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When our grandparents and parents set up their businesses, they relied on pieces of paper and stored the increasingly heavy weight in filing cabinets. This had the virtue of certainty. As long as people were disciplined in labeling each file, everything was easy to find. But, if there was a fire, it was equally easy to lose everything whether to the flames or the water when the fire department used their high-powered hoses. Then along came computers and there were problems as entire blocks of data could just disappear. The paranoid tried to run paper and computer systems side by side and lost all the economic advantages of going digital. Now there’s a new kid on the block. It’s called cloud computing. You could already have your head in the cloud if you run a Gmail account – all your mail and messages are stored by Google.

This trend has been building for the last ten years as more businesses began to outsource some or all their IT problems to bulk suppliers (often overseas). But, in the first instance, this tended to be major processing tasks like the payroll. The difference in today’s services is that you can run applications online and in real time on hardware supplied by an independent company. Indeed, it’s not even necessary to know where the hardware is located. There can be a single site or multiple locations depending on the scale of your business and the nature of the applications you want to run. The advantage of this approach is that the applications are almost infinitely scaleable. What starts off small today, can be massive tomorrow without you managing the upgrade.

Ah, the costs. . . If you run your own hardware, you are responsible for every aspect of its maintenance and support. It’s your responsibility to design and develop the software. This can mean major up-front costs when you buy the systems and serious money required for maintenance and support. Moving into the cloud gives you services for a monthly fee. There are already packages for almost all the major business functions available. In the main, these match or exceed the capabilities of the free-standing packages you can buy. Obviously, a tailor-made solution, specifically written for your company will be hard to beat. But when you consider the cost of the bespoke project, it may be more cost-effective to accept fewer individual design preferences in the generic product. The choice all comes down to whether your needs are complex and cannot be met by the cloud applications. Continue reading →

In the wake of damage caused by hurricane/tropical storm Irene, many are left wondering how they will pay their deductible and what their claims will be like. For those lucky enough to escape the storm, many are rightly concerned with the possibility that the next one might strike their home. What will happen? If you have hurricane coverage, your insurer will take care of you, but you might have to pay a special deductible.

Hurricane Deductibles Versus Normal Deductibles

In places where hurricanes hit regularly, such as Florida, Georgia, and pretty much the entire Atlantic coastline, Gulf coastline, and New England, insurance companies do not charge a normal deductible. Instead, they charge a hurricane deductible.

The difference is that, rather than the flat amount you pay with a standard deductible, you pay a percentage of the market value of your home. So, if your home is worth $300 thousand and your hurricane deductible is 2 percent, you pay $6 thousand. This is almost always more than a standard deductible, such as $750.

Companies do this to save themselves thousands of dollars per home in claims, since they often have to pay to fix thousands of homes per hurricane.

Unless you live right on the coastline, in which case your deductible may be very high, hurricane deductibles rarely stray from the one to five percent range.

All states and districts subject to hurricane deductibles are:
The South and Southwest
Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia
The North and Northeast
Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island
Other
Hawaii, Washington, D.C.

Will Victims of Irene Have to Pay Hurricane Deductibles?

Hurricane Irene is tricky case, since it was not a hurricane the whole time. Before it hit New York and New Jersey, as well as Vermont and other more northern areas, Irene was downgraded from hurricane to tropical storm. While you might think this would be a straightforward case of nobody having to pay hurricane deductibles, the reality is different.

In New York and New Jersey, state regulators have declared that homeowners should not have to pay hurricane deductibles. So far, several insurers have come out and said that is the case and that they will not be charging more than the standard deductibles. However, other states have been less clear. Continue reading →