity and sometimes you had to have multiple servers in your office and virtualize the servers. And so Todd, you know that from your dad’s story,
Todd Darroca:
When I was at his office, I’d always walk into that back closet and literally I think there were six or seven servers back there just humming away and I never understood it. And he’s like, well, blah,
David Kakish:
Blah, blah. So yeah, no, totally remember those totally over it. Exactly. And then when we got really smart, it was one physical server, but then you would have three or four virtual servers and stuff like that. So anyways, that era of having your email in your office is done. Nobody’s really running email in their offices anymore, at least not in the small and mid-sized business space. I can’t remember. I’m trying to think in the last two years, Todd last two years talking to RIAs and we talked to them quite a bit. I can’t remember a single time when somebody was still running an email server in their office. It was hosted, whether it was hosted with Microsoft or Rackspace or Intermedia or whoever, it didn’t really matter. But in the last two years, not a single, I haven’t talked to a single RIA that had an email that’s in their office.
However, as I said, about a third or still running an onsite server. And we’re sort of at the end of the era of you having an onsite server anymore. And again, an onsite server could be a server for files or an application, or it could be a shared computer or a network attached storage, whatever term. I’m just going to call it an onsite server. So we have that. Now, one thing I did have in my notes that I want to make sure I share with you as a listener is one of the things that we consistently do with Microsoft, we don’t go with version one or V two, we go with V three. And what I mean by that is when Microsoft first released their email in the club, and this is over 10 years ago, just I’d have to go back and look specifically, we didn’t all of a sudden take all of our clients said, great, let’s run you on the Microsoft email.
Actually, we were heavily partnered with Rackspace. We used Rackspace a lot because they were great. And then once Microsoft was on V three of their hosted email, we started moving all of our clients there. And the way we say it is we want to make sure we’re playing in the leading edge space, but not the bleeding edge. Because in bleeding edge, that’s where all the bugs are. And we don’t want that for us or for our clients or anything like that. So again, with Microsoft, when Microsoft releases something, we generally wait for V one, V two, and then V three we’re on the bandwagon. You’re on it. Yeah, that makes sense. So alright, so the people that have an onsite server in their office today, what is it doing today? The main thing that I see, actually, it’s two main things that I see that that server is doing.
It’s files. So a lot of times an RIA will be using Redtail or wealthbox is their CRM. They’re using a lot of web-based applications, but they still have that server to access files, like client files, different things and things like that. Think of that as your file explorer. So that’s number one. The second thing is a lot of clients still have an onsite server and they need to have it there because that server is kind of like the brain computer or what we would call active directory or a domain controller. And that’s sort of like the master computer or the brain computer that controls, let’s say the 10 other computers for the advisors that work in your office. So those are kind of the two big ones. And then some form of a print server so they can share a printer or so they can share a scan or something like that. Now what I don’t see, but I see it occasionally is it’s running applications. And the really simple one is I like to use Juncture. A lot of people are using Juncture Server based and then they move to Juncture Cloud or another type of CRM or something like that. But that’s kind of most of the time now when somebody is using an onsite server, they’re doing it’s files, it’s active directory, and then maybe it’s some kind of a shared printing or shared scanning. Those are kind of the main things that I see. Okay, got
Todd Darroca:
It. When you go in there and you see these servers in there or what you’ve heard from clients, what are the big backdrops or problems with those onsite servers?
David Kakish:
So it’s a combination of things. Number one, it’s clunky. Number two, they’re expensive to maintain. Number three, and this happens quite a bit, the VPN. So what happens is a lot of, again, depending on the RIA, the typical setup, you’ve got 10 people that work and they’re in the office 80% of the time, and then they’ll occasionally work from home. So when they’re working from home on a company laptop, they can easily access all the web-based applications, CRM, again, wealthbox, red Tail, so on. However, in order to access their files, they need to VPN into the office. So the typical, the ideal setup is to VPN into the network firewall in the office. And then from there you can access the files and the folders. It’s just clunky. It doesn’t work. It’s slow. A lot of IT providers are not setting up. What they’re doing is they’re leaving a loophole in the firewall basically, and then you remote directly into the server.
So we’ve seen a lot of different things. The point being is one of the biggest problems with an onsite server is if you do work remotely, now you have to VPN or you can remote into the office to access your files. The other thing to think about is the backup. You’ve got a server that’s sitting there, where are you backing it up? Ideally you’re backing it up to the cloud, and then it’s just old technology. If you have an onsite server now, you didn’t just buy it last year or two years ago, it’s probably been 3, 4, 5 plus years where you’re using that. And I would say, listen, the two biggest risks with an onsite server risk number one is I can tell you it’s probably not backed up properly. We see it all the time. There’s backup problems. Oh, you think it’s backed up and it’s not. And so my question for you is, when was the last time your IT provider gave you a backup report showing you that Oh yeah, hey, so the backup is a big problem. Yeah,
Todd Darroca:
Never seen one of those before. Yeah,
David Kakish:
Heard
Todd Darroca:
Of them but never seen them.
David Kakish:
Well, it’s that trust but verify, right? Like, oh yeah, we’re backing it up for you. Great, what report can you show me that it’s backed up? And then the other risk is just hardware failure. If something happens to recover that it could take days or even weeks. And I know this in intimate details back where we were working with clients and it was mission critical. What we did is we set up a primary server and then another a replication server or hot standby or whatever term you want to use. So we had a primary one because it was mission critical, but then, and think about your email, you couldn’t afford to have your email down or your application or any of that. And then you had the second one that was essentially kind of a replica. If the main one went down, the second one would kick in and stuff like that. Today, if you have an onsite server, I can guarantee you, you don’t have a replica that’s sitting there. And so how fast can you recover if that server fails? So anyways, listen, it’s an end of an era. It was great while it lasted, and I feel like if you have an onsite server, you’re still stuck in the 1970s basketball.
Todd Darroca:
What is the main reason why people are keeping those onsite servers? Is it just because they’re scared to switch or is it just because they don’t want to?
David Kakish:
So a couple of things. Number one is they want to maximize their investment, which I get, and I feel like right now you’re sort of at the end of a life of that investment, three years, four years, five years, and so on. That’s number one. Number two, and rightfully so, hang on, all this cloud stuff, I don’t understand. How can I control it? How does it sit? And I’ll talk a little bit about how we set it up for our clients and really how you want to set it up for your own RIA. But those are very legitimate things. Like, Hey, listen, we invested money. I want to maximize the investment. But the other thing is I have some real concerns about cybersecurity and IT compliance. The cloud is a generic term. Remember? Hey, it’s on the internet. I read it on the internet, right? Well, so I mean, you can’t just say that, right? And I feel like today I’m like, oh yeah, move it to the cloud is so generic. Oh yeah, I read it on the internet. So anyways, so maybe what I’ll talk about, Todd, I’ll come to you if you have any questions or insights talk about on how we move our clients and then how we maximize security. Because again, even if you don’t have an onsite server, we’re going to talk a little bit about how you can maximize your security. So I’ll kind of turn it to you. I don’t know if you had any questions or if you want me to keep going along.
Todd Darroca:
No, I think that’s just kind where I wanted. I’m always interested to know why people hold onto to relics or things that they know are absolutely obsolete. And I’m going to pick on my dad here. My dad keeps everything back in the technology, even if it’s not working, just in case like VHS players, he’s still got that just in case. He’s kept these servers for old servers on five, seven years, whatever, just in case. And he just, now, I’m not kidding, you just now has destroyed them all and it’s crazy. But now I’m just more asking about the dads of the world out there of why are you keeping that? Just throw it out.
David Kakish:
I’ll share this story and then I’ll kind of get back to the topic at hand right here. So in a previous lifetime, I used to work a lot in the healthcare space. So we did work with doctors. Again, this was the era where you still had to have the onsite servers to run your practice management and all that fun stuff. And then we had a doctor and it was like we’re talking about seven, 9-year-old servers. It is like, all right, I want to go and I want to sell this on eBay. I’m like, oh. I’m like, listen, the risk of you potentially just putting it on eBay with patient data
Todd Darroca:
Information
David Kakish:
Is huge. Plus don’t take it the wrong way. Nobody wants a 90-year-old server, nobody’s biased. But the way that the brain of doctors, they think they’re really trying to recycle that. Now, luckily in the wealth management space, the mindset is different, and that’s why we’re in this space, not in the healthcare space.
Todd Darroca:
So let’s talk about how you help clients move on and how do you get over that fear and make sure it’s really smooth for them to transfer?
David Kakish:
Yeah, so we’ve got an entire sales process, but I’ll talk about what we do. So the files, right? The way that we basically do, it’s like, look, you’ve got a server that’s sitting in your office, it’s running all these files. We actually do that during our onboarding process when a client becomes a client with us, and then we take all the files that they have and we move it to SharePoint. Now, this is just a fancy way of basically saying, look, if I am an employee, I click on File Explorer on my computer, and then all of my files are there. What’s really nice is the way that we do that is it’s indexed locally on the computer, but it’s all actually saved at the Microsoft data center. And so that’s how we do that. And again, if you’re using a Mac, you would use Finder to go ahead and access that.
And then the other, so the two big things that they’re doing is one is bios, and then two, it’s kind of like the brain computer that manages the other 10 computers. So what we’re doing is we’re using Azure directory services, active directory, and all that that is, is we’re using a Microsoft tool to be able to manage all these other computers. And what I mean by that is, hey, we need to make sure that Bob and Mary’s computer meet the IT compliance for your RIA, right? Is it encrypted? Does it have the security? And so on. And so those are probably the two big things that we do at a really high level, but I’m happy to expand and get into the details on that. Yeah, okay. So again, the way we do that for our clients, and we’re partnered with Microsoft, you could do that with anybody else that you want, but this is how we do it with our clients.
And Microsoft’s really the 800 pound gorilla in this space. Like I said, 80 plus percent of RIAs are using the Microsoft platform. And so the way that we typically do it is I want you to think that what we do for our clients is we set each client up. So if you’re an R-I-A-B-C advisors, we set up what’s called your own private tenant at Microsoft. Think of it as your own private network at Microsoft. So it’ll include your email, it includes your office suite, it includes your files and folders, and it includes the active directory and a lot of the security that we talked about. And so what we’re essentially doing is we’re saying, look, your RIA, you have your own private tenant or your own private network at Microsoft, we’re making sure that that’s secure, and we’re setting up everything there for you on the other end.
We’re making sure all of your endpoints, your computers, your iPhones and so on are secure. And then the connectivity in between is secure, and everything is in your name. It’s not in our name, it’s not in Microsoft’s name, it’s not in the broker dealer’s name or anything like that. And the reason for that is we want to make sure you as an RIA, you have ownership of that private tenant or that private network that you have with Microsoft. So number one, what we do, we move the files, right? We use SharePoint, not OneDrive. OneDrive is good for you if you’re a consumer or a really small business, but as an RIA, there’s a lot more security, lots of security settings that we can do for you on SharePoint that are not available on OneDrive. So that’s something that we do. And again, this will work really well with Mac. A typical environment, they have two, three hardcore Mac users and they’re like, I’m not going to work for your RIA unless I can use my Mac. So we do see that, and we do have some clients that are all standardized on Macs. Those are the exception. That’s not the norm.
And then I guess from the folder, file folder perspective, at a really basic level, what we set up for our clients, and I would encourage you to think about it this way, if you don’t have it set up that way, is file, let’s say folder number one is for everybody at your company, folder number two is just for you. So it’s for Todd, it’s for David, it’s for Mary, it’s for Bob. I’m working on stuff. You don’t see it. And then folder number three is by department sales, marketing, hr, finance, and so on. If I’m part of the HR team, I’ll see that folder. If I’m not, I won’t. So at a really simple level, it’s basically just like three folders and then sub folders from there. And so that’s kind of how we do that. So anyways, so that’s kind of the files. We’re going to move it over to SharePoint, make sure it’s set up the right way.
The second piece, which is the brain computer or the active directory or domain controller, you hear a lot of the IT guys talk about that. I’m like, your computer is a domain controller or the active directory, great. We use Azure directory services. You don’t need to have that server. So that’s a common misconception among IT people, oh yeah, you move to the cloud, you can’t do that. They’re like, no, no, we can use Azure directory services. And we do that. And then the third thing that we do for our clients is that next generation clientless, VPN. And what I mean by that is in the onsite server space, when you worked from home, you had to click on the SonicWall or the Cisco VPN to access your file server in the office. Now your work experience, whether you’re working in the office or you’re working at home is the same.
It doesn’t matter. You just click on that. You have a work laptop, you’re working in the office, great. You take it home, you’re working great. All you do is you power up that computer, that computer, we make sure it meets your company’s IT compliance requirements for your RIA, and then you click on File Explorer, and then you open up all the files, you work, you’re productive, you’re doing all that. And again, nothing is sitting locally on that computer. It’s saved at the Microsoft data center. So I could be using a, so my setup, just so you know, in the office, I use a Windows computer every other Tuesday I work from home, I have a MacBook for work, and I work off of my MacBook and I don’t miss a beat going back and forth. And then we, as another layer of security, we’re putting a security wrap around, we’re using the next generation defender for endpoint.
And so we put a security wrap around your laptop because we make an assumption. You’re probably working in the office, you’re probably working from home, you’re probably working on the road when you’re traveling. So we want to make sure we’ve got that security wraparound and then all the printing and the scanning and more, all that. You don’t need the onsite server to do that. And then there’s some other things related to the applications and advanced settings and stuff like that that I can talk about, but those are advanced things. I just wanted to talk about the basic things that we set up. And I know for me, I talk about it, this is basic, but these are pretty advanced for an RIA with five employees, 15 employees and so on that we set up for them.
Todd Darroca:
Yeah. When you say security wraparound, what does that mean? I’m thinking almost a bubble around your computer or something like that. Is that what you’re trying to that explain that to
David Kakish:
Me? Yeah, it’s like the bubble boy, but for your laptop, and it’s a security. And what I mean by that is what we’re really doing is, if you think about, again, so RIAs fall in two categories. You work in the office most of the time and you’ve hardly ever work from home. And then you have ones that are all remote and travel around a lot and in between. So our assumption is like, look, whether you’re in the office or at home or traveling, we need to protect that. And so what we’re doing is, and I use a security wraparound analogy because that’s perfect. What we’re doing is we have the next generation firewall, intrusion prevention, antivirus and anti spyware on that computer to prevent any attacks from happening. And so there’s some very advanced things that we can do, and we’re leveraging all the defender products from Microsoft Defender for endpoint.
We’re also leveraging making sure that that computer meets the IT compliance requirement. So Todd, as an example, if I’m working and within minutes I’m logging in from Chicago and I’m logging in from Austin, it’s going to look at that and raise a red flag and then force me to do the multifactor authentication because all of a sudden now it noticed something. And if there’s even very suspicious activities, it might lock out my account altogether. And all that’s intentional. And so really we’re leveraging a lot of that advanced security, even though you might be nine employees, 15 employees and so on, because to us, we know that you still need that big business or that enterprise security.
Todd Darroca:
Got it.
David Kakish:
Got it. Yeah. Alright. Sorry, I know hopefully I’m not getting too much into the weeds, but I just wanted to talk it at a high level so that again, if you’re listening to us, some of this makes sense. And even if it doesn’t just say, Hey, listen, I was listening to Todd and David, they were talking about this thing. Go to your IT provider and say, Hey, look, we want to make sure we have this. We got Microsoft, we don’t have this.
Todd Darroca:
So typically, how much does this migration cost? And when you compare it to the onsite server versus doing all this, and not only cost in dollars but in time, what’s the downtime versus uptime and all that stuff? Yeah,
David Kakish:
It’s a great question. And the irony of that question is, I am trying to remember the last time we migrated somebody from an onsite server to another onsite server. We just don’t do that anymore. And so I’m like, hang on, I’ll put it to you this way. For us, it’s a lot easier to migrate Todd’s wealth management services from an onsite server to the Microsoft cloud than it is to migrate you to a new onsite server. I’ll just kind of put it at that. For us, it’s easier, it’s less expensive, it’s faster, and then for you, you get a lot more scale, you get a lot more security, you get a lot more stability to go along with that. So the answer to your, I don’t have hard numbers anymore because at some point, if I go back five years ago, yeah, we could potentially go here or we could potentially do this depending on the unique environment of that RIA, we might, I’d say 80% of the time we still put ’em in the cloud, but there were times when it made sense to say, no, let’s buy you an onsite server and put you there.
Todd Darroca:
So how long does it take then, from an onsite server to the cloud when you do that migration? What’s that typical?
David Kakish:
Yeah, so we do that all during our onboarding process. We have a team that just specializes in onboarding. And the way that we typically do it, we do it within 30 days from the kickoff meeting. And what we’re typically doing, Todd, is we’re actually syncing everything in the background. So you work like you do every day. We’re syncing everything in the background, excuse me. And then we’re going to say, okay, Friday the 10th, we’re going to go live. So Thursday at 4:00 PM please, you and your team don’t access your files, we’re going to do the final sync. And then Friday morning when you come in at 9:00 AM you can just start working like you have. And so the quote downtime is essentially one evening because we want to do the final sync, but we really accomplish all this and many other things within 30 days from the kickoff meeting. That’s how we do that. But again, you’re working in parallel, you don’t notice you’re just working like you are today. And then we’re building a parallel environment as you’re working today, and then you do the final sync.
Todd Darroca:
So can you talk about the typical network equipment that an RIE needs in their office to make this actually work?
David Kakish:
So I’m going to go back to some of the other things that we set up for our clients, because kind of a geek, and these are cool things. So just by default, we also set up our clients with single sign on for web-based applications. We set them up for data loss prevention for email. So if I email a social security number, account number, it will encrypt it, it can notify your chief compliance officer and so on. We set up teams archiving, email archiving, and then file archiving. And so with a lot of our clients, we’ll even provide them with an attestation letter from Microsoft saying you meet the SEC and the FINRA compliance requirements and stuff like that. So anyways, and then I will say the cost of SharePoint, you’re probably already paying for that with Microsoft, you just don’t know for your files. 90% of our clients are already paying for SharePoint. They just don’t know that they are. So alright, now back to you. Sorry, I had to put all those things in.
Todd Darroca:
Good.
David Kakish:
So once all this stuff is in place and you have that, again, whether it’s with us or somebody else, it doesn’t really matter. The typical equipment for an office, whether you’re five people or 25 or 55 is this, you have your internet line right after that, you’ve got your router from your internet company, but then the pieces that we manage for you, you would have a network firewall, you would have a switch, and then you would have a wireless access point. That’s it. Network, firewall switch, wireless access point. So from a network infrastructure perspective, that’s really all you have. And again, if that’s your core office, that’s what you’re going to have. I’m not talking about the printers and the scanners and stuff like that. I’m just talking about the network equipment. If you open up a satellite office, it’s the same thing. Network firewall switch and a wireless access point and that’s it. Yeah, that’s kind of, yeah,
Todd Darroca:
It’s three things. It’s pretty
David Kakish:
Simple. And by the way, I think it’s pretty cool that we are tech guys and we’re telling you, get rid of all your onsite servers, don’t buy all this onsite stuff. We’re not asking you to buy more stuff. We’re actually telling you there’s a better solution. Get rid of this stuff you have in your office and save money at the same time. So usually us geeks we’re like, oh no, go buy this gadget and this gadget and that gat buy this. So yeah, we’re telling you don’t buy more stuff, save money.
Todd Darroca:
So David, as we wrap up here, key takeaways for someone looking to get their ias from an onsite to a cloud or to stay in the cloud, what are your big takeaways that they should remember?
David Kakish:
Yeah, I think listen, if you have an onsite server, it’s an end of that era. Just like you moved your email to the cloud, we can move your files and your onsite server to the cloud, much better solution. You’re going to be a lot happier. And then even if you don’t have an onsite server and you thought you’re okay, we shared some very specific things that if you don’t have these things in place, go contact your IT provider and say, Hey look, these are things that Todd and David were talking about. Let me go and set those things up that’s in place. But I think the big takeaway is like that’s it. If you have an onsite server, I’m almost positive you’ve maximized the lifetime of that server. Let’s go ahead and let’s move you to the Microsoft cloud environment. Again, on your own, a provider with us, whatever. And I guess I’ll just share this last tidbit, we don’t see a lot of clients doing it themselves because a little bit, there’s some complexity that’s involved in that. Most of our clients are either hiring us or they’re hiring an IT provider to do that because again, there are some complexities, but plus they’re not skilled in this area anyways. And typically an RIA doesn’t have an onsite IT person anyways, right? They don’t have somebody on their payroll, that’s their IT guy or IT g, but yeah,
Todd Darroca:
Well great. So also ditch the server guys, ditch your onsite server. That’s kind of like the main theme that we’ve been covering today. So David is always great stuff. And look, David is always here. He’s the real better expert than I am on all this stuff. So feel free to shoot David an email or even post it in the comments below. He’s looking at that, we’re looking at that. And so we’re happy to answer any questions you guys have on that kind of migration. So hey, another episode for us in the cans. So we want to thank you for listening to the RIA Tech Talk podcast, brought to you by RIA Workspace. And for more podcasts and resources, make sure you go to www.riaworkspace.com and check out the learning center. And like I said, make sure you like us, subscribe to us and put some questions out in the field there. We love those. And also there’s something you want to hear from us as far as an episode goes. Please, please let us know and we’ll do our best to make that come true. Alright, and also stay tuned. More episodes are coming up with RIA Tech Insights in more episodes. So for David and myself, thanks again and have a great day.
David Kakish:
Thank you.