Tag Archives: Business Continuity

What is Ransomware and How to Protect Against It

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RansomwareRansomware is a type of malware designed to block access to your computer until a sum of money is paid. Ransomware issues have impacted many individuals with home computers; however, it is only a matter of time before this malicious software attacks business. Starting with Cryptolocker in 2013, Ransomware exploits have become increasing sophisticated and have cost individual companies thousands of dollars in ransom.

Here are some tips to take to help your business avoid being held captive by Ransomware.

Backup to the Cloud to Recover from a Ransomware Attack.

An inadequate backup strategy without real-time backups or offsite backup could hamper your ability to recover from a Ransomware attack. Being able to recover data from your Cloud Backup could get your systems up and running in a hurry, avoiding the need to pay ransom.

Keep Your IT Assets Up to Date and in Compliance

If your systems get behind in operating system and applications patches and updates, you may create a security hole that can be compromised by Ransomware. Many managed security and managed service offerings include proactive management and delivery of these important updates so your network will not be held hostage by ransomware.

Training Your Employees to Detect and Report Ransomware

Your employees are your front line of defense when it comes to your systems security. Make sure your employees know how to identify a phishing email and understand the risks of opening documents and attachments (including unfamiliar file extensions or .exe file formats) from unauthorized sources. Ensure your employees understand what Ransomware is and how it can impact your company’s productivity and drain financial resources. Make sure employees are clear on procedures to quickly report any security breach to avoid widespread distribution of a Ransomware attack.

To avoid unnecessary downtime and costs associated with Ransomware, it is important to proactively protect your computer systems. If you have any questions about steps to take to avoid Ransomware in your organization, contact your trusted technology advisor.

Proactive Networking Monitoring: What & Why

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Proactive Network MonitoringYour business relies more and more on healthy network infrastructure. Migration to Cloud, Compliance and IT Security all fuel the case to proactively monitor your network health. By proactively scanning your network, you can identify bottlenecks and other irregularities that could impact your network performance and network security. Identifying network compromise in advance will save your business time and money in the long run.

Here are some considerations of what to proactively monitor on your network and why:

Monitor Your Network Performance

Network performance monitoring may identify a number of issues impacting your employee productivity. In some cases it may be a hardware failure (network switch or router) that is causing intermittent outage. Data-intensive applications (e.g. remote backup, call center or VoIP) may need optimization to improve overall network performance. Regular proactive network monitoring will identify these issues that can easily be remediated to avoid any unnecessary downtime, loss of employee productivity, or other failures such as dropped calls and failed backups.

Monitor Your Network Access

A periodic scan of devices attached to your network will identify any unauthorized access to your network. You may identify devices including desktop, laptop and mobile access from terminated employees, unauthorized access on your wireless network, and other potential compromises to your network. A regular scan of your network helps you stay in compliance and avoid any security compromise.

Monitor Your Network Utilization

By monitoring your network utilization, you may identify usage patterns impacting your overall network performance. Social media and streaming technologies can chew up your company bandwidth. By monitoring your utilization you may need to implement internal policies on use of streaming and digital media to free up bandwidth for mission-critical services.

Monitor Your Network Security

Your network is as strong as its weakest link. Periodically monitor your network endpoints to ensure Operating System patch, Antivirus and Malware definitions are all up to date. One device out of compliance could be infected and compromise your entire network.

Proactive Network Monitoring is a healthy best practice that saves you money and time while reducing business risk. If you are unsure of your network health or need to know more about network monitoring contact your network specialist today.

Business Continuity Essentials

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Business ContinuityBusiness owners know there are a number of threats to business continuity. Next to employees, your IT systems and their data may be your most valuable assets. Your business may fall prey to Cyber attack or Data breach. Other factors, including adverse weather, fire, or interruption to utility supply, may also cause business disruption. Can your company recover from a catastrophic data loss? Use this Business Continuity Essentials guide to reduce the risk of downtime:

Business Continuity: Understanding Cost of Downtime

How much data do you need to recover to bring your business back from a disaster? Not all data may be essential immediately. However, some systems–including email–support other mission-critical systems and processes within your company. It is also important to know how long it will take to recover your data. Factor in your employees’ wages, plus overhead and potential loss of revenue, to get a sense of the overall risk of not having a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan.

Having a Business Continuity Plan May Avoid Violation of Industry Regulations

Depending on your industry, backup and disaster recovery might be the law. Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) makes business continuity and disaster recovery an imperative. Failure to comply could mean fines and even jail time. Other industries, including health services, must comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which requires backing up data and making sure it is consistently available, even in a disaster. Understand regulatory requirements placed on your business, to avoid unnecessary consequences of a business interruption and data loss.

Data Protection with Belts and Suspenders

Relying on a local backup is not enough. The risk to your business resulting from a data loss is too high to rely on one backup method alone. Complement your local backup with Cloud Backup to ensure rapid recovery. Offsite archives of tape backups may not recover fast enough to avoid business interruption. It is also important to ensure your network supports a timely backup from a local source as well as from a Cloud backup and recovery system.

Test Your Backup to Ensure Rapid Recovery

Backup is all about recovery. Verifying your backup in a timely manner, and ensuring it actually works, is a critical step in your business continuity and disaster recovery plan. You should verify your backup periodically and check to make sure all data needed is included. By testing the recovery, you can identify any corrupted data along with network bottlenecks to restore your business to full operation.

If you have any questions about your business continuity and disaster recovery plan, contact your trusted technology advisor. If you are uncertain about your cost of downtime, compliance with industry regulations, or your company’s ability to recovery from a disaster, do not delay but seek guidance today.

Does Your Business Have a Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan?

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Backup and Disaster RecoveryMost businesses need a Backup and Disaster Recovery plan.  Disasters like fire, flood, earthquake, and more can bring your systems to a halt. Systems including order processing, invoicing, emails, call center, and business phone are critical for daily operations. Without a Backup and Disaster Recovery plan, organizations that encounter a disaster run the risk of going out of business. Here are some tips for getting your Backup and Disaster Recovery plan in place.

Consider Risk of Downtime

Understanding your business risk in the event of a disaster–and related downtime, data loss and other factors–is a good place to start. Factor in loss of productivity from your employees. This can be quantified by calculating employee salaries, wages and overhead for every hour of downtime. You can also calculate loss of revenue if you are unable to process orders, have to disrupt manufacturing, or lose the ability to fulfill customer demand. Also, add in any long-term damage from loss of reputation if you were to suffer a long-term outage. These costs easily add up to impact your company’s bottom line in the case of a disaster recovery scenario.

Build  Your Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan

Not all data is mission critical. Some systems may be more critical than others to get your company back operationally. Determine which systems are most important to your daily operations. Decide how much risk you are willing to take in terms of hours, days or weeks of downtime. Systems that keep your employees productive and revenue flowing in your business may need to take priority. You may need redundant failover for phones, email and order processing to ensure maximum employee productivity and minimum loss of revenue. Other data, including shared files, may not be as critical and could be restored from an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly backup with minimal disruption to productivity and little economic loss.  Review and document your decisions to guide your planning. Also factor in the human element to train your employees what to do in a disaster.

Implement, Test and Monitor Your Backup

Once you understand your risks and have a documented plan, you can align your goals with a backup and disaster recovery solution. You can now begin to implement real-time redundancy for Cloud Backup for mission-critical systems. Where possible, consider having alternate sources of backup in case one system fails. Depending on the disaster recovery scenario, this could be worth the investment. Test your backup before you go live, and be sure to test the restoration and recovery processes as well. You should also monitor your backups regularly to identify and remedy failures as they occur.

Being prepared with a solid plan for backup and disaster recovery ensures employee productivity and safety. It can also make the difference between business recovery and business failure. Contact your trusted advisor to discuss your needs for backup and disaster recovery.

The Benefits of Fixed-Price IT Managed Services

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shutterstock_163229387More and more, we hear of security breaches that are derailing business’s activities, whether such problems are malicious software (“malware”) designed to grab privacy information from an employee, a computer crash or even a natural disaster such as an earthquake. A data breach can put customers’ personal information in peril, thereby causing embarrassment and even costing steep fines. This is why it is important to hire a reputable IT managed service provider before you need one. Businesses rely on their IT systems to do day-to-day business, and most of the time, things go as they should. But what about when they don’t?

Proactive IT Support is Worry Free

Taking a proactive approach to IT assistance is key. Before you need one, find a reputable IT provider. With your IT provider, draw up a managed service agreement/service level agreement so you know what services they will take care of – remote and local backup, recovering lost and corrupted files, network security updates and even unforeseen computer repairs. Keeping systems up to date will help prevent downtime. Proactive IT support converts the unexpected costs of reactive problem-solving into the more stable, budget-friendly cost of preventive maintenance and support. With fixed-price IT support, there are no surprises that can play havoc with the company’s budget and productivity.

Aligning Your IT Service Delivery Costs With Business Value

By fixing IT Service costs with an IT Managed Service agreement,  your service provider has incentive to proactively ensure everything is working smoothly. Instead of billing by the hour related to problems, a fixed-priced arrangement covers most incidents. It is in the best interest of your IT Managed Service Provider to help you proactively prevent IT problems—it keeps their costs (and stress level) down so they can serve you over the long haul.

Remote Support Saves Time and Money

Many problems can be detected and resolved remotely. In addition, services including malware and antivirus protection, O/S patching and other routine services can occur outside of normal business hours to minimize disruption of your employees. This adds up to fewer problems and more productivity for your business.

As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Finding a reputable IT managed service provider and drawing up a service-level agreement, along with a proactive approach, can help prevent potentially costly problems before they start.

Is Your Network the Weakest Link for Data Protection?

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Data ProtectionData protection isn’t just about reliably backing up your application data and files. It is also important to be able to rapidly restore data in the event of data loss. In addition to natural disasters, cyberthreat and human error drive the need for a solid data protection plan and reliable network performance. There are many aspects to keeping your data protected and your Network in compliance. Here is a short list of considerations:

Networking and Broadband Connectivity

Having a fast, reliable network and broadband connectivity helps you gain access to your online backups for rapid recovery of your application data and files in the event of a data loss. Without a reliable network, your time to recover may go from hours to days. There are many affordable ways to avoid unnecessary downtime, including Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Software Defined Networks (SDN) options for Wide Area Networking (WAN) and connecting to the Cloud. Without reliability your network may be the weakest link in your data protection plan.

Network Security and Compliance

Keeping your network security up to date is a critical component of your data protection plan.  Making sure all endpoints and servers are protected with Antivirus and Anti Malware threat detection with up-to-date threat definitions will help avoid loss of data due to cyberthreat.  Consider routine monitoring of your network to ensure your network is secure. Not only will this help prevent and detect any security breaches, monitoring your network will keep you in compliance with industry regulations including the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), a standard for credit card processing.

Employee Awareness of Cyberthreat

According to a 2015 research report, “Trends in IT Security” by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA),  companies see many sources of human error contributing to security threats resulting in loss of data. End-user failure to follow policies and procedures, general carelessness, and failure to get up to speed on new threats, top the list of specific actions that cause problems. Periodic training of your employees will close these knowledge gaps around technology and strengthen your data protection plan.

Network performance is a key element to avoid any unnecessary downtime due to data loss. Having a data protection plan that keeps your network secure and your employees aware of cyberthreat, helps avoid unplanned business interruption due to data loss and data leaks.  If you have concerns about your network and data protection plan, contact your network specialist today.

Business Continuity Planning: How Much Downtime Can You Afford?

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DecidingOptionsHaving a Business Continuity Plan is an important way to ensure your company can operate during and after a disaster. By assessing your business risk, you are able to protect your company and minimize downtime that may occur from unplanned business interruptions. Natural disasters including fire, earthquake, flooding and snowstorms can slow or halt operations. In addition, other threats including cyber attacks and data leaks can cause unplanned disruptions to your business. The impact of prolonged unplanned downtime can be reduced and or eliminated, but at what cost? Here are three things to consider when developing your Business Continuity Plan.

What is Your Cost of Downtime?

To develop a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan it is imperative to evaluate your risk of loss from downtime and business interruption. There are many factors to consider when calculating the risk of loss due to downtime. How much revenue would you lose per hour, day or week if your business was off line and you were unable to process orders? Could your inventory lose value if your factory, warehouse or retail operation were shut down? If you suffered a privacy breach what would be the impact to your company’s reputation? The risks and costs are different for each company based on industry, size and other factors. Start by assessing the risk to determine how quickly you need to react during and after a disruption.

How Fast do You Need to Recover (RTO vs RPO)?

The cost of downtime to your business is expensive. It is important to evaluate which applications and data are critical to your operations. During or after a disaster do you need these systems available within minutes, hours or days? Primary Factors that can influence your ability to recover are the Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), which is the time between backups and the Recovery Time Objective (RTO), which is how long it takes to get your data back. If you backup weekly to offline media including tape backup, your business is at risk of losing one week of data and it may take days or weeks to get your systems operational. There are various ways to ensure failover and rapid restore if you suffer a system wide outage. Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery, Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) including application hosting and other remote data protection methods can ensure your systems are available within your RPO/RTO goals.

Human Element of a Business Continuity Plan

Don’t forget the human element in your business continuity plan. Ensure your employees are trained and understanding policy during and after a disaster. Have a plan for safe evacuation during a disaster will protect your employees and minimize business risk. Giving your employees the ability to access core communications and collaborations applications like email, file sharing, wide area networks, software as a service (SaaS) and other remote applications improve overall communications and could get your employees productive if they are unable to work on premise due to business interruption.

There are many other factors to consider when assessing risk and building a business continuity and disaster recovery plan. Take a holistic view of your business, systems and network security needs. If you feel your business may be at risk and your business continuity plan is out of date, contact your IT Service Professional for a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Risk Assessment.

 

Does Your Business Need Network Monitoring?

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According to a recent Trends in Information Security report by CompTIA, malware, hacking, privacy and data loss/leakage top the list of serious concerns over security threats. Companies large and small have been victims of these security threats. While large corporate security breaches makes the news, smaller companies may not have the vigilance to detect, and the resilience to survive a network security breach. Hackers have evolved and are now more sophisticated than ever. Network Monitoring can identify security exploits before it is too late.

 

Network Monitoring is Proactive

Just like getting your vital signs checked at the doctor’s office, network monitoring is a proactive way to detect a network security threat. Network Monitoring scans for viruses, malware, patch compliance and any unauthorized access to help determine network health and compliance. By using intrusion detection when a system has been breached, you are immediately notified. It’s important to proactively monitored your network and act swiftly.

Network Monitoring Saves You Time and Money

By remotely monitoring and managing your network and related IT assets, your IT Service Provider may be able to detect and remediate security issues without ever coming to your office. This will result in an overall reduction of IT costs. Routine IT tasks, including Patch Management will ensure that all Application and Operating System (O/S) patches are up to date thus protecting your business against vulnerabilities. In addition, keeping software up to date may give you productivity features and benefits.

Avoiding Downtime and Increasing Security

Secure remote support is an important element for delivering an IT Managed Service. In addition to remote support, many IT Service Providers offer remote network monitoring, managed backup and managed security in their IT Managed Service offerings. By adopting the Managed Service Model your IT Service Provider can proactively manage your IT needs in a secure and cost effective manner.

Don’t wait until you have a security breach to add proactive network monitoring to your line of security defense. If you have concerns about your network security contact your IT service provider today.

Is Your Business Ready for a Disaster?

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Disaster recovery and business continuity planning are processes that help organizations prepare for disruptive events—this might include a hurricane, an earthquake, a power outage caused by a fire or a cyber attack by hackers. Your business should have a process in place ranging from overseeing a disaster plan, to providing input and support, to putting the plan into action during an emergency.

Having a Plan Is Important

Given the human tendency to look on the bright side, some business people are prone to ignoring disaster recovery because disaster seems an unlikely event. Business continuity planning is a more comprehensive approach to making sure you can keep making money, not only after a natural disaster but also in the event of smaller disruptions including illness or departure an employee or other challenges that businesses face from time to time. The critical point is that neither element can be ignored, and physical, IT and human resources plans cannot be developed in isolation from each other. At its core, BC/DR is about constant communication.
Don’t Forget to Test Your Plan
Once you have a plan, it is imperative to test your backup and recovery scenarios to make sure you can bring your systems up in a timely manner. For disaster scenarios, consider training employees on protocol in an emergency situation. Understanding the effects that a disaster can have on your company is extremely important. In order to prepare your business for a disaster, it is necessary to analyze the costs and risks associated with downtime of your critical applications and their data. Having a proactive business continuity/data recovery plan will save your business money, and may save your business. If you need assistance with your plan, contact your technical professional before a disaster strikes.

Windows 10 – Best Windows Ever?

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windows-10The new Windows 10 operating system is purported to be the best Windows ever. The combination of ease of use for new users, automatic updates, and built in security features is causing small to medium sized businesses to breathe a sigh of relief as business owners dream about spending less time and money on training and more energy on making money – finally.

Windows 10 is Easy to Use

The new OS combines the interface of Windows 8 with the Start menu of Windows 7. This is a godsend for small business, because it means not having to train employees to complete mundane tasks, such as syncing a Bluetooth device. Such options are readily available on the Start menu now. The Windows 10 Start menu is designed to be easy for new users. Check out some of the things users can now do right from the Start menu:

  • Find settings
  • Reboot
  • Launch applications and place apps into the program list
  • Find documents
  • Adjust desktop resolution

In addition, the new OS is designed for all platforms, especially smartphones. When using Windows 10 on your smartphone, it will only display the finger-control interface. All in all, Windows 10 is great for SMBs who want to avoid high training costs.

Automatic Updates!

Microsoft experienced the pain first-hand of customers complaining about having to upgrade from Windows XP and later from Windows 7 to 8. Microsoft Vice President for Operating Systems, Terry Myerson, explained that the company never wants to be in the position of having to convince people to buy the next version of Windows again. The plans for Windows 10 include a continuous series of upgrades performed automatically. This means that in the future, questions about what version of Windows you’re running will become meaningless because everyone will have the same version as universal upgrades begin to take effect, making business as seamless as ever.

Enhanced Security Features

Windows 10 is offering new ways to protect users from dynamic script-based malware and other forms of cyberattack. Specifically, they’re using AMSI (Antimalware Scan Interface), an interface standard that allows applications and services to integrate with any existing antimalware product on your PC. Applications can use AMSI to scan files and employ other techniques to identify malicious behavior. This means that your device will automatically be inspected on a much deeper level than before.

Windows 10 has made quite the leap, and those who have tested the new OS report only good news. To learn more about how the new Windows 10 OS can improve your small to medium sized business, contact your trusted IT advisor today.