Lornet

OK everyone hates them (complex passwords), but there is a compelling story I want to tell about a client that decided not to do it.  Public servers, specifically mail servers are constantly being probed for logins.  Simple passwords are broken easily.  In this clients case one users account was broken into.  Without even knowing it that username and password was then spread around the world.  When we were alerted to the problem there was 58,000 spam emails in the outbound queues marked for sending.  All because complex passwords were not required.  This client will also be internet blacklisted for a while because of the volume of spam they were spewing just because of a simple password.  So the moral of the story is make yourself protected by using complex passwords.  The password should not look like a real word.  Complex passwords should have a minimum of 8 characters.  Those 8 characters should be random uper case, lower case, numbers and at least one symbol.  We use a tool called passutils from PC Tools to generate passwords.  It creates good secure complex passwords that would make breakins like described above very very rare.

Managed Services so is it what small businesses need?  First what is this nebulous thing.  Well maybe lets look at it another way.  In larde companies most have full time IT staff.  In a small company you may or may not even have a server.  When something goes wrong you end up calling someone like us to come in and fix whatever broke.  THis may happen many times a month and you have to wait while an engineer is driving to you.  Then you get a bill for those services and it can be multiple hundreds of dollars for the accumulated visits.  This is really what Managed Services attempts to solve.  It is a peice of software that lives on your server or designated desktop.  It monitors and collects information about all the computers and network devices in your network.  This information is viewed at a provider such as us.  We can take proactive action to correct a problem or dispatch an engineer to fix a problem before it causes downtime.  It also provides us and the business owner a complete inventory both software and hardware.  It monitors disk space and many other key peices of information with each device.  Managed Services also generates reports which are sent to the business owner in laymans terms.  The whole concept is to reduce the number of calls you have to make to us the provider and less onsite visits which cost you money.  Plus give the owner and the company accountant a good accounting of all the equipment.  There is a lot of other things Managed Services buy for the small business and maybe can help lower your overall technology costs, which in todays economy just makes plain sense.  So in a nutshell here are the benefits:

1. proactive support of your technology with less onsite visits.
2. lower overall technology costs
3. higher uptime
4. inventory of all the technology equipment and software .

For more detail look at the attached document on our Managed Services offering.

MSPcustomer_brochure.pdf (285.61 kb)

We had a client email us today about a deal she was offered at a big box store.  She was concerned about the special addons they wanted to put on her new system.  Mainly she was concerned about a certain security software package.  She was right the offer was junk.  But she did not know.  Obviously the big box store employee did not know either, the boss said to and that was it.  The bottom line is consumer computers wether purchased online or through big box stores comes with more junk and trash than the local garbage dump this includes security software that belongs in the local garbage dump.  Needless to say the big box stores advertise they have techs on site that do all these marvelous things.  Well I doubt they have engineering degrees or computer science degrees (well with the economy the way it is they might).  The fact is before you let some salesperson or non-certified person install software on your new machine, check with a certified degreed IT consultant, most of us offer this kind of service for free.