Fire Prevention vs. Fire Fighting

Your business is faced with an increasingly complex set of challenges – and your focus should be alignment of your business priorities. The average small business budgets 6% for IT management services and is constantly looking for ways to reduce that expense. Often times, you find yourself in a reactive situation when your server is down or your network is not performing optimally. This in turn costs your business a lot of money with downtime and the potential of lost business. As a small business owner, you cannot afford to lose any business or be affected by downtime.

Have you heard of Managed Services? Managed Services is not a commodity, it is innovation that gives you peace of mind by monitoring your network for security vulnerabilities and providing proactive issue resolution. This innovation looks for hidden problems; such as, spyware, failing hard drives, security patches, system backup failures and maintenance issues that can turn into extended downtime and expensive repair bills for your business.

Properly managing your IT infrastructure is about risk management, control, flexibility, and a renewed focus on your core business strategy and business priorities.

Managed Services is the future for small to large businesses to
maintain their IT costs and reduce downtime. The paradigm shift is having your IT technician drive fire prevention vs. being your firefighter by using managed service technology to proactively monitor your IT environment.

Vista . . . Why Wait?

With all of the hype about Microsoft Vista and its new features, most of you are thinking about running out and grabbing a copy. However, we recommend you wait. So, why wait? Even though Vista has new and improved features with improved security, fancy-looking interfaces, and multimedia bells and whistles, we recommend you wait for the wrinkles to be ironed out. We certainly recommend that you set aside some upgrade money for the future because we will eventually recommend you upgrade to Vista, but not until Vista releases its first service pack and not until other vendors make hardware and software compatible with Vista; e.g., some security, back-up, and anti-virus applications do not work with Vista yet.

To maximize up-time for your business or home office, we recommend XP Pro Service Pack 2. However, if you can’t wait to experience Vista’s new features, a Mile High PC Tech technician can assist you with the upgrade. We will start with an understanding of the known problems and explore the pros and cons of the upgrade.

Once you decide to upgrade to Vista, it will be a dramatic, whole-hog upgrade of the Windows platform. Vista is not simply the Windows XP/2000 code base that has been slowly evolving
over the years with some fancy graphics and icons slapped onto it. Vista is the next generation of operating system from Microsoft.

Are You Ready for March 11?

As you know, Daylight Saving Time usually starts on the first Sunday in April. However, this year Daylight Saving Time begins on the second Sunday in March. In which, we are turning our clocks an hour ahead three weeks early and turning our clocks back an hour one week later on the first Sunday in November. The government has enforced this to try to save money on electricity. Benjamin Franklin proposed this idea in 1784 to save daylight and hoped to give workers more hours by increasing the amount of daylight during the summer and decreasing it during the winter.
All computers and software applications with a programmed calendar date and time will be affected unless you have updated your computer and applications with the latest patches. Vendors have patches available for most applications and operating systems. However, if your application or operating system is no longer supported by the vendor, they may not provide a patch.
If you do not have patches applied to your applications and operating system, you may notice erroneous time recorded information; i.e., time stamps, calendar times, time tracking, etc. may be off by one hour. In some instances, you may manually update your time within the application and operating system. However, be aware on April 1, the time may be modified based on the old Daylight Saving Time schedule. Newer operating systems and applications; such as, Microsoft Vista, will be immune to the Daylight Saving Time change
since the law was passed prior to the release of the tool. Most vendors post their patch information on their websites – we highly recommend you perform research to ensure your business operations will not affected.

Are Bugs KILLING Your PC?

Your computer probably is not slow – it is just horribly infected. Your computer is vulnerable to a whole host of viruses, spyware, Trojans, and other unpleasant programs.
Computer insecurity statistics today are truly frightening. One study says 80 percent of users have some form of spyware on their system. There are roughly 3,200 viruses currently active. Those are alarming figures, but you are not helpless in this fight. Today’s security tools are more sophisticated and combined with good judgment and best practices, you can reduce your risk.
Neither virus scanners or sypware killers are 100 percent effective. Anti-spyware applications only stop about one-third of the treats. Therefore, setting up your firewall correctly; maintaining your software updates and patches; and only opening trusted files, URLs, e-mails, and pop-ups can help you reduce your risk.
Experts in the industry recommend that you use only one anti-spyware tool to block incoming attacks, but strongly recommend that you use two or more tools to scan your system regularly in the hope that each will cover the gaps in the other’s protection.
So, how do you know if you have a virus that your anti-virus software does not detect? Start by looking for unusual activity on your PC, such as unexplained hard-disk activity or network access. Remember that there are a lot of viruses traveling across the Internet . . . don’t let them get you down or affect your business.

Procrastinating Will BITE You!

What are the things you know you need to do, but keep putting off . . . flossing your teeth, changing the oil in your car, and backing up your data files? You know that it’s inevitable that procrastinating will eventually bite you and you end up paying more in the long run.
Backups are a necessary evil in some ways. The question of whether or not you should do them is more a matter of when you will have a data loss than if you will have a data loss. The reality with computers is that you will have a loss of data sooner or later. Murphy's Law not only suggests that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, it also adds that when it does happen, it will do so at the worst possible moment.
Now that we've got the inevitability factor covered, how often should a backup be done? It depends entirely on how important your data is and how current it needs to be. Let's say you run a business and you keep business records that need to be absolutely current in order for your business to survive, you need to decide how much data you could afford to lose but still keep your business going and then plan your backups in a time frame shorter than that.
If you decide you can only afford to lose 1 day's data, then you might choose to do a backup twice a day. That way, in any disaster situation, you will only have a half day of work to recreate. If you're using the computer to write papers and essays, maybe once a week is fine. You decide how often you need to backup based on how well you can face the trauma of a data loss.
Doing a backup does not need to be disruptive. Depending on whether or not you actually remove the data to another medium (i.e., archiving) you can actually free up some space on the system. You should not do any other work while a backup is occurring. We recommend end-of-day backups so that backups are a non issue.

How secure do you think you are?

Wireless router vendors typically do not enable security settings in their default configurations. Routers are typically configured to broadcast their service set identifier (SSID) values to wireless clients and are not usually configured to require any authentication from those clients. When a wireless client detects an SSID, which doesn’t use security, all it takes to join that network is a couple of clicks of the mouse on the wireless network icon in the Windows system tray. Because Windows XP built-in wireless Ethernet support scans for SSIDs, it’s easy for an unauthorized user to piggyback on an unsecured wireless network and do anything from borrowing an Internet connection to reading email or snatching documents from a shared folder on the network. The potential for identity theft, loss of business trade secrets, and loss of privacy caused by unsecured wireless networks is something very serious to think about. Wireless networking has become an extremely popular way to build home and office networks. However, wireless networks present extreme security risks unless the network is secured against invaders.

You can secure your home or office wireless network by using the features included with virtually any combination of access point/router and network adapter. Most wireless access points or routers are configured through a web-based interface. Check your manual to determine what IP address to use in your browser to start the configuration process.

Source: Pearson Education