I.T. Overdrive

I can't remember any meeting I've ever sat in with a potential client who asks us about our certifications. Most of our clients don't even know what those certifications are, or what's required to get that certification, and how it applies to them. When I was at EDS, yes. I had to get certified on certain things, you had to have specific certifications to move into different groups, to be able to do different things because they were so specialized in what they did. You don't see a lot of guys going to work there with a kind of a general knowledge. It's very specific and they must have those certifications.

Conversely, we rarely hire people coming from corporate or enterprise jobs. We find that their focus is a little too narrow and they don't have the kind of well-rounded knowledge that our clients require.

You know, our guys, our techs have to be able to clean a virus off a computer, as well as configure a firewall for security, and everything in between. So we tend to try to look for those guys that maybe know a little about a lot, as opposed to a lot about one or two specific things.

They can learn the things they need to learn to do our job. So our clients, on our level, don't typically care about certifications. They never ask. We don't really require them when we're looking to hire people. I'm not saying they're bad. They're great. Any kind of training you get is great. Any kind of certification proves that you're willing to learn enough about something to be able to get that certification.

Most of our clients, they assume since we've been around 20 years, we know what we're doing on the tech side. At that point, it's more of a, "How do we feel about each other personally? Do we get the "warm fuzzies?" Can we call your other clients? And talk to them?"

We pride ourselves on our personal touch that we have, even with our remote clients, the ones that aren't here in the metroplex, that we don't get to walk in their office as much anymore with the remote access, and the video calls. We still get to see them stay in touch and still have that personal interaction with them as much as we can without being on site.

It's funny, when I'm talking to new potential clients, I talk about that, that aspect of our business, about our personal relationships that we have with our clients. And it's so much so that, I've got keys and garage door codes to a lot of businesses and maybe even the owners house. They'll email and say, "Hey, my WiFi at home isn't working, or my wife's tablet can't do this..." Or I've gone into a client's house after Christmas and hooked up their kids X boxes on their network, or put in a wifi booster so they could watch Netflix in their bedroom and things like that.

So we have that personal relationship with a lot of our clients. We know their families and we really work with them on that personal level.

A lot of these clients, I've known personally for a long time. We were friends before we were business associates and business partners. But you know that kind of trend translates down to all my engineers and techs as well. And I try to make sure they understand that's part of the business too.

I'm a small business owner myself. And so, I understand the struggle. What they're going through. So, I get it, I can empathize with them and realte to the challneges of owning and running a small business. I think a lot of them appreciate that as well.

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Two-factor authentication or multifactor authentication is making a huge push over the past couple of years, but it's been around for a while. The reason it's making such a big push here lately is because Microsoft is starting to push that out to their Office 365 systems, which all of our clients use. A lot of businesses use it at all different sizes. All the school districts use it. It's a big player in the industry, and they're not requiring it yet, but they're highly suggesting it. And it's going to be a requirement, I think, from what we're reading and the way the industry is going.

It's a bit of a pain right now to set up. I think it'll get easier as they go through it. You typically have to download a Microsoft authenticator to your phone or some kind of mobile device. And when you go to log into your email or your cloud server, you put in your login ID, your password, and it prompts you on your phone and asks you, "Are you trying to log in?" And all you have to do is hit yes or no, or approve or deny.

In fact, we're actually working on a document right now. We're going to send to all of our clients with a recommendation to enable multifactor authentication on their Office 365 accounts. And if they don't want to do it, we're going to make them sign off on a piece of paper that they refused. And that if there are any breaches caused by this, that we determine that are caused by them not having the MFA enabled, that will be outside the scope of their contract. It's getting to be that serious. We have plenty of stories where if a client had multifactor authentication enable, it would have saved them a lot of time, hassle, and money.

Sometimes you get that notification, and you're you're you are trying to buy something. It doesn't go through, and you get the text or the email that says, "We saw this charge. Are you, you're trying to buy this?" Well, okay, it's approved, but you may have to put the charge back through and maybe call them back.

But I'm glad they do that, obviously, for the instances when you say, "No, I didn't charge a sombrero in Mexico City!"

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Your phone and tablets, those are a little easier to secure in that most people either have a pass code or face ID or fingerprint identification. That's pretty secure. That's about as secure as it can get out there. You can do face ID on your laptop with Windows now, and the same with Mac. They have a face facial recognition login, always great to activate if you have that option.

Another great thing to do with your laptop is to turn on full disk encryption. On a Mac it's easy. It's in system settings. You go, I believe it's File Vault and you just turn it on. Same with windows. In the control panel, you can enable BitLocker, and it will encrypt all the files on your hard drive. We highly advise all of our clients to do this.

Audits that our clients will send over either from one of their vendors or one of their customers is requiring this sometimes. We've had a couple from the IRS. We've had clients go through financial audits and as part of that, they've had to perform an I.T. audit as well.

And that's always the big question. Do your laptops have encryption enabled? It's easy to do. It's it makes it pretty much impossible to read the contents of your hard drive without the encryption key. And that's the kicker is people are afraid that they're going to lose the encryption key.

So if we manage it, we've got a repository that holds all the encryption keys. So that we can recover one if one's ever needed. You know that's our big stickler on laptops, you've got to enable that encryption. And then if your laptop gets stolen or lost, you leave it on the plane, somebody grabs it out of your car...

Then you're safe. It doesn't mean they can't format your drive and reload it. They can. But, when they do that, all the files are gone anyway, so you don't have to worry about it anymore.

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When it comes to passwords, there's some pretty hard and fast rules on what you should and shouldn't use as far as length of password and types of characters. What I like to tell people, and what even a lot of our business clients have started doing, is use a Password Manager. I've been using one personally for years. I think most, if not all of our staff uses one, and we have a lot of clients we've started setting these up for as well.

The great thing about it is, it will store all of your passwords for you in an encrypted vault. And you don't even have to know what they are. In fact, I use one called Last Pass. And when I go to log on, for example, onto my banking site the first time, Last Pass looks and sees that it's requesting a password, and it will prompt me and ask, do you want me to create a password for you?

And if I say yes, it will create a highly secure password. I can tell it however many characters I want it to be, anywhere from eight to 128 characters. It will create the password stored in its encrypted vault. And I don't even know what the password is. I don't know what any of the passwords are to any of the sites that I go to or any of my systems.

All I know is my Last Pass master password, just that one. So when I go to a site, my banking site, it prompts me for my master password. I put in my master password. It goes into my vault, pulls the actual banking site password, which is 28 characters long, plugs it in and logs me in.

It also syncs to my phone. So if I want to log into my banking app on my phone or my credit card app or anything, I log into Last Pass, and I only have to know my master password. Listen to this episode if you want even more great password tips to make sure you don't get hacked. Many people get lazy and sloppy with their passwords, making it much too easy for hackers to break in. Don't let that happen to you!

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The hardware you use your for businesses, a router and a firewall, switches, wireless equipment, all of this, even though it's hardware it also requires updating to keep security. Typically, for your computer, you have updates for hardware, but other hardware network pieces like printers fall into this category.

This is what's called a firmware update. And the difference is firmware is software that firmware actually resides on a chip, on a silicon processor of some sort within the hardware. So we do have to go out and download firmware updates for these devices and apply them.

You should be going in and applying those firmware updates to those devices and rebooting those devices on a monthly basis, just to keep them all on the latest version, and to keep them all on the latest security patches as well. A lot of people don't think about that.

If you were to go through a security penetration test, you'd be surprised at all the red you would see on your report from all of your hardware being out of date. There's a reason they update that software, hackers can easily get into that software exploit security holes.

And once they do that, they're on your network. Now they can start capturing network traffic. They can see whose computer is insecure and bounce over to that. We do monitor and maintain that for all of our clients as well.

And that's another reason we like to standardize on equipment. We always use the same brand of hardware or firewalls, for switches, wireless equipment. We use the same brand, same models as much as possible just to standardize it, which helps us to keep up with the updates for all of them, knowing what needs to be where.

And obviously within the last year with so many people moving and working from home, we've had to deal with that a ton and that sometimes can be an issue. Users need remote access to the office, or they need to have access to files. And sometimes it doesn't work. Not because something's wrong with the office network. It's usually something on their home network is outdated. Firmware hasn't been applied, it's old equipment and their remote access software.

At least the software we use requires those to be at a certain level and requires that security to be at a certain level before it can be used. And if it's not, it doesn't work. And 99 times out of a hundred, it's something on their home network that's causing the issue.

Do you need help? Remote worker access challenges or network access problems? Give us a call!

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When it comes to backups, there are many methods out there, all at different price levels. We typically cloud our clients typically employ one of three methods. The first one, is kind of the old tried and true method. You can buy a couple of external little portable, external hard drives, and plug them into your server.

We run a little backup system software that backs up to these external hard drives, and you can swap them out typically once a week and put them in a fireproof safe or take them home to get them off site. So the worst case in that backup solution is if something happens to your server, you lose no more than a week of your data. Not ideal, but from a cost standpoint, it's cheap and works fine, but you're also reliant upon somebody to swap those drives out, take those drives home, or put them in the safe and make them secure.

And if that doesn't happen, then the backups don't occur. Or if there is a disaster and both drives are at the site, and you have a flood or a tornado or something happens in the server room, it doesn't do you any good if all of your backups are all sitting in one place. We may have a couple of clients that still do that, but we kind of cringe at that. We don't recommend it, but cheap guys are going to be cheap.

The next solution is just a cloud backup system. There's plenty of them out there that'll back up your computer to the cloud, and you just pay a monthly fee depending on how much storage. And they make those for businesses as well. And we do have quite a few clients that use that works great. It's automated, you set it and forget it. The files are backed up. You get a report typically every day saying yes, the backup was successful, or it wasn't successful.

It's still inexpensive. It doesn't cost that much per month, and you know that it's done, that it's taken care of, and you don't have to worry about it. To restore data takes a little time because you have to download it. And depending on your internet connection, it might take a full day maybe two, to download all of that. So you're talking about being out of commission for three, four days in a disaster.

Finally, the last one and the best system out is a true backup and disaster recovery system is called Datto. There are a few others out there. Datto is a pretty big player in the market and typically these are clients that can't afford to be down at all, business critical. It's a small server we place on their network. That server then makes an exact duplicate of their on-premise servers. It makes a duplicate of the operating system. The settings, the entire server, it creates what's called an image.

The great thing is it does this every hour. So if we have a client that creates a file at 10:00 AM and one of their other users deletes it at noon, we can go back and pull the file from the 11 o'clock backup. The nice thing is if their server were to crater, that backup appliance will actually fire up that server on itself, bring it up in a virtual environment. And 15 minutes later, they're back up and running until they can replace the hardware.

Do you need help staying secure or creating backups? Give us a call!

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Earlier this week we had a client who got phished. They received an email, and it looks like it's from one of their officers in the company. And the interesting thing was they had been emailing with this officer about a particular product sale they were working on with a client and the officer emailed the salesperson and said, "Hey, this client's agreed to buy."

"Please send them wiring instructions so that they can send over money to purchase our product. And here are the wiring instructions."

And so the sales guy said, "Sure, I'll send that right over." He forwarded that to his contact that he had been working with and that contact sent it to his accounting group. Who then tried to send $140,000 back to my client, a wire transfer. Thankfully their bank called them and said, "This looks a little fishy. Can you verify the numbers?"

So they went back through the trail, back to my client. Who went to the sales guy who went to his officer who said, "Nope, never sent that to you don't know what you're talking about."

How did this happen? After digging into his email, we found that he had opened up an attachment from a source which he didn't know, and had installed some virus malware on his computer and people had been able to get in.

The interesting thing they do here is they got into your email, and this is typically how it works, and they set up forwarding rules for anything to do with wire transfers, bank accounts, anything financial. Those emails never hit your inbox and get forwarded to the hackers automatically all in the background. And then the email gets deleted. So that person never sees it. Never even knows it was there.

And then they'll pull that wire transfer info. They'll substitute a form with letterhead, with the correct email addresses, with the correct names and obviously incorrect wiring information and email it out. You don't want to click on anything you don't know who it's from. Make a phone call first and verify that this is from who you think it is.

We had tons of security systems in place for them. We had a spam filter. We have antivirus controls, a firewall, and they were obviously not very happy. But there's nothing out there that is 100% secure. Nothing out there that is 100% full-proof that will stop every single thing coming through. So some of the responsibility does fall on the end customer and the end user to be knowledgeable. We send out a lot of training on this, but not everyone watches it.

So we suggest you make a phone call and just verify. In the long run, it'll cost you a lot less. Thankfully their bank caught it, and shut it down. Otherwise they would have wired out $140,000 to an overseas bank account.

Do you need help staying secure? Give us a call!

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A lot of people think their computer is secure, they may have a firewall and antivirus software loaded. But really the big key here is that Microsoft releases security updates for Windows, for all of the operating systems, including servers, once a week.

And even though you may have great antivirus software, you may have a great spam filter, you may have a great firewall, but if you're not keeping your updates on your computer, it's still very vulnerable. They push those updates out for a reason, mostly to patch security holes.

Some are performance upgrades. You know, some are functional upgrades. But most of them are to patch security holes in the operating system that their security team spends 24/7 looking for. Or, if other companies have found security holes, which is quite frequent, they'll send out patches as well.

So with our systems, and as part of our contracts, we actually have a utility that does that automatically. We can schedule that, and we actually test the patches to make sure it doesn't break other commonly used software. And once we feel good, we push those out to our clients' computers and servers. We do that after hours. We wake up all the systems. We push the updates they get installed and rebooted all remotely, typically, odd hours of the morning while nobody's in the office.

So it's extremely important to keep up with those. And a lot of people don't because if you don't have an automatic system doing it, that means you have to do it manually. And even though it may prompt and ask you to do it. Most people just say, "do it later, do it later, do it later." Because they're in the middle of something, and they don't want to install and have to reboot their system. Now, I've got to sit here for, for 30 minutes while this finishes. So that's why we do them after hours and automatically, and they're done.

Do you need help getting it done and staying secure? Give a call!

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Obviously we made plenty of mistakes as I'm sure any business, trial by fire learning. The technical side tends to be the easy part, it's running the business that tends to be the more difficult part, especially for us tech types. We just want to get in and play with computers.

Today I'm sharing a story of a mistake I made early on in my business. Basically, with I.T. stuff, Murphy's Law seems to prevail. You know, "If it can go wrong, it will." And because of this, we have learned to budget in extra time for all of those unforeseen pieces of the project. Sometimes I call these "can of worms" deals, where you dive in, and one thing leads to another, and another, and so on.

It's always going to take longer than you think, but we know that. And someone dealing with their own I.T. internally isn't going to account for this, and suddenly find themselves losing even more time, and more money.

Listen in as I share a very educational experience and let me know if you've ever experienced something similar!

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I didn't start off as a computer guy, in fact, I was working in accounting and financial services. Today I share the story of how I fell into I.T. management. Or rather how I was invited into the position because, well, I was young and knew how to re-boot a computer when my co-workers were having issues. And later I was let go from my full-time I.T. position by my longtime friend and client who now says he started Herrod Technology, because I had no choice but to dive into the business and make it work. Before long, I was busier than I had ever imagined and the rest is history.

Listen in to the story of how Herrod Technology was born almost 20 years ago. We've come a long way and helped a lot of great businesses. Let us know if yours is next!

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