Solid Network Security Requires Vigilance

Solid Network Security Requires Vigilance

When all is said and done, your business’ success relies in no small part on how secure you keep it, and in order to be secure, you need to know what threats are apt to target your business. Below are four of the biggest concerns that you need to be sure that your security implementations address.

Password Pitfalls

Passwords can be a very effective tool for maintaining data security, assuming that they have been created properly, with best practices in mind. For instance, a password shouldn’t be used for more than one account. It’s bad enough to have to deal with a single account being stolen, let alone access to all of your accounts.

Furthermore, you need to strike a balance between your password being easy to remember and difficult to guess. While you don’t want it to be too easy for someone else to puzzle out, it also wouldn’t help you much if you kept forgetting it, either. This is why a passphrase is a useful alternative. A passphrase is exactly what it sounds like: instead of relying on a word to secure access to an account, you utilize a phrase. Basic substitution can also help boost your security as well.

So, instead of using “dorothy” or a random series of letters and numbers, a Wizard of Oz fan might use “&Ur1i++leD0g2.”

Malicious Mobile Apps

Not all applications are created equal, and we’re talking about more than just their quality. While the official app marketplaces attempt to weed out any potentially threatening downloads, there are no such hurdles for those apps found outside these official channels. This makes them particularly risky to download.

Of course, that isn’t to say that an app downloaded from the official marketplace is guaranteed to be safe, either. Plenty play fast and loose with a user’s data, so make sure you check what permissions you give them. Does it make sense for an app to need access to a particular piece of data? If not, you may consider giving that app a pass.

Phony Phishing

Cyber criminals don’t always have to resort to breaking into a system in order to accomplish their goals. Instead, they can use deception and a user’s own expectations to manipulate them into acting against their own self-interests. These efforts are referred to as phishing.

Phishing scams can appear in many forms, from the classic Nigerian Prince example to the many that appear today asserting that a victim’s systems have been compromised, only to compromise them once access is granted. Fortunately, there are a few ways that these attacks can be avoided through observation and diligence.

It is important that you and your staff keep an eye out for any inconsistencies in messages that come in. If there ever is a cause for suspicion, confirm the message through a secondary means of communication. While it may be a pain, it would be much worse to be on the receiving end of a successful phishing scam.

Wi-Fi Worries

Wireless Internet functionality has enabled businesses to move away from the desktop workstation, allowing business to be conducted with more mobility and convenience. However, just as Wi-Fi has created more opportunities for businesses, it has given cyber criminals more opportunities as well.

Small Business Backup Practices that Protect Against Data Loss

Tumblr Vulnerability Concerns Valid Amidst Social Data Breaches

Data backup and disaster recovery is one of the most important parts of running a business, even if they are only used frequently, if at all, to recover from a disaster.

Still, it’s crucial that your organization has it, as without data backup and disaster recovery, you’re putting your organization at risk. If you haven’t thought about data backup, start thinking about it before it’s too late. We’ll help you get started with some best practices.

Back Up Everything

You should be making it a priority to protect as much data as possible. As far as how much specifically you should aim for, the answer is all of it, if possible.

Data is difficult to replace in the business world, and it can lead to missed opportunities in the long run if you lose important data. It’s also important to note that you can’t guarantee that data won’t have a use sometime in the future.

This is the reason why tape backup isn’t the preferred solution. While it takes complete backups, they need to be done after-hours, and if you go just one day without a backup being taken, it’s up to 24 hours of data that could potentially be lost.

If you use an automated cloud-hosted data backup system, you can take snapshot backups of files that have been changed since the last backup was taken, allowing for more frequent backups.

Take Backups as Often as Possible

If your business falls victim to a disaster, you’ll want to use only your most recent backup. Using anything less means that you’re losing more data than necessary, which is never what you want to settle for.

What happens when you do suffer a data loss and you find out that your most recent backup is from the previous week, or even a couple of days prior?

We recommend that your backup system take backups as often as every fifteen minutes, minimizing data loss in the event of a disaster.

Restore as Quickly as Possible

If your business suffers from a data breach, it’s important to think about how fast you can get back to business following this disaster. Any time where your organization isn’t working the way it should be is called downtime, and it’s more expensive than you might initially think.

You have to factor in paying for technology that isn’t working, employees who aren’t working, and sales or work that’s not getting done, totaling together to create a considerable cost that’s hard to justify. This is why it’s so important to make sure you can restore data as quickly as possible, as any time your organization isn’t working comes directly out of your profits.

Basically, when a disaster strikes, it’s important that you have full, complete, recent backups that can be restored in a moment’s notice. With WheelHouse IT’s Backup and Disaster Recovery you can have just that.

To learn more, reach out to us at (877) 771-2384.

Why Break/Fix Gives Business Owners Nightmares

Why Break/Fix Gives Business Owners Nightmares

Like cars and industrial equipment, computers are complex machines.

To function properly they will need to be maintained, and sometimes fixed. Components inevitably fail, users very often make mistakes, and sometimes other people deliberately break things out of a litany of emotions.

If your computer has seen better days, and you’ve done all you can, seeing if you can get it repaired will involve unhooking it and bringing to your local computer guy.

For the small business, that has to go through this routinely, it can be an absolute nightmare; and, that’s even before we talk about cost. The cost of getting your computer fixed can be all over the map. It can be a simple fix (that will likely annoy the break/fix technician), or it can be a smile and a shrug that implies you are going to have to buy another computer.

If it is fixable, the cost to get computers fixed is typically substantial, but it’s not the largest cost associated with broken technology; that would be downtime.

Downtime can sometimes cause irrevocable damage. In fact, in one survey that asked small business owners how much they lost as a result of downtime found that the AVERAGE small business should expect to lose around $100,000 in downtime and downtime-related costs per year.

If your business can’t afford to lose $100, let alone $100,000, avoiding downtime should be at the very top of your list of priorities. But what about your broken computer?

The fact that you will have to remove it or pay someone to come to your place to fix it should do enough to be open to the other option: Managed IT Services.

Managed IT services can help you get more out of your IT, while also significantly reducing the amount of IT-related downtime your organization has to tolerate. It does this by having certified technicians proactively monitoring and managing your hardware so if there are failing components, your hardware support costs are much less than they would be.

At WheelHouse IT, our priority is always keeping your business’ IT running effectivily, so your business can be as efficient as possible.

With our proactive maintenance, and our certified technicians’ commitment to getting you the technology your staff needs to help improve your business, you’d expect our service to be expensive, but for an affordable monthly payment, you can get a professional IT staff who is dedicated to helping your organization to be the best business it can be.

For more information call us today at (877) 771-2384.