Geek Officecalls's Blog

Security of Cloud Computing

Jeff the Biz Geek — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:49:51 +0000

This article caught my attention recently. Google Apps experienced a security breach. The reason this is interesting to us is that we have many customers who don’t have servers. These customers use many aspects of Cloud Computing (of which Google Apps is one). Some customers use Salesforce.com or Hosted Exchange – all examples of cloud computing. A way to easily share documents in the cloud inexpensively and letting Google or another cloud provider worry about backups and uptime is tempting. Most businesses have not gone this way at this time. Anyway, it is something to watch. I suspect it will begin to catch on as the internet gets more reliable. In fact I recently posted an entry about having 2 internect connections in a small business – Cobbler’s Kids Shoes Syndrome.

I’d love to hear from others on their experience with cloud computing – particularly with file sharing/collaborating.

.http://geekofficecalls.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=26

Cobbler’s Kids Shoes Syndrome

Jeff the Biz Geek — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 19:37:17 +0000

IT companies sometimes suffer from the “Cobbler’s Kid’s Shoes Syndrome”. The cobbler never gets around to fixing his kid’s shoes, because he is busy doing his work for pay, and his kids are going around town with embarrassingly worn shoes. Sometimes Geek Officecalls has this problem. Recently, our 3 year old router began to show its age and we had to reboot it a lot and sometimes it took several reboots to get it to work. So, this week, I installed a new router. I’d like to share with you some of the awesome benefits of this router (which wasn’t hideously expensive).

The most exciting thing about our new router is that it lets us use two internet connections. When we first started in this location we had internet through cable. Later, we got a T1 line. We kept the cable line as a backup. So when I got a new router I wanted something that would let us failover from one line to another automatically. For under $1000 I got a business class router that not only fails over automatically, but balances our internet load between the 2 connections. This has sped up our internet dramatically and given us much better reliability that is so crucial to a small business.

I’ve observed that many of our customers are becoming more and more dependent on web-based applications such as e-mail, customer databases (salesforce.com and others) and web-based meetings and collaboration. Internet outages are becoming one of the more annoying issues facing small businesses. Having 2 ISPs with a router like this may be something for a small business to consider these days. For less than $1000 for the router and $200/month for both a cable and dsl connection you could have this capability. I’d love to hear thoughts on this from small business owners !

My revelation about backing up

Jeff the Biz Geek — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 19:15:10 +0000

I have 2 computers at home, one for work and one for family. The family computer, however, is also used by my wife for her job as a computer programmer which is done 100% from home. Now, being a geek, I don’t worry too much about my home computer. I know how to fix it if it breaks, I have Carbonite on there to back up my critical work and valued family files offsite automatically. I know how to clean up malware, recover data from failed hard drives, reinstall windows, etc.

However, the other day, I realized that my wife and I have customized the home computer so much it would be quite a scramble to get it reconfigured and get us both up to full productivity. Even with my black-belt geek skills it could take weeks to get back to 100%. Therefore, I decided to install a second hard drive and periodically store an entire image of my primary hard drive to it and keep as many versions of the primary hard drive as will fit on the second hard drive. This way, if my computer gets messed up, I can get it back EXACTLY as it was. This is not like system restore, this restores both system state and data, it restores everything and works independently of Windows. I can then get the latest version of data files from Carbonite.

This restore process is quick and painless. The second hard drive and the software to do the images costs about $200, but it is well worth it.

Costs of On-Line Backups coming down

Jeff the Biz Geek — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:57:07 +0000

Backing up critical business data is challenging in any business. There are so many things that can go wrong. We frequently go into small businesses and find that things are not backed up as people think. Often users go through the process of shuffling tapes while having no idea if the backups are really working. On-line backups are nice because they are automated and don’t require media that can fill up. Traditionally these services have been expensive. Today, that is not the case and on-line backups deserves careful consideration as part of a comprehensive backup strategy.

On-line backups can be as cheap as $49.95/pc/year for products such as Carbonite and $2/gigabyte/month for network caliber backup services that can backup network shares, servers, databases, Exchange, System State and other components needed in slightly more complex business networks.

Many people are unaware how often backups fail. Many small businesses use a thumb drive or CD to backup but because it is a manual proceudre it doesn’t get done often enough and the users often do not know how to verify the data on the backup.

A proper backup solution should be easy to learn and operate, include an offsite component, include full system state/bare metal recovery for servers or critical workstations and include multiple revisions of changed files. A regular checkup by a computer professional to verify the backups is also recommended. Wtih today’s prices on-line backup is an easy way to fulfill the “offsite” requirement.

Massachusetts Laws Regarding the Security of Personal Information Collected by Businesses

Jeff the Biz Geek — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:41:46 +0000

The law firm of Coleman and Gagnon has posted a Business Client Advisory on it’s website regarding the Massachusetts Laws Regarding the Security of Personal Information Collected by Businesses. As the advisory points out, the law’s effective date has been delayed again. Maybe some small business owners are hoping it will never happen.

Will it ever happen? Maybe not. Regardless, a written, government endorsed list of what are basically good steps to take to protect personal data puts a certain obligation on businesses. Common sense can allow businesses to adapt these recommendations relatively quickly for reasonable cost.

A customer’s name in combination with credit card # or social security # is “personal information” and you must take reasonable steps to protected it. The law has many requirements for documentation and training which you can read on the state’s website. Geek Officecalls can help you with this, but in this article I’d like to outline at a very high level what you should be thinking about in terms of security for your network. To be fully compliant a more detailed analysis is needed.

First of all, where might personal information be on your network?

E-Mail
QuickBooks
Customer Database
HR Records

So, how do you protect it?

Keep it off laptops, if the data must be on laptops it must be encrypted
Don’t let your e-commerce site e-mail credit card numbers (some do this)
Password protect all folders with personal data in them. Give each employee requiring access his own username and password. Only give access to employees who need it. If you have a large database with more sophisticated security capabilities, consider assigning groups of accounts to different employees so each only has access to a subset.
Require SSL security for your website. This means users see a padlock and/or a green bar on their browser when entering personal information on your site. Your web developer should be able to help you with this.
Don’t store info you don’t need to – process the credit card number through your processor’s system and then dispose of it.
Buy laptops with encrypted hard drives.
Have a decent firewall for your network
Keep firewall firmware, OS software, antivirus software up to date
Have periodic maintenance visits from your outsourced IT provider to verify that systems are up to date and to look for evidence of breaches.

Jeff The Biz Geek

Geek Officecalls