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Card keys are fast replacing traditional keys in small businesses. Here are 7 reasons why it might make sense for your small business! Regular keys are bulky, clunky, and slowly going away. Have you been car shopping lately? You will be hard-pressed to find a new automobile that has a traditional door lock or ignition system. Instead, you will unlock the doors with the press of a button on a “fob.” Once in the car, you’ll press a button on the dash to start the vehicle. The card key technology, once reserved only for high-security facilities and fancy hotels, has become much more affordable for small businesses to adopt.  Besides looking professional and high-tech, there are some practical business reasons why card key technology is a great option. If a key gets lost, it’s no big deal.Think of the security concerns that arise when a key is lost or stolen. What expenses might be incurred to change the locks, etc.? With a card access control system, your company can deny access to the card with a couple of clicks of the mouse. The employee that lost their key is assigned a new card key, and no security risk has been incurred. Internal doors can be protected.Access control systems are well suited to protecting secure internal locations such as executive offices or Human Resources file rooms. For example, the janitor and the president can enter the building with their card, but only the president’s key card will open his private office. You’ll Have a History of Building Access.Whenever an employee scans their card, the system records their name, the current date and time, and the door location. If you have internal doors that are secured with key cards, their movement into these secure locations will also be documented. Optionally you can require card key scans to leave the building.It’s possible to require employees to scan when leaving the building. This helps complete the trail of an employee’s movement in, around, and ultimately out of the building. You could pull up a list of anyone that is currently in the building, or anyone that was accessing a particular area at a  specific date and time.  Automation options are nearly endless.A commonly assigned automation is to have the system unlock the doors during business hours, and then lock up automatically at closing time. Electronic access control systems have capabilities far beyond this, however. You can do things like adjusting the room temperature, turning on and off the lights, or triggering a video camera system to start recording activity. Systems are easy to administer.Whether using traditional keys or card keys, you will need to keep track of who has what key and what doors the various keys open. You will have to have a locksmith service provider rekey the locks anytime you have a breach such as a lost key, to keep the facility secure. Electronic access control systems make it infinitely easier to administer. You might use groups to assign access to outside doors and limit entry to only certain times of the day. Simple backups protect your cards and their owners.Centrend’s role in these systems includes installing the software on your computer or server and then making sure that the entire system is backed up. If there is a computer crash, we can have your access control system back up and running in less than 30 minutes. While the computer is “down,” the locks will continue to function correctly. You would be unable to make changes until the computer application is restored. Centrend, Inc. works closely with an excellent resource for installing access control systems. Please contact me if you need help determining if a card key system is right for you. We can help you plan the system and connect you with a local professional to perform the installation.

WiFi has come a long way in terms of speed and reliability. But there is still nothing like those irritating wires that are much faster and more reliable than interference-prone WiFi. Here are some guidelines for when you can go WiFi only and why you might not want to ditch all the wires just yet. This is a simple decision, and if you “Google” the topic, you will find lots of detailed, complicated articles arguing in one direction or the other. It comes down to this: the only place for WiFi is when you need portability and mobility. If your office has a lot of workers moving around and working in different areas of your space, it could make sense to let them be WiFi only. Otherwise, hard wire them and you will have a faster, simpler, and much more reliable network. You have to consider the physical capabilities of your computers and laptops. Are they capable of WiFi? Desktops sold today won’t include WiFi connectivity without specifically adding that capability. Many modern ultra-portable laptops, such as my Microsoft Surface Pro 6, have WiFi but don’t even have an ethernet port. If you order new equipment, make sure you know if it needs to have WiFi based on how and where it will be used. Need help to decide? Give us a call, and we’ll talk it through with you.

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.

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!