Monthly Archives: July 2017

Business Network, Internet, Managed Service Provider, microsoft, productivity

Forgot Your Password? The Future May Help.

Probably one of the most annoying things about technology today is trying to remember all your passwords, from your desktop login, social media sites, down to your online financials, a combination of words and numbers can really start to all blend together. If you’re like most of us, you probably have the same password for everything. This practice is EXTREMELY unsafe, and not recommended by any IT technicians or service providers. So, is there any end in sight to the madness? Well, current trends in biometrics may just make passwords obsolete.

Today, many cell phone users are logging onto their phones and entering all their apps with their fingerprints. Apple’s “Apple Pay” on iPhones are becoming ever more popular and allows for users to pay with their cards at retail locations using their fingerprints to authenticate the purchase. The Samsung Galaxy S8 phone has an upgraded retinal scanner that can be used to unlock the phone and can be used as a second factor in authenticating any number of online services. Microsoft’s Hello is allowing Windows 10 users to login through facial recognition and a patent for the company indicates they are trying to develop ways to pair a touchscreen with gestures made on the screen to authenticate. Some ideas out there are even hinting at using brainwaves for authentication to unlock computers!

What will this mean for the future of passwords? Maybe soon all you will have to do is think about unlocking your Facebook page and like magic, it would work. While that may seem farfetched, who knows what the future can hold? Much of this research to eliminate passwords is being supported. In the U.K. the National Cyber Security Center is looking for proposals that will do away with passwords and is offering $32,160 in research funds per proposal.

However, while things are still in the works we will have to still stick to the “old-school” way of keeping our information safe, with your first pets name and your birth date numbers (did we get some of you??…). Until then, we recommend creating strong passwords (using capital letters, numbers and symbols) and using different passwords for each account you have.

 

Call ECMSI today for a free consult!

330.750.9412

 

disaster recovery

Our systems are down!- A CEO’s Nightmare…

In this day and age, having some sort of computer to do your job is as necessary as air. Chances are, if you have a lot of computers in your business, you also have things like servers, routers, access points, and switches. These are all critical pieces to maintaining your business and your employee’s productivity level.

Have you ever stopped to think about what would happen if your business suffered a catastrophic event? How long would it take to get you back up and running? Do you know if your critical data is being backed-up and if it is, how often is that happening? If you are reading this and starting to feel a tightening in your chest because you aren’t sure of your answers, then it’s time to stop ducking your head in the sand.

In a survey done by IHS in 2015, the average of cost of outages totaled the $700 billion dollar mark. This number has only increased for the past year in 2017. This total includes the loss of employee productivity, revenue and the cost to the fix the issue, which surprisingly was the lowest cost of the three.

So how do you calculate downtime loss?  Our friends over at My IT Pros shared with this basic formula:

 LOST REVENUE = (GR/TH) x I x H

GR = gross yearly revenue

TH = total yearly business hours

I = percentage impact (a high percentage would mean you can’t complete any transactions, will lose clients and have a PR nightmare)

H = number of hours of outage

Finally, to calculate the expected annual cost, multiply this number by the number of expected annual hours of outage. If you do this and you are absolutely panicking, don’t worry. While all of this sounds like something out of a nightmare, the solutions are fairly simple. We would first recommend that you have incremental back-ups of your critical data that are stored both locally and in the cloud. This way, if your hardware were to fail, with the help of your IT provider, you can pull your data down from the cloud onto a backup server (part of the redundancy plan). Secondly, we recommend that you have a redundant environment. Now, this can mean a variety of things but at minimum, it would mean that you’d have a secondary server that is only for emergencies. At maximum, it would mean having clustered servers where there are more than 1 server and if something were to fail, the data just seamlessly moves to the next available hardware.

We don’t want to see any businesses have to deal with this nightmare. If you are unsure of what disaster recovery plan you have with your current IT Provider, it may be time to strike up that conversation. If you have any questions and would like to discuss how downtime could affect you and how ECMSI can help you prevent a disaster please feel free to contact us at 330.750.9412.