“Worry-Free Business Security” v7 was a complete disaster for me as client after client experienced issues with computer speed, and my company suffered hours of support time patching and babysitting the stuff. Anything BUT “Worry-Free,” IMO.

Late last week, I helped a new client with their email – their old cloud filters got turned off unexpectedly, and they needed to get their email back and running quickly. I got their MX record changed and pointed to my company’s cloud filters, and did all the other things needed to get their email flowing again, and a couple hours later, they were back and running.

Or so I thought.

Turns out they have an ‘orders’ email that is set to auto-forward to a supplier’s external email address, and once the change was made, these messages started bouncing with a ‘Too Many Hops’ message coming back from the far-end server.

Counting up the hops in the email header, and there were exactly 16 ‘Received’ hops.

Long story short(er), and it turned out the supplier has Trend’s Interscan Messaging Security Suite installed in front of their Exchange 2007, and deep in the bowels of one of the .ini files lies a ‘MaxHopCount’ setting of 16.

Really? 16?

Exchange 5.5 had a default of 18 (circa 1997); Exchange 2000 actually dropped that default to 15; Exchange 2003 bumped it to 30; Exchange 2007 left it at 30; and Exchange 2010 now defaults to 60.

Why the increase? Well, for one, there’s a lot more servers and routers on the Internet, but additionally, mail now is more likely to be filtered in the cloud through several servers before it gets to its destination.

My company’s email service goes through about 7 hops before it gets delivered, running the mail through spam & anti-virus filters as it goes. When mail is redirected, that then doubles the count to 14. Add the initial and final ‘Receive’ hops, and you’re up to 16. The far end actually added an additional hop going from their IMSS server to Exchange, which pushed it over the edge and made it fail.

Thanks to the Userfull Blog and Yanissa for posting the answer to the dilemma.

And a big #FAIL to Trend Micro. Out of curiosity, I searched through the IMSS Admin and Install guides and it mentions the MaxHopCount parameter exactly ZERO times.

Client is happy again, and I learned something new today. I also advised my client’s supplier to consider other solutions to Trend. They’ve not been terribly impressed with them lately either. And that’s too bad … I used to champion Trend products for business, but for me and my clients they lost sight of where their strengths were.

My friend from Calgary thinks not, and I agree. It will cost you more than you save, and earn you less than you’ll make using Microsoft.

http://stuartcrawford.com/my-experiences-running-a-business-on-google-apps/

Computers and networks have become central to the running of nearly all businesses in the past 30 years (do you remember the first time you used a computer at work?), and for small businesses, it’s really only been the last 15 – 20 years.  I remember well setting up the first email server and web site for a company I worked at in 1994 – a high-tech firm, no less. I had no experience at the time with mail servers, but I figured it out, and one day soon after, the owner came to me and told me he just fell out of his chair, as he had just received a reply to an email he had sent 15 minutes earlier (thanks NTMail).

My point is simply this – in just a few short years, information technology has become intrinsic to our businesses, and without it, your business is most likely marooned.

So before rushing head-long into ‘cloud-flight’ with your business’s technology, make sure you will be able to withstand outages (ask yourself a bunch of ‘what if’ questions…an hour, a day, 2 days?). And we’re not talking about the same issue as when large geographic areas have all been affected by blackouts or ice-storms. With cloud-outages, your competition is very likely using something different than you are, and isn’t experiencing the same outage as you.

And that’s what it’s all about right there – doing what you do better, faster, and more efficiently than your competition. It’s been that way ever since human kind was able to travel (communicate) faster than the wind, and whoever does that better, wins.

The question therefore becomes – is IT a ‘cost’ or an ‘investment’?

Keeping your IT in good working order is critical. The ‘cloud’ adds a new dimension to how technology can be delivered and used, but the reward (cost savings) needs to be measured against the ‘risk’ (loss of business). It’s too easy for business owners to look at their IT budget and think it could be $X less if they went to ‘the cloud’.

Compared to what? Look at your IT budget in concert with your business goals (revenue, profit, other operation costs etc.), and then decide what you should do. Think about what would happen in your business if you had to live without your technology for a few days – could you function? Would you lose business to competitors? How do you measure these things?

I’ll bet if you do, you will realize the ‘cost’ in IT really isn’t that great, and there’s a better than good chance you will realize IT is an investment in your business (i.e. it actually MAKES you money), and perhaps it is a good time to invest more.

As a final anecdote (and the spark that got me writing this post today), I received an email from one of my service providers, who runs their business ‘in the cloud’, and is having trouble delivering some information due to a ‘cloud’ outage…

Finally, a quick observation: [cloud service provider] had fiscal 2009 year revenue of $3.1 billion…and this is their second significant outage this year. Point is, Cloud Computing has its rewards..and its risks. And no one is immune.