Centrend

Menu
Facebook Twitter Instagram Linkedin

Author name: admin

Should you back up your cloud data?

Cybersecurity /

So you’ve put your data in the cloud. Should you back it up? The short answer is Yes!  This article explains why I think it’s essential.  We put data in the cloud for different reasons. Sometimes it is the primary access point for our data, and it’s in the cloud for easy access from anywhere in the world. Or we might put the data in the cloud because, with today’s high standards for cloud security, it’s the safest place to manage confidential data. The cloud might be used as a backup of data that resides on our local computers or file servers. Your reasons for putting data in the cloud may vary, but here are the top reasons you should be backing it up yourself:  While the provider may have features that let you restore or roll back files and folders to a previous point, these processes can take a long time, and the copies of files may not go back as far as you need them to. Consider a file that is accessed quarterly, and you don’t notice that in setting up the file for the next quarter, you accidentally overwrote last quarter’s good data.  If your cloud provider only keeps copies for 30 days, your last quarter’s data is lost! A backup is only as good as the last test proves it to be. Many folks don’t find out their backup system doesn’t work until they need to restore something. By then it’s too late. Cloud providers may not be clear about what is backed up, how often, or how long and cumbersome it can be to restore the data when you need to. If your cloud provider experiences a failure, your data will be inaccessible. While it’s unlikely to be a permanent, catastrophic failure, the provider may be down for a long time. What will it cost you or your business to lose access to the data for a couple of days or more? With your local copy, you can restore the file quickly. If your Internet Connection fails for an extended period, you will want to restore your backup locally to get back up and running. You’ll be glad you had a local copy to fall back on!   Cloud data is not impervious to crypto-locker-type viruses. Especially true when you have a drive mapped to the data source. If a folder or group of files is encrypted and this compromise goes undetected for some time, your only recourse will be to restore a local backup. Having a local backup is inexpensive insurance and makes good sense. The ability to restore a backup locally provides your business with a great contingency plan to keep you up and running should the cloud provider go down for any reason.

Should you back up your cloud data? Read More »

How to Keep Passwords Safe in Email

Cybersecurity /

No doubt, the most secure way to give someone a password or other confidential information is in person or over a private phone call. There are times, however, when you want to send a password or a bank account number via email simply because of the convenience. This article explores how to send secure information safely. Most people find email encryption software to be expensive and complicated to work with. Ephemeral messaging may be the answer. When something is ephemeral, it is considered “temporary” or “only lasting a short time.” A great early example of ephemeral messaging is from the James Bond movies. James Bond would often receive a tape about his secret mission. Upon hearing the message, the final thing it would warn 007 is that the message will self-destruct. SnapChat is a very commonly used application that is a modern example of ephemeral messaging. SnapChat lets users of its phone application send pictures or text that disappear either after a short time or after being viewed. While it’s popular among teenagers and some adults, it’s not practical for business use. The solution I recommend for business is called Shush.  It’s an online service provided free by Articulate, makers of e-learning course authoring tools. You can try Shush out for yourself at this link: https://shush.articulate.com/. You will be pleasantly surprised to find that the service is completely anonymous and does not require a login for either the sender or receiver! You go to the site and enter (or copy/paste) the information you want to encrypt into the presented window: After you enter the content, you then choose how long you want the message to live. You obtain the link by clicking the share button.  Click the Copy button and paste the link into an email message to send to your contact. Once the duration expires, the link will no longer work, and your message can no longer be retrieved. Depending on the duration you set, the message will be viewable to anyone that has the link. The default and most secure solution is “When it’s first viewed.” Upon the first view is an excellent choice for messages that you know will be read promptly as they only last for a maximum of 12 hours. Messages sent this way can only be viewed one time, and then they are gone forever. Messages that are set for a specific duration such as a day or a week can be seen again and again by anyone with the link. Thank you for reading. This blog post will now self-destruct!

How to Keep Passwords Safe in Email Read More »

Are Cell Phones Ruining Communications?

IT Support /

Technology is great. I believe in its development and use to the benefit of all humankind. However, there is a real danger that we are losing our ability to communicate with each other because of the way cell phones are way overused.  I’m sure you’ve seen the scenario. A set of parents with their two children are out to a nice family dinner at a restaurant. Rather than talk, they are all on their phones accessing social media or texting friends. It’s not just the kids; it’s adults as well. People are on social media and texting others instead of talking to one another. They are using cell phones at the dinner table instead of having a conversation with the people they are with.  We see this in families, couples, and friends that are out to dinner, at social gatherings, even while they are walking around!  Sometimes the behavior is just rude, and they are disengaged from those they are with due to a lack of respect or lack of interest. Other times it can be caused by a condition called FOMO, or Fear of Missing out. Psychology Today has an article that describes experiments done to prove that a Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is a real and valid condition. The article continues to say that FOMO has become prevalent among young adults across America and in many other parts of the world as well. If you think it’s not really a thing, I’m sorry to say that it is. The American Addiction Center, LLC, a leading provider of rehab for addicts, has a website called PyschGuides.com on which they have published an article “Signs and Symptoms of Cell Phone Addition.”  I’m not the only techy to pick up on the dangers of excessive smartphone use.  Check out this article on the popular website, PC Mag. If this sounds like you, your family, or your friends, I urge you to get cell phone use under control and be present with the people you are physically with.

Are Cell Phones Ruining Communications? Read More »

How Big Can My Outlook File Get?

IT Support /

Who doesn’t love their email?  Ok, maybe love is a strong word, but we all tend to save a lot of email, don’t we?  How much is too much and what are the risks of letting Outlook grow out of control? This article assumes you are using MS Outlook so the steps may be different for you, but the same general principals apply to any email program. Depending on your version of Outlook, you may be well below the technical limit which, by default, is 50gb in Outlook 2013 and higher. From a practical standpoint though, you will have a much better experience, and much better hope for recovery from outlook data file corruptions if you keep your outlook file much, much smaller than that. We recommend keeping outlook to less than 10gb in size. When the outlook data file is larger than 10gb, it is going to be much harder to back up and take much longer to scan for errors if you encounter a problem. I’ll cover how to scan your Outlook data file for errors in a later blog entry. For now, though, know that it is something that can happen due to disk errors or data corruption from sudden power loss, etc. This past week I helped one of our users with a data file that was close to 48gb in size. Her outlook file had become corrupt and would no longer properly send/receive email. I started the scan at noontime and was checking on it throughout the day. By 11:30 at night it had been running nearly 12 hours but was still not done!  She could not access her outlook file while it was scanning, which was a significant inconvenience for her. If your organization doesn’t have its own MS Exchange server, your outlook data file is most likely stored in .PST format. This file is vulnerable to data loss because a copy of its contents does not exist anywhere else. It’s important to make a copy to another location such as a memory stick or external USB drive. It’s going to take a long time to copy the file if it gets much bigger than 10gb so the risk is you won’t take time to do it or you won’t back it up often because you can’t have outlook open during the copy. Finding the outlook data file can be tricky. Here’s how to do it: With Outlook open, click File, then Account Settings. Click the Data File Tab. Click Open File Location. In the list of files presented (see image at right) right-click the image and then click properties. Viewing the properties of the file, you will see how large it is in megabytes or gigabytes. You will want the PST to be less than 10 gigs in size. As you can see from my file, at right, I am just under the recommended limit and will need to archive soon. For now, though, I can copy the file to a USB stick or to my file server to back it up. Close the properties window and from the data file folder shown, you can right-click and copy the data file to another location such as your USB stick, an external USB hard drive, or a network share. Remember: It’s important to keep this file backed up because it is going to contain data that no longer exists on the servers of your email host.

How Big Can My Outlook File Get? Read More »

Non-profits Deserve the Best Tools – for Free!

IT Tech Tips /

If you work for or care about a non-profit organization, make sure they know about Centrend – and these strategies for obtaining the best software for free or nearly free. Corporations understand that investments in technology can make a huge difference in the success of their non-profit organization. After calculating Return on Investment (ROI) they can afford to wait a year or more for their technology investment to pay off. Non-profit organizations don’t have that luxury of waiting for a return on investment.   They have to maintain a positive cash flow to be successful. While the ROI can be terrific for businesses adopting new software technology, it’s harder to justify such expenses in the non-profit sector. As a turn-around specialist and business consultant friend of mine tells our clients, “No margin, no mission.” Fortunately, there are many opportunities to obtain top-notch information systems either free or at a minimum cost. The following list is what I consider the best of the best for Non-Profits. Start here to make sure you are obtaining the most cost-effective technology for your non-profit: Tech Soup – Tech Soup is the premier platform that lets businesses like Microsoft donate software licensing and subscriptions to non-profits. There is a minimal fee for TechSoup to administer the licensing, but the cost ends up being pennies on the dollar. You can also get recycled/off lease hardware from them very inexpensively though in our experience, the quality of the hardware has been inconsistent. Gsuite for Non-Profits – Google has a very generous program for Non-Profits that allows you to use the entire Gsuite for up to 49 users, completely free!  You can have 30 gig of storage for each user, plus use team drives for document collaboration. Google can host your entire domain name for free and having their reliability for email gives your non-profit a great advantage at no cost. SalesForce.com – Salesforce.com’s “Nonprofit Success Pack” provides a set of advanced Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools for managing constituents and donors. It’s not free, but the price is significantly reduced and it’s a very robust set of tools. Donorbox.org – Donorbox.org is an automated, recurring donation management system. You can use the system absolutely free to raise up to $1,000 a month. After that, they charge a nominal fee of 1.5% to pay for the cost of the platform.  MailChimp and ConstantContact – They offer complete email marketing solutions for keeping in touch with donors and creating brand awareness. Both services are good and offer discounts for non-profits, but MailChimp will ultimately cost less than ConstantContact for nearly the same feature set.  The list above will be a great place to get started when looking at software options for your non-profit organization. They will require you to show a copy of your 501c3, Federal Tax ID/EIN, and unless you are brand new, a copy of your tax return for the previous year.   If you have favorite resources for non-profits, please feel free to add them to the comments below. If you need help getting some of this in place, Centrend may be able to donate consulting services. Please reach out to us and let us know how we can help your mission succeed! 

Non-profits Deserve the Best Tools – for Free! Read More »

Are public WiFi’s Safe?

Cybersecurity /

A friend of mine and I were together at a venue, and I asked him if he was able to get on the local free Wifi that was provided. He said, “I usually don’t go on public wifi because I don’t think it’s secure.” This article describes what I told him I thought the real risks were so he could decide if he could use it safely. First, when connecting a Windows PC to public WiFi, the computer will ask what kind of network you are connecting to. It usually offers three choices: Public, Home, and Work. What you choose here makes a big difference in how secure your computer will be as it adjusts the firewall along with controlling your file-sharing features. Always select the public type when connecting to a public WiFi. Second, I explained that as long as whatever he was doing had a secure connection, denoted HTTPS: in the address bar, then the communications between his computer or phone and the web server are encrypted. Having HTTPS before the address in the browser means that anything he typed into the browser and sent on a form or anything he read from the site would not be observable to a third party. Sure, someone could intercept the transmission and look at it, but they would see gibberish. Hackers can snoop unencrypted communication that is without the S on the end of the HTTP in the address bar very easily. This allows them to see things like your login name and password in plain text. They can use this information to log into your account at will and wreak all kinds of havoc. So, make sure what you do on public Wi-Fi is encrypted. Third and perhaps most importantly, I explained that any real danger from using public wifi comes from poor security on your end. In other words, if the device you are using to access the public WiFi is not correctly configured and secure, you are at risk of threats.  What kind of security problems can leave you vulnerable?  Well, here are a few examples: Your computer’s firewall is turned off You fail to identify open WiFi as a public type of network Your computer is not up to date with the latest security patches Your computer’s antivirus is not up to date. I told my friend, he can use the WiFi safely as long as he’s made sure that the necessary security requirements of his computer have been taken care of and the sites he’s communicating with use a secure protocol.  To be even more secure and private, you can use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) which holds all your communications inside an encrypted tunnel. Not only does a VPN provide excellent security for your PC but it protects you from honeypots as well, but we’ll save that for another blog article.  Do you feel safe using public Wi-Fi? Have you had any concerns or bad experiences with public Wi-Fi? Please feel free to comment below, and we’ll discuss!

Are public WiFi’s Safe? Read More »

Are You in the Dark about Downtime?

Cybersecurity /

Even the most reliable systems can go down, and you deserve to know what is happening! Here are some thoughts on what you should be able to find out when a critical piece of your Information Technology fails. As a managed service provider, we take great care to keep our customers’ systems up and running with minimal downtime. Things do break occasionally though, and it’s very important to keep our customers informed. Take a look at my blog entry about unexpected power issues for example. When a key piece of your technology goes down, you need the problem quickly acknowledged and you should be kept up to date as to the progress of its resolution. On Wednesday this past week, the part of Google’s GSuite that controls Calendar and Hangouts conversations stopped working for a few hours for us.  Rather than beat my head against the wall trying to see if the problem was on my end, I went out to their status website at AppStatus and saw there is a service outage affecting the areas of the product I was having problems with. Though it was frustrating to have systems that I rely upon be inaccessible, I appreciated how well Google communicated the status of their systems. By clicking into the details, they very expertly communicated what systems were having problems, the target time for when they believe it will be resolved, and finally, the news of it being fixed and fully operational again. While we can’t all have as robust, automated systems as Google for communicating outages, several essential things are good practices that IT Managers and managed service providers should follow. Acknowledge the problem. Scope the problem – are all systems down or some?  Are all users affected or only some users? When can a fix be expected? Announce when the problem is resolved. Conduct a root cause analysis to see what steps can be taken to avoid a recurrence of the problem. Following the above steps at a minimum will help keep your users informed and at least amicable while you work toward a solution to their issues.

Are You in the Dark about Downtime? Read More »

Power: the One Thing your Computer Systems Need

IT Support /

This week, one of our managed services customers sites went down due to a power failure. The site has a backup generator, but guess what? Their generator failed to start! While there is not much we can do for a customer that is entirely without power, there are things we have in place to get clients back up and running, the moment stable power returns. As soon as I received the notification that the power was down at the site, I knew something had gone wrong because I knew the site had a backup generator that should have automatically engaged within 30 seconds of a grid power loss. Except for this time, it didn’t kick on! I spoke with personnel at the site, and National Grid will not restore power for at least six hours. Downtime is extremely costly for this organization, so I immediately broke my schedule and headed to their location. Our plan was simple. We would get the servers back up and running as soon as power was restored to the site. At the time, we weren’t sure if it would be National Grid or the generator that would come on first, but one thing was for sure; downtime would be minimized as much as possible with this strategy.  All we needed was for power to come back and charge the battery backup systems to a safe level. I was confident that the information systems could quickly be brought online once the power came back because we had configured the battery backups to report to the servers that they were low on energy and that the servers should perform an orderly shutdown. Having this failsafe in place minimized risk by limiting the possibility of corruption of the server’s operating system. To summarize, there are a few things you should keep in mind when it comes to battery backups:  First, they are not intended to be a substitute for grid power or in place of a generator. Battery backups are not sized to be a long-term solution, but merely a stopgap intended to run the IT systems while you get your generator started or perform an orderly shutdown of your servers.  Second, UPS systems help you avoid sudden failures due to momentary blinks and brownouts. Third, when properly sized and configured, the UPS will send signals to your equipment to turn back on once the battery has recharged enough that it is safe to go back on the grid.

Power: the One Thing your Computer Systems Need Read More »

Don’t type contacts, Scan them in with your phone!

IT Support /

If you’re like me, you meet a lot of people and end up collecting a lot of business cards. Several years ago, serious business networkers had to have a special scanner for scanning business cards effectively. With our smartphones so powerful, and with such great cameras, there’s an app for that! Specialized card scanners are still around. Cardscan is probably the best and most popular, but I’m going to show you an application I use that only requires my phone’s camera. The app is called CamCard, and the screenshots I’m showing are of the application running on my Android phone. For my first example, I’m scanning Joseph D’Eramo’s card.  Joe is an outstanding copywriter with PR Works, a public relations firm in Plymouth Mass. After taking a picture of his card, CamCard immediately went to work parsing the image into recognizable fields and presenting it to me on the screen for editing. In the image above, on the far left, you can see the scan of Joe’s card along with the result.  From here, you can proofread the card for accuracy. As I touch into each field, the card app zooms in on the area of the scanned image to show you where it got that information from.  In the second photo, I clicked on Work phone, which shows me it obtained the data from the Direct Line section on the card. Next, I clicked on Website, and it zoomed right into www.prworkzone.com on the card photo so I could make sure the web site address was right. Joe’s card was relatively easy; it had black text on a white background, and the recognition was near 100% accurate. Now, watch what happened when I scanned Tom’s multi-colored card.  Tom is an expert security consultant with Beacon Protection and provides excellent burglary protection, video surveillance, fire and smoke monitoring, and access control systems for homes and businesses. Pictured below, the app created an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) enhanced version of the scanned card and used that rendering to parse the data into the correct fields. CamCard preserved the original image, which I show on the right, below. As you can see, CamCard had no problem at all parsing Tom’s card, even with its Yellow, Black and white colors. The application will let you keep notes on each contact too. I’ve gotten myself into the habit of including a memo that has the date and venue where I met the contact. I’ll often fill in details that will help me remember what they do and how they can help my contacts so I can refer them in the future. Once you’ve got the card scanned and proofread and save it, the contact details will be synced with your phone. You can then call the person or email them immediately if you like, without any extra steps to import the contacts. It’s also important to know that you can share the business card via email very easily. The recipient will get an email with the contact details (shown at left, below). If the recipient clicks the link at the bottom of the email message, they can view an image of the card on the CamCard site (shown at right, below), If the recipient is also a CamCard user, they can click Save to CardHolder to save it to their account. There are other apps and tools that you can use to scan cards, but CamCard is my favorite and lets you scan up to 500 cards without having to pay for a subscription.  You can download CamCard for your Android or iPhone from your phone’s Store app, or directly from links you can find on the CamCard web site.

Don’t type contacts, Scan them in with your phone! Read More »

How to Protect from Word and Excel Crashes

IT Tech Tips /

There is NOTHING worse than having worked on an Excel Spreadsheet or written something in MS Word and then had to redo it because of a power loss or application crash. You can avoid this frustration by following a few quick and easy precautionary steps. So How Do I Protect from Microsoft Word and Excel Crashes? The most critical piece of advice I can start with is to save early and often, especially before your print. I don’t know if it’s due to Murphy’s Law, or if there is some science behind the fact that programs tend to crash when the document is sent to print. To protect yourself between saves, launch the Office application and follow this process: Click File. Click Options. Click Save on the menu bar. Make sure that “Save AutoRecover information every 10 minutes” is checked. Make sure that “Keep the last autosaved version if I close without saving” is checked. Click OK. Now you are protected! If the Microsoft application crashes or if you exit and say “Don’t Save” when it asks if you want to save, you will be prompted with a screen such as the following to recover the file at the last checkpoint! I’ve shown you how to establish Autosave using Microsoft Word. You don’t need to set up autosave for each document, but you do need to set autosave up for each application. Configure autosave for each of your Microsoft programs, and you significantly reduce the amount of data loss that can occur. Note: This article assumes you are using a Microsoft Application such as Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel and are saving data to a local hard drive or USB memory stick. If you are saving to a cloud service such as Dropbox or Google Drive, backup versions of the file (revisions) are automatically saved for you and can be recovered through that program’s interface.

How to Protect from Word and Excel Crashes Read More »

Scroll to Top