Proponents of Cloud Computing Solutions often discuss the silver linings and ignore the potential for a storm...

His situation became desperate when his Google account had been hacked, hijacked and all of his data was lost.

Lost-lost.

He couldn’t even access his account until reaching out to Google to have his account credentials reset, but once was able to access his account again he found empty folders, an empty in-box and I’m sure a very empty feeling in the pit of his stomach.  After weeks, literally weeks of going around Google’s security procedures and contacting Google directly, providing them information to prove he was the account owner, he was able to retrieve all of his files and get everything back to where he needed it to be.  But how do you measure the cost in lost time and opportunity while dealing with this issue?  The bottom line answer for most small businesses is, you can’t.

This is the equivalent of a business production server having a disk failure and not being able to perform any disaster recovery because the server doesn’t trust the new disk drive is the one it should give the data to.  If a disaster recovery solution took weeks to implement an get a business back up and running, would you not fire the IT manager that implemented such a solution?

I know I would.

This is one of the problems with going to an exclusively Cloud Environment in business.  Sure it is convenient and cost effective for many businesses, but does it offer the level of flexibility and security that you want if something does go wrong?  And what happens if you’re cut off from your data?  Maybe not even a security breech or other account failure – what happens if you or your Cloud Provider is cut off from the Cloud for some reason?  What then?  What is the back-up plan?

For every benefit of Cloud computing, there is at least one significant drawback as well.  Most have to do with connectivity, access and security.  While normally a provider like Google is very reliable providing backups and redundant systems, if you don’t keep all of your security informational ducks in a row, you could find yourself in a situation like my colleague did.

The first thing – no matter what you are doing with social media, if it is a part of your business or not, any business type cloud services through providers like Google, Yahoo or MSN, should be kept separate and never touch your social media.  So many people unwittingly compromise their own security installing rogue Facebook apps designed to steal account passwords, or by clicking short-links in Twitter, while using their primary G-Mail, Yahoo or Hotmail account as their login name or primary email for the social media accounts.  All too often, not only do people use the same email addresses, but they use the same logon passwords for their email and their social media.  That is our number two no-no.  All email, Cloud Services and Social Media passwords

should be significantly unique and individualized.  Any similarities, although they help you remember, they make the passwords easier to crack if one is obtained.  Created different passwords and keep a paper log and an encrypted or password secured file of what your passwords.

We love XKCD. The truth about passwords - click the image to view their site.

A good rule of thumb is to have at least 2 email accounts: one for your primary business services and one for creating and identifying social media and other online service accounts.

Many web hosting service providers allow you unlimited email and message filtering from the server.  We are a huge proponent of using your business’s custom domain as your primary business email.  Services like G-Mail will usually allow you to link the two, and for marketing purposes you always want your domain front and center with your clients.  But in addition to that, having control over your own mail server gives you the option of creating email accounts for use exclusively online, thereby sheltering your primary accounts from the additional dangers and exposure.

Point number three is don’t depend on JUST Cloud services for your essential business data.  Most providers allow you to create client email connections such as Outlook to retrieve email.  These client connections can be set to both leave messages on the mail server of your provider as well as saving a copy locally on your PC.  Having your own record of these emails can save you if your connection to email is disrupted or if an error causes your server copy email to be deleted.  Important files should also have a local home in your office.  Products such as the Buffalo Networking Linkstation can be employed as a secure network storage device to keep a password protected copy of important business files locally, again in the event of a connection disruption or a loss of data with your provider.

And always – ALWAYS – use common sense and discretion when using social media.  If you’re on Facebook for business, ask yourself, “Do I really need to give this game/media application access to my single sign-on credentials?”  Think about the links and responses you click carefully.  Even today I received a Facebook message from an

account called Fącebooƙ Șecuriƫy telling me my account was out of compliance and I needed to follow a link and answer questions about my account.  Aside from the obvious character substitution which someone else may or may not notice, I asked myself, “Would Facebook really be sending me a message on Facebook about security, or would they email me?”  I’m 99.99% sure they would email it, since that is the way I get all Facebook notifications.  Message deleted, link not followed.  However I can see a lot of less experience users following that link for fear their account will be deleted.

These are some of the things that users need to be aware of though when using Cloud Computing Services and Social Media together.

For more information please email us at questions@aspiretechnet.com.

The Potential (Horrors) of Cloud Computing is a post from: @ Blog

Here is what else we see as a result:

• Unrefined business processes that cost time rather than save it, because time wasn’t spent on learning an application properly.
• Poor technology platform choices because the only person consulted was a 16 year old nephew that knows what technology is cool, but not necessarily what technology works for business or how to implement it.
• Poor technology performance, due to cutting corners on vital, required items such as PC hardware specs and maintenance, Operating system maintenance, security and anti-virus or internet access services, and centralizing critical data on a server or network storage device.
• Time and money lost due to inadequate printing devices and no management.
• Improper file storage and no backup or recovery solution.

One of the main things that wastes time and money is either ignoring problems until they snowball into issues, or setting untrained, inexperienced employees to the task of managing the business’s IT and with no budget to do so. Not only do they not have the training required to adequately manage and make good IT decisions, but the task of problem solving takes them away from their primary roles – the role they were hired for – which can have a negative impact on productivity throughout the organization and less visibly end up costing the company a whole lot more than a qualified IT consultant or contractor would.

Storing critical data on your Best Buy bargain laptop? Yeah... that's why they're not called Best Plan.

Lest we ignore the biggest disaster waiting to happen; leaving back-ups in the hands of the employees themselves. If your job was painting houses, would you use ladders or stand on the shoulders of your employees? And when there is a failure, what is the plan to recover from it? A single hard drive failure could potentially put a business out of business.

What is the simple solution? Treat your IT as it deserves to be treated and put it in the hands of professionals. The technology industry moves fast – let a company that keeps up with those changes advise you in what changes would work best to improve your business.

Not everything is a do-it-yourself project. Some of life’s necessities need to be handled by a professional, or the results could end in disaster.

Is your business headed for an IT disaster?

What IT Means Today is a post from: @ Blog

In the past with film based cameras, you took the film in for developing and got prints. Although prints have a shelf-life too, most of us would put them in a box, in a cabinet and break them out every few years trying to find that one special one, right? They might be vulnerable to the perils of time and disaster, or improper storage – but the only one of these perils digital can protect against is the peril of time, and even that is debatable. After all, who says that today’s digital graphics standards will be accepted or used in 50 years? The industry does move fast.

NAS devices such as this one from Buffalo Technology can store several terabytes of data and is easy to use.

It is a pretty safe bet though that your average digital device will still be able to open those vacation pictures from 2010 in 2110, so time might not be the biggest peril. What is the biggest peril is the failure of the memory device you keep your pictures stored on.

Think of it this way – the device you stored your pictures on takes the place of the negatives in the days of film. Most of us don’t print every picture – one of the many conveniences of digital photography – so if your storage device fails and if your data isn’t stored correctly, your pictures or the ability to print your pictures is lost forever.

So how do you avoid this? There are several ways:

Live storage – if you edit and clean-up your photos, your live storage can exist on the PC or another PC type device. This makes it convenient to open the images, work with them, email them or share them out on sites like Facebook. Although the pictures can reside here for as long as you want them to, assuming you have the storage space for the images and all of your other necessary files, this should never been the only location.

External PC Storage – as a general term, this would be a hard disk drive attached to your PC, whether it be a USB connected drive or a spare drive inside of your desktop PC. Traditional hard drives have a life expectancy of 2-5 years (and I personally don’t trust them beyond three) so this should not be relied upon as the only back-up.

Many tower chassis PC’s have room for multiple drive inside of the case and have the feature functionality allowing for multiple spare hard drives in a RAID-1 configuration. This would mean two hard drives tha mirror each other, giving you two exact copies of the data on them. This is a great idea – if one drive fails, the other still retains the same data and can be copied to a new drive. We would suggest this option if you work with your photos often and you require a large amount of “live” images.

Solid-State Storage – Now available for a higher cost are Solid-State Drives. These are Hard Drives, but they are memory based drives without a spinning platter and mechanical read-arm. Solid-state drives are more reliable and less prone to failure due to vibrations or drops, but significantly more expensive currently than standard hard drives. A solid-state drive can be installed into an external hard drive case and connected via USB for a very reliable desktop storage solution for both archiving and maintaining “live” images.

Removable Media – USB flash drives and other removable media such as secure digital cards, although they can still become corrupted or fail, it is much less common than with mechanical hard drives. With the price of all memory products dropping all the time, images can be archived to this media and stored in a fire-proof safe in order to protect a copy of the images long-term.

Optical Media – Very cost effective and easy to use, we recommend images being archived to DVD-R or CD-R media. Optical media has a shelf life of 100 years, or more. If kept clean and scratch free, it provides a great media option for keeping a non-volatile, long-term archived copy of the images.

DVD-R media can get a little flaky if the disk is written to full capacity. We recommend limiting a DVD-R archive to 3GB or less per disc.

Network Storage – A NAS (Network Attached Storage) device can provide a very reliable and convenient way to manage, access and share your images and other media files. A NAS device, similar to the RAID drive example mentioned above, can make use of multiple hard drives to keep redundant copies of your data, protecting it if a single drive in the device fails. These devices are easily configured for access by any computers or other devices on your home or small office network and many even come with a web-based access feature so you can access your files from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection.

Internet Storage – An excellent way to keep your data safe from premise disasters that can threaten anything stored locally (fire, flood, natural disaster). There are some online storage vendors that will provide up to 100GB of storage for only about $100 per year – typically anything beyond a small-office sized storage (250GB or more) will cost significantly more and remember, at a typical broadband 1Mbps upload rate sending all your images to an online storage center could take hours, if not days.

What is our recommendation for the typical home user? Consider using an online storage service, but at least keep your images backed up to a NAS device and archive them to DVD-R or CD-R media. Make sure you keep multiple copies of the optical discs (they’re cheap enough, burn a few when you make them) and keep the discs on a shelf. Just like the old days, you can always take the DVD off the shelf and look through them, and reminisce about all those good times!

Backing It Up is a post from: @ Blog