Data Management

When Was Your Last Permissions Review?

July 26, 2021

When was the last time you reviewed who in your business has access to which documents?

Do you know who has access to your documents? Or can everyone access everything?

You may need to make some changes. You see, the more people that have access to your business documents, the less secure they are.

Let’s imagine for a moment that one of your people opens a very convincing email, supposedly from a supplier.

The email contains a document to download, which they do, because it’s from a supplier, right? They can trust it.

What your employee didn’t notice was that the email signature was missing or that the email address wasn’t the same as it usually is.

And the document they downloaded has now installed malware on their device.

They don’t notice the malware because it all looked legit and nothing obvious has happened. They continue their working day unaware.

While they’re working, the malware is working too, in the background. It’s accessing and copying all of the data that your employee has access to.

You might get lucky and stop this malware before it enters your network and takes everything, but if your employee already has access to everything, well, it’s gone. Although this isn’t a malicious act on behalf of the employee, they’ve essentially caused a huge data breach that could kill your business.

And this scenario doesn’t even need the malware to become a reality. One day, a member of your team might decide they’d like to make a little money by stealing your valuable data.

By giving everyone access to everything, you’re making it too easy – and too tempting – for them.

So, if you haven’t already done this, I suggest that this week you make it a priority to sit down and work out who needs access to which files and documents and restrict access to absolutely everything.

Keep your own document detailing who has access to what. And update it whenever anyone joins the business or changes roles.

This is also a great way of protecting your data when somebody leaves, because you can see exactly what you need to revoke access to.

If you already restrict access, when was the last time you reviewed it?

Are people able to access files they no longer need? And are there people who could benefit from access to more documents to complete their role?

Yes, that’s a lot to think about. But once you have a detailed document to work from, regular reviews are pretty simple and definitely worth your time.

Please give us a call if you’d like to go over the shares and permissions on your network.

Data Encryption – What You Really Need To Know

December 27, 2018

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

In today’s digitally driven world, far too many personal and business devices are left unsecured. These devices don’t leverage strong passwords and fail to have the encryption needed to protect vital data.

Whether companies choose to store data in public, private, or hybrid clouds, they should always ensure that the data is encrypted before it leaves their devices or networks.

Additionally, when employees think that “this data isn’t important,” they are creating the weak links that hackers need to successfully infiltrate a device (or network) and subsequently steal unencrypted data, upload malware attacks, and otherwise wreak havoc on unsuspecting businesses.

What Is Data Retention? Why Do I Need It?

May 23, 2018

If you are in the medical or legal industry, regulations require you to retain data and records for a certain period of time. The data retention process was a little more clear-cut back when it was only files and sheets of papers in brown boxes that you stored in the attic or the basement.

However, in today’s time, almost everything is in digital form, whether it’s stored locally on a file server, external hard drives, or in the cloud.

This data needs to be secure and easily accessible in the event you need to retrieve any of it. Depending on how much data you have, there are many options.

The one thing you do not want to do is buy a cheap hard drive, move your data over to it, and think you’re safe.

If you only have one copy of that data and you move it to a new location, that is your only copy. You want to have your data saved in more than one location or a mirror copy of it saved.

A business might want to consider a local or cloud server with a RAID setup so that there is a copy of your copy. It creates a copy of your data so that, in the event of a hardware failure or data corruption, the data can be restored from the second copy.

The first copy would be returned to the last version, like nothing happened to it.

If you are a larger business and/or deal with medical or financial information, it would be very wise to utilize data encryption for the stored data.

However, every business should create a data retention policy and follow it. Categorize documents and images, then specify how long the data is to be retained.

Make sure all employees and IT professionals with access to company and client data know and adhere to this policy.

The main thing to keep in mind is the type and quality of hardware that is used. It’s great to have a data retention policy in place and follow it exactly, but if your data gets corrupted, stolen, or a hard drive fails, the policy does you no good.

The key to a rock-solid data retention policy starts with having a robust backup solution in place as well.

The backup solution can either be a cloud-based system or an on-site enterprise storage device or server with a proper RAID setup.

Here at Tech Experts, we can assist you with establishing a file server with the correct RAID configuration to ensure that the retained data is safe and secure, with encryption and redundancy built in. Cloud based image backups are also a great way to ensure the safety of your data.

We can also start you on a managed service plan for monitoring and maintenance of that server and your other workstations, laptops, printer, and VoIP phone systems.

Wherever you decide to store your data, make sure that enterprise hardware and security measures are used to ensure that your data will remain intact.

Five Ways To Take Your Business Paper Free

December 1, 2017

If you’re a small business owner, chances are you always have one eyes on your operating costs and the best way to reduce or eliminate extra expenses and improve staff efficiency.

One great way in which you can gain some great cost savings is by eliminating paper.

Paper-based tasks increase storage, postage, and compliance costs and can be a major overhead for modern-day businesses.

Here are five ways you can reduce paper usage and save yourself some cash in the process.

Smart Project Management

Traditionally, the process of managing company projects that involve different departments and multiple people generates massive amounts of paperwork.

More contemporary organizations are taking the smart project management approach through the use of cloud-based solutions, such as Basecamp, Asana or Trello, which allow you to ditch the paper while running a project online with unlimited users.

Electronic Payroll

Rectifying payroll issues costs half of all small business an average of $850 annually. Using decent payroll software reduces the errors and facilitates paperless processing. An electronic payroll system automates all the manual calculations such as tracking hours worked, calculating salaries, and filing taxes.

Salaries can also be paid electronically rather than printing checks or visiting the bank.

The additional benefits of electronic payroll include self-service functionality, and allowing staff to view their payroll data, such as personal details, tax deductions and pay slips online from any device.

Receipts and Invoices

Eliminate paper (and postage costs) by offering customers the option to receive electronic receipts either by email or text.

Your customer will then have it for future reference. Ask suppliers to issue and email digital invoices, which you can save into your accounting software.

Cloud Storage

Small businesses spend a lot of money to purchase, fill and maintain filing cabinets!

Switching to cloud storage can reduce most of this cost as many services, like Dropbox, offer a free allowance.

Most cloud-based options also allow you to organize documents into separate folders.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

CRM software can reduce the extent to which you rely on paper to store and track customer details, purchase orders, quotes and other correspondence.

Features include the ability to store customer data and interactions, manage staff details and vendors, and store documents.

Data Redundancy And Why You Should Have It

July 13, 2017

Ron Cochran is a senior help desk technician for Tech Experts.

Data redundancy is the making of an exact copy of the data that you are currently working with, in the event of a hardware failure, theft, or those pesky mistakes where you delete something that you really wanted.

What happens is you will have 1 or more hard-drives used for backups, housing those files that are kept nearly current. You will go through the steps to rebuild or restore the files or programs that were removed, then you will be back at the point you were at before the files were lost.

The above is extremely important when you are working with money or medical records. Let’s say you were working with a customer on their tax returns and your office experienced a power outage, which turns your computer off in the middle of saving data. A short while later, the power is restored and you turn your computer on and open the data to resume where you left off — and you find out that there is no record on your computer of your client and you start to panic.

If you had a redundant data solution, then you could restore the data, but if you didn’t, then you will need to call that customer and explain that they will need to bring all of that data back in so you can enter it into your system again. Now, consider how this customer could begin to think of you and your business.

If you have a safety net, you would follow the steps from your program and, in a short while, all of that data that you lost will be restored and you’ll be back at the point when the power went out, with all of your data intact. There are several different ways you can set up a system backup. One of the ways is to have more than one storage solutions to send data to.

With this solution, you will have more than one drive that is saving that information, which will do a couple of things. It will speed up the read/write times and you take less of a chance of losing more data. It’s always wise to have more than one solution for data recovery. You don’t want to wait until it’s too late and find out that in order to recover the data on your drive it’s going to be thousands of dollars.

You can have an image copy of your hard-drive made one time a day (or once a week or maybe twice a month) with a scheduled back up. You could have an application running in the background of your computer that would take up very few resources as it copies your data to a drive or an offsite storage facility.

We offer quite a few different data redundancy solutions to our clients. Those options range from on-site RAID drives to a cloud-based solution that is off-site. With either option, you can have a data backup or an image of your operating system — or even a direct mirror copy of your hard-drive in real time.

If you are worried that you might lose valuable information, then some sort of data redundancy is probably something you should be actively seeking. If you’re overwhelmed by the options and aren’t exactly sure which method would suit your business best, contact us and we can help you narrow it down, as well as provide a solution.

Is It Ever A Good Idea To Share Your Password?

August 15, 2016

Luke Gruden is a help desk technician for Tech Experts.

There are times when it can be tempting to share account information or give a coworker access to files and programs to streamline processes. Other times, you might be away from the office and someone may need something on your Windows.

There are many reasons why workers would want to share accounts and passwords that would be in good faith and, on the surface, best for business. Should this be allowed and acceptable in a work setting? The short answer is no, and for several good reasons.

As much as it would seem that sharing passwords and credential information could help workers, this can lead to poor habits and huge security vulnerabilities. All it takes is for one person to write a password down for another person to read it.

It is common for someone using social engineering to go into company buildings and look for sticky notes, note pads, or files on desktops with passwords and account information on them. This way, they have the means to steal company information.
Even worse, it will look like the user account that was used to steal information was the one stealing information instead of the thief.

Another common event at some work places is that some workers will use their coworkers account to do something risky, so if anything happens, the account holder is the one in trouble and not the person borrowing their account.

backup When it comes down to the pressures of keeping a job or to work towards promotions, it can be surprising what some people might resort to in achieving their goals.

Sometimes, a person sharing an account might make a mistake and mean no harm, like deleting some important files on accident or click something they didn’t know about in an area of the computer they normally do not have access to.
This would also look like the account holder made the mistakes and not the actual person. There is a reason why certain people have access to certain drives, websites, and programs. Permissions and restrictions should be respected.

Your Windows account and email are your unique fingerprints and they should be protected. Everything you do on a computer is recorded in event logs and possibly on other monitoring systems on the network. Your account information should serve you as well as prove the work you have done.

It may be tempting to share account information, but there are alternatives. If a coworker needs access to a program or website, let IT know.

If the coworker really needs access for their job, then your manager and IT will change permissions to allow them access and they’ll no longer have to ask for your password.

What about if they need to work on files that you are working on? Your IT can setup a network drive and enable access for both you and your coworker so that files can be edited and changed freely without ever logging into each other’s accounts.

There may be many other reasons as to why people may want to share their account information, but chances are, there are alternatives that your IT can implement so that no one’s personal credentials are given out. Keep your account your own and there will be no unnecessary risk or possible security threat out in the open. If you have security or user concerns or would like to develop a permissions plan, we would be happy to help. Give us a call at (734) 457-5000.

(Image Source: iCLIPART)

How Cloud Computing Can Benefit You

May 26, 2016

Michael Menor is Vice President of Support Services for Tech Experts.

Is your business using the cloud in 2016? If not, you should know that it’s a great tool that’s designed to help your business better manage its data and application deployment.

However, the cloud can be used for so much more and it’s quickly becoming an indispensable tool for SMBs.

Here are four ways that cloud computing is changing the way that small businesses handle their technology:

Data Storage
The cloud is a great way to share data among your entire organization and deploy it on a per user basis.

Businesses can store their information in a secure, off-site location, which the cloud allows them to access it through an Internet connection.

This eliminates the need to host your data internally and allows your employees to access information from any approved device through a secure connection, effectively allowing for enhanced productivity when out of the office.

Microsoft Office365
Access Office from anywhere; all you need is your computer – desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone – and an Internet connection.

Since the software is running in a data center, you just connect to the Internet to access the software.

Another benefit to this is that you have a central location for all your data. If you need to make a change to an Excel spreadsheet from your tablet and you share the file with your colleague, they will be able to view the changes that you just made.
Gone are the days of emailing files between members of your team and losing track of the most up to date file version.

Virtualization
The cloud can be an effective tool for virtualization, which is a great method for cutting costs for your business. By virtualizing physical IT components, you’re abstracting them for use in the cloud. This means that you’re storing them in the cloud.

Businesses can virtualize servers, desktop infrastructures, and even entire networks for use in the cloud. Doing so eliminates the physical costs associated with operating equipment, allowing you to dodge unnecessary costs and limit the risk of hardware failure. For example, you can deploy all of your users’ desktops virtually from the cloud so you don’t need to rely heavily on more expensive workstation technology and can instead use thin clients. Simply log into your company cloud and access all of your applications and data on virtually any Internet connected device.

Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR)
A BDR device relies on the cloud to ensure quick and speedy recovery deployment. The BDR takes snapshots of your data, which are sent to both a secure, off-site data center and the cloud.

From there, you can access your data or set a recovery into motion. If you experience hardware failure, the BDR can temporarily take the place of your server, allowing you ample time to find a more permanent solution.

The cloud is crucial to the success of a BDR device, simply because the cloud is where the BDR stores an archive of its data.

Storm Season Is Just Around The Corner… Are You Protected?

April 18, 2016

We’ve just celebrated the first day of Spring, and before you know it, the weather will warm up and tulips will bloom. Of course, we’re also headed into Spring storm season.

If you haven’t already, it is time to prepare for those pop-up storms that occur randomly at this time of year. These unexpected storms often result in everything from ice damage to lightning fires.

During this time of year the threat of fire, flood, severe storms, water damage from office sprinklers, and even theft is very real.

One of the most valuable assets for any company is its data. Hardware and software can easily be replaced, but a company’s data cannot! As a reminder to all of our clients, here are some simple things you should do to make sure your company is ready for any natural disaster. [Read more…] about Storm Season Is Just Around The Corner… Are You Protected?

Does Your Backup Plan Stand Up To A Disaster?

March 8, 2016

Technology, while a great asset that can be leveraged for your benefit, can also frighten businesses due to how unpredictable it can be at times. The constant threat of data loss, identity theft, and hardware failure can cripple your business’s ability to retain operations.

Specifically, businesses can learn about risk management by analyzing the processes used by an industry where risk management is absolutely critical: nuclear power plants.

In the wake of two of the most destructive and violent nuclear disasters, nuclear power plants have begun to crack down on how they approach risk management. The Chernobyl incident of 1986, as well as the tsunami-induced disaster at Fukushima in 2011, are the only nuclear disasters to reach the peak of the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) at a rating of 7.

This means that they had an immense impact on the immediate vicinity, as well as the environment on a worldwide scale.

The meltdown at Chernobyl was the result of an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction, ending in an enormous explosion that resulted in fire raining from the sky and radioactive core material being ejected into the vicinity. A closer inspection of the incident revealed that the explosion could have been prevented, had the plant practiced better safety measures and risk management, like having a containment system put in place for the worst-case scenario.

In comparison, the Fukushima plant was prepared to deal with a failure of operations.

The problem that led to a disaster was one which couldn’t possibly have been prevented: the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and the resulting tsunami. The Fukushima plant had a contingency plan to shut down the plant in the event of a disaster, but tsunami prevented this from happening properly by flooding damaged power lines and backup generators, leading to heat decay, meltdowns, and major reactor damage.

Disasters like these lead to professionals searching for ways to prevent emergency situations in the future. For example, the Fukushima incident kickstarted conversations on how to prevent problems caused by the unexpected issues.

In response to emergency power generators being flooded or destroyed, off-site power generation will be implemented as soon as November 2016.

One other way that nuclear plants have chosen to approach these new risks is by outsourcing this responsibility to third-party investigators, whose sole responsibility is to manage the reliability of backup solutions. In a way, these investigators function similar to a business’s outsourced IT management, limiting risk and ensuring that all operations are functioning as smoothly as possible.

What we want to emphasize to you is that businesses in industries of all kinds expect the worst to happen to them, and your business can’t afford to be any different.

Taking a proactive stance on your technology maintenance is of critical importance. While your server that suffers from hardware failure might not explode and rain impending doom from the sky or expel dangerous particulates into the atmosphere, it will lead to significant downtime and increased costs.

In order to ensure that your business continues to function in the future, Tech Experts suggests that you utilize a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solution that minimizes downtime and data loss risk.

BDR is capable of taking several backups a day of your business’s data, and sending the backups to both the cloud and a secure off-site data center for easy access.

In the event of a hardware failure or other disaster, the BDR device can act as a temporary replacement for your server. This lets your business continue to function while you implement a suitable replacement.