MJ's Business IT Blog

A Good Take On Our Current Economic State

My friend Harry Brelsford, CEO of SMBNation posted an insightful view of the current economic woes on his blog yesterday. I encourage you to read it here.

With all the discouraging economic news that we hear, Harry has a view that I share.  Basically that the SMB segment of the economy is doing well and that the fundamentals of the overall economy are looking fairly positive and that a turnaround should be coming.  I also think that the major hurdle we need to get over is the presidential election.  The country seems very much in flux waiting to see what type of administration will lead our nation for the next four years.  Regardless of your politics, once we have a new administration queued up to take over next year, I think a lot of things will begin to settle down.

While there are definite concerns in the overall economic conditions, the fundamentals, as Harry says, are what matters.  These have not changed all that much over the years.  I have often viewed economic cycles like mood swings, as they are often keyed to other events that don't always have much to do with economics, at least not directly.

Like many of the businesses I talk with on daily basis, I believe that if we all stay focused and keep our noses to the grindstones, as the old cliche goes, we will be fine.  I know of many growing businesses out there, and that leads to opportunity across the economic spectrum.  While today's news is not exactly positive, the outlook for our nation and our world, is quite exciting.  Let's all keep our focus and help each other enjoy life to it's fullest.

Be Ready for Hurricane Season

With Gustav and Hanna now behind us and Ike gathering power, it's important to take a moment and insure your systems are prepared to ride out what looks to be a very active hurricane season.  Just today, a column I wrote about this was published by our local paper.  You may read it here.

To give you the quick summary, be sure you've got reliable UPS protection in the event you lose power.  You also want to be absolutely sure you have a reliable backup.  We recommend offsite backup to complement your onsite backup so if you have any catastrophic failures, you will have the best options possible to access your data.

Our Jenaly VSA Backup and Disaster Recovery service is a blend of near real time on-site backup coupled with secure off-site backup, to insure you have the best possibilty of recovering not just your data, but also your business.  If you have any questions or concerns about your backups, give our office a call at 603-431-7864 and we'll be glad to check them and insure the are working reliably.  In the meantime, check out my latest column and let me know your thoughts.  Have a great week!

Network Security and Employee Terminations

Happy Labor Day!  Labor Day is a holiday for the "working citizen" according to Wikipedia.  So, I hope you are enjoying, or have just enjoyed, a restful day off.  While Labor Day also signals the unofficial end to summer, at least here on the NH Seacoast, we're expecting a stretch of georgeous summer weather this week.

One of the critical things business owners and managers need to remain keenly aware of, is who has access to sensitive IT information.  This can be as simple as passwords, but especially for those who have access to administrative passwords, this can mean the equivalent of the "keys to the shop".  This becomes critically important when one of these individuals leaves the company, voluntarily or otherwise.

An alarming survey by security software firm Cyber-Ark, notes that most employees with administrative, or privelaged, access to your IT systems will snoop or steal information they should not have access to.  This is a troubling piece of information.  I was surprised at some of the results in this survey, though it should also be noted that this survey was done in Europe and one would like to think that those of us in the USA would be more ethical, but it makes you wonder.

This survey underscores the importance of why you must limit who has administrative access to your systems and why you must have appropriate policies in place for those that do.  We routinely recommend closely held limitations on who has access and while this can sometimes seem inconvenient or unnecessary, consider some of the findings of this study.  Your IT systems need to be secure, not just from outside threat, but also, unfortunately, from inside threats as well.

Be sure to audit your network security, at least twice a year and talk with a qualified and trusted IT partner about insuring your network is secure.