MANAGED IT
We’ve all seen the commercials featuring Mayhem, a bruised and battered Dean Winters in a disheveled grey suit, impersonating everything from a texting and driving teenage girl to a fiberglass-chewing raccoon. Always around him is some scene of … well … mayhem, be it a wrecked car, a house on fire, or flooding — all of which he causes.
As fun and entertaining as these ads are, they all point to one sobering truth, as one commercial so succinctly states: Mayhem has been and always will be everywhere. In the light of this, here are four reasons you should invest in an offsite data backup system now.
Oklahoma weather. ‘Nuff said. Three years ago, many of our associates from our corporate office in Oklahoma City watched either on TV or from their very homes as a tornado laid waste to Moore, carving a path of destruction two miles wide and 22 miles long, leaving 13,000 homes, perhaps hundreds of businesses and at least two public schools splintered and strewn apart in its wake. How many businesses lost everything, including their data? Who knows? And that’s just a tornado. We’re not even talking about the grassfires, flooding and earthquakes … and escaped tigers.
Stuff happens. Sometimes the disasters aren’t weather or nature-related, but while smaller — coming in the form of things like theft, fire, pipe-bursts and network crashes — they can be nearly as destructive. Sure, you may have built redundancy into your office, perhaps adding a back-up server, but if a tornado strikes, a flood swamps, a pipe bursts or a gas line explodes your back-up will be just as useless as the server.
Downtime is painfully expensive. According to one Gartner statistic, the unplanned downtime whether due to a natural or technical disaster, can damage a business to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars — the cost of downtime due to loss of data or a network outage estimated to $42,000 an hour. That’s just downtime. We’re not even talking about any kind of equipment or other physical damage that may have occured when your network went down.
Malicious technophile geek pirates … or whatever want to call them. By now, you’ve probably heard about viruses (or is it viri?), like Cryptolocker or more recently Locky, that infect networks through a clicked link or, as in the latter case, a macro on a Word document, encrypting all the files present and making them inaccessible until a ransom is paid. In many cases, even after the ransom is paid, the files are still lost.
So, alluding to another now popular bit of pop-culture, that is why we are warning you, “Spring is coming.” Time to prepare.
The best way to prepare your data for any disaster, whether that be a wide-spread natural phenomenon, a network failure, a Locky infection or a localized zombie apocalypse (white walkers maybe?) is to implement a dependable backup, disaster recovery solution — one located far offsite and one that can get you back up and running immediately following the disaster. With one of these systems, all one has to do is in essence go to the backup and in it access a time before the catastrophe and reset the system with that data. Done. Disaster over — at least for your business info. It’s that simple.
To learn how R.K. Black, Inc.’s IT team can implement a BDR system through our technology partner Datto and a data backup center more than 50 miles away from OKC, ensuring your data is safe and your downtime minimal, contact us.
MANAGED IT
To borrow a quote from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “There are two kinds of spurs, my friend. Those that come in by the door; those that come in by the window.” Those spurs that come in by the window probably don’t belong there and mean no good. That’s why you want to have a secure network — to limit the number of Wi-Fi “windows” in your house or business.
That’s why one of our specialists in our Managed Network Services department has written this instructable to help you keep them bad spurs out, if you will.
Most of us have wireless routers in our homes. We take them out of the box, follow the simple setup and leave it at that. We might even do this at our small business, but doing so opens us up to network security issues. Let’s take a deeper dive into that security.
Types of Wi-Fi security
-WEP Wired Equivalent Privacy — Highly vulnerable and easily compromised (the FBI gave a demonstration in 2005 of cracking a WEP passkey in minutes. Imagine how fast we can do it now).
-WPA Wi-Fi Protected Access — Created by the Wi-Fi Alliance as a replacement for the weak WEP standard. Uses TKIP or AES encryption, TKIP was meant as an easy upgrade to WEP but unfortunately has some of the same weakness that can be exploited. If you use WPA encryption, be sure you are using AES encryption.
-WPA2 Wi-Fi Protected Access II – Much the same as WPA but defaults to AES encryption however TKIP is still present as a fallback option.
Best setups for Wi-Fi Security:
WPA2+AES
WPA+AES
WPA+TKIP
WEP
Note: Your network should never be completely unsecured.
Let’s take a look at the wifi security in my UniFi AP that I use at home for wireless access. (Keep in mind, your router may differ.)
Log into your wireless router’s web interface (this should be somewhere in your router documentation probably a URL that looks something like https://192.168.x.x ).
Look around and find your wireless security options.
Here’s what mine looks like:
Image of wifi WLAN settings window
As you can see, I’m using WPA for security (the blue box) and my WPA mode (lets me choose between WPA, WPA2 or Both) is set to both to allow older devices that only support WPA to use my wireless. Also in the Orange box you can see my Encryption is AES only.
Wi-Fi Optimization
On your Android, device grab an app called Wi-Fi Analyzer open it up and it will scan all the wireless networks around you and tell you the channels they are running on.
As you can see, there are Wi-Fi networks running on channels 4 and 11, meaning if we are setting up a new Wi-Fi network, we would want to use channel 7 or 8 to cause the least amount of conflicts.
Again, here’s a screenshot of my Wi-Fi setup at home:
Image of wifi channels window
As you can see, if I wanted to broadcast on channel 7 or 8, I just need to click the drop down menu by channel and change the 11 to 7 or 8. It is very likely that you have a lot more networks broadcasting around you. Just try and overlap as few as possible using the Wi-Fi analyzer tool.
What’s this HT20?
Now, lets talk about the HT20 in the picture above. That stands for the 20Mhz — basically, how fast we can transfer something. 20 or 40 Mhz is the standard for most routers (though some new AC routers support 60Mhz). The thing to remember about this is the wider you set the channel, the easier it is for something to interfere with your network. Turn it up to 40 and if you experience any service degradation, lower it back to 20.
Thanks for reading and hopefully this provides you some help in fixing up your wi-fi.
If you need any network services for your small or medium-sized business, give our IT people a call at 405-943-9800.
MANAGED IT
We’ve all seen the commercials featuring Mayhem, a bruised and battered Dean Winters in a disheveled grey suit, impersonating everything from a texting and driving teenage girl to a fiberglass-chewing raccoon. Always around him is some scene of … well … mayhem, be it a wrecked car, a house on fire, or flooding — all of which he causes.
As fun and entertaining as these ads are, they all point to one sobering truth, as one commercial so succinctly states: Mayhem has been and always will be everywhere.
Less than two years ago, in May of 2013, many of our associates from our corporate office in Oklahoma City watched either on TV or from their very homes as mayhem in the form of a tornado devastated Moore, leaving a path of destruction two miles wide and 22 miles long, laying waste to nearly 13,000 homes, perhaps hundreds of businesses and at least two public schools. Since then, storms have struck central Oklahoma with tornadoes, flooding and strong winds.
Sometimes the disasters aren’t weather or nature-related, but while smaller — coming in the form of things like theft, fire, pipe-bursts and network crashes — can be nearly as destructive.
In fact, according to one Gartner statistic, the unplanned downtime alone whether due to a natural or technical disaster can damage a business to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars — the hourly cost of downtime for computer networks being an estimated $42,000.
So as we head into this winter (already having been hit with unseasonably springish-type storms) and next spring storm season and as malware becomes more prevalent in the cyber world, the question is while you may have gotten insurance to protect your business, have you protected your data? If your server crashes, is all your data gone?
Sure, you may have built redundancy into your office, perhaps adding back-up server, but if a tornado strikes, a flood swamps, or a virus infects your network, your back-up will be just as useless as the server.
The best way to prepare for any disaster, whether that be a wide-spread natural phenomenon or a network failure, is to implement a dependable backup, disaster recovery solution — one located far offsite and one that can get you back up and running immediately following the disaster.
In fact, such a system is the best defense against such malware as Cryptolocker and other malicious programs that encrypt your files, making them inaccessible but for a ransom.
To learn how R.K. Black’s Managed IT Services team can implement a BDR system through our technology partner Datto and a data backup center more than 50 miles away from Oklahoma City, Contact Us.
