Recent Blog Posts
While there are assorted backup strategies available to businesses, the most important consideration to make is which of them will best fit your purposes. After all, different businesses create and collect different types of data, and losing that data therefore has different consequences for one than it would for another. Let?s take a moment to examine the prospect of shaping a backup strategy to the way your business operates. Focusing on Operability Take a moment and consider something: of all the data you have, what could you simply not continue to function without? What data could land your business in major trouble if it were to be lost? As your data powers your daily operations, you probably have a pretty good idea of what is most essential to your business? continued survival. Unfortunately, you can?t be sure that your data is safe. After all, if it were saved on a single server in a reinforced, completely secure room, that data could still be lost. The server could malfunction, or catch fire, and your data would be gone. Data loss doesn?t always mean data theft. No, there is no guarantee that your data will be safe, so you need to address this risk through preventative action. This is why an operational backup strategy is so useful. By incorporating insights into which data is used most often and how that data is put to use, an operational backup combines the benefits of incremental and differential backup strategies. In short, when the chips are down, you?ll know you can restore your necessary data as the need arises. Why Does Operational Recovery Matter? From here, we will proceed under the assumption that you have hired human beings to work in your business. Guess what is directly responsible for the majority of a given company?s data loss? Your workers are the right answer. Some are negligent, some are vindictive, and others just don?t grasp the importance of your information systems? care. Therefore, a data backup is a smart investment. That?s without even mentioning that a lot of data loss can happen without the ?help? of your employees. Consider your central hardware. If that fails for any reason, or is somehow damaged, your business? IT could be suddenly left unmanaged and unconfigured. Access control systems and email platforms could be lost, along with all the important information they contain, and you would then need to spend days and weeks rebuilding them from the ground up. Alternatively, a backup could help you avoid this stress and expense. Operational Recovery The data recovery process?especially in those times when you are fully migrating data from one server to another?is notoriously slow. The trouble is that if you are trying to recover data, it is problematic when the recovery process takes a long time. The longer you are without data, the more downtime you face. Downtime is wasted money. With the BDR, however, the restore times are much faster, especially since you can choose to restore from either the BDR itself or the data center it is backed up to. The BDR is one of the most useful products you can purchase for your business. It is an insurance policy against a multitude of potential problems. Call White Mountain IT Services at (603) 889-0800 to talk to one of our consultants about the BDR […]
Managing Your IT You may not even realize it, but your IT management carries with it substantial cost, whether that cost be from hiring onsite IT administrators or from not having any IT support and the time and expense it takes away from you and your staff. Today, there are other considerations outside of just the health of your infrastructure, especially if your workforce is dispersed and working remotely. The fact is that by having an IT services provider handle the health of your organization?s IT, you are getting more than just IT support, you are removing the financial shackles around your IT support and providing your staff the maintained and managed information systems that can make a huge difference for them. White Mountain IT Services delivers IT services that aren?t just your run-of-the-mill IT support, they are a value-based service delivery that not only provides your business with superiorly monitored and managed IT, it also provides your business several services that can be of immense benefit to your organization. They include: Remote management – Our staff of certified technicians use some of the most sophisticated IT management software to monitor and manage your hardware and your network to ensure they are working as intended. Backup and disaster recovery – Our managed IT services provide comprehensive backup services that protect your business? data to ensure that it is secure, regardless of your situation. Patch management – We ensure that all of your software is routinely patched and updated to ensure that you don?t have any harmful vulnerabilities that could be exploited. Vendor management – We deal with your IT vendors to ensure you are getting what you pay for and to help you avoid that time and expense. IT help desk – We provide a remote help desk that delivers your staff a direct line to an IT professional. Most IT issues can be resolved in minutes. Technology procurement – Our team of professional technicians can help any business design, deploy, and support any IT needed for your business. Fast onsite support – If you need onsite support and services, our team responds quickly to ensure that the IT systems you depend on are running proficiently. White Mountain IT Services delivers managed IT services that help your business save time and money, assists you in avoiding productivity bottlenecks that occur as a result of IT-related downtime, and does it for one, easily budgetable rate. To learn how you can gain the peace of mind and cost stability that managed IT services provide, give us a call at (603) 889-0800 today.
Keep Track of Your Time An individual will always think he/she will know how long a certain task will take when they?ve done the task numerous times. Sometimes it surprises them to find out how inaccurate those projections are. In order to definitively know how long tasks take, monitoring how much time they take is a great solution. Once you know how much time you take, you can make a conscious effort to take less time. Limit Your Exposure to Meetings What percentage of your meetings, would you say, are a giant waste of time? If that percentage is high, consider that one study found that the average employee spends 31 hours a month in meetings. If you are wasting over 30 hours a month in meetings, cutting that down will most certainly improve your overall productivity. Work with Reasonable Deadlines A lot of people work better with a little bit of stress from an impending deadline. Sometimes, however, the deadline is counterproductive. If you are able to set your own deadlines, make sure you leave yourself with a reasonable amount of time to get everything done. This will help you stay ahead of the workload. Set Goals You Can Accomplish We all want to be good at our jobs, but you need to know your limits. You will want to set reasonable goals and try your best to meet them. Setting unattainable goals may seem like it will foster better results, but it very rarely does. Take Regular Breaks Taking regular breaks can actually be great for productivity. Getting away from a task, especially one that creates stress, can help rebuild any lost focus. Be As Proactive As Possible The most productive people don?t deal with as many problems. This is largely because they proactively handle situations that create inefficiency. By planning for the worst, you will likely find that the worst never comes. Attempt to Reduce Interruptions Interruptions are going to happen, but if they are continuous, distraction is inevitable. Try to maintain focus on one problem at a time, even if the interruption is welcome. Turn Off Notifications Notifications can be extremely distracting, and can keep people from maintaining focus. By turning off notifications, people aren?t inundated with status updates and erroneous messages and are able to put their all into the tasks at hand. If productivity is the name of the game, considering these strategies will help. Subscribe to our blog for more great business tips and technology information.
Operational Agility is a Prerequisite for Success At risk of sounding like a movie trailer from the ?90s? in a world where many businesses have closed due to the limitations that social distancing concerns have created, the capability to operate despite such restrictions is even more important. Digital solutions, particularly those supported by cloud technology, are well-known for enabling productivity regardless of where the user may be. Naturally, this can come in handy in numerous ways?not only can isolated coworkers continue to collaborate remotely, but this flexibility also allows businesses to scale their services to better match their needs and budgetary constraints. As a result, an agile business is better prepared to adapt to changing conditions, making the most of all the situations that it may encounter. IT is More Than Just Tech Support Let?s take a step back and consider the entirety of the business landscape, including smaller organizations and large corporations alike. Featuring the right technology has proven to be an asset to so many different industries that have helped to sustain some measure of their operations in the past months?and in the same vein, simplified some significantly important processes. Take the increase in curbside or delivery services by restaurants and stores alike as an example, or contactless payment options that have been more widely adopted (use rising by 150 percent) across the board. Solutions like these have allowed technology to prove itself even more instrumental in powering all aspects of a business? successful continuity?a trend that is not likely to change as restrictions are lifted, due to benefits coming to both sides of any business transaction. Critical Collaboration Has Continued While the use of collaborative solutions and communications was already rising before COVID-19 was in play, it is without question that the pandemic accelerated the rate of their adoption by significant measure. Without the ability for team members to simply turn and face their coworkers, reliable tools were needed to enable them a different means to check in with one another. These events have proven a few key things to businesses and the management behind them. First, it shows that successful operations are possible when dealing with remote assets, so long as these assets possess the tools needed to carry them out. On a related note, it also helped to prove that today?s collaborative habits are primarily possible thanks to the IT that we use to power them? to embrace the benefits, the methodologies must be integrated into the workflows. When all is said and done, equipping a business with the right tools for the task puts it in a better position to succeed, without the worry that some event out of its control will sideline it. As time marches on, it becomes increasingly important to understand and address this simple fact. White Mountain IT Services has been here the whole time, ready to assist businesses in identifying, maintaining, and managing exactly the tools they need. To find out how we can assist you, give us a call at (603) 889-0800.
HAFNIUM, and Their Actions Back on January 5th, 2021, a security researcher at security testing firm DEVCORE operating under the nom de plume ?Orange Tsai? reported a few issues that were discovered in Exchange Server. The same issues were reported on January 27th by the Danish firm Dubex, and on February 2nd by a firm called Volexity. All these reports alluded to what proved to be the actions of a hacking group in China that goes by ?HAFNIUM.? HAFNIUM?s hacking efforts have been directed toward the email platforms used in many different organizations? systems?including organizations classified as infectious disease researchers, defense contractors, institutions of higher education, law firms, think tanks, and civil societies/non-government organizations. In total, it seems apparent that hundreds of thousands of organizations making use of Microsoft Exchange have been swept up in the attack, breached by HAFNIUM with backdoors left open for the hacking group?s convenience later on. These breaches were originally directed against exclusively high-value targets, but have swiftly become far less discerning in who may be affected, with all encountered servers now taken over by the automated attacks. While these attacks have left the cloud-hosted Exchange servers untouched, a lot of the victims were using both on-site and cloud-hosted in tandem. A patch was released on March 2nd that only protects against infiltration, leaving those who had already been infected to fend for themselves. This is Now A Global Cybersecurity Crisis With the patch in play, it is now a race between hackers and organizations to see who acts first?with either HAFNIUM infecting a target or that target patching their systems against them. Too many have already lost to HAFNIUM, at this point. Even worse, these patches won?t do anything to resolve an existing breach, necessitating a comprehensive network analysis to eliminate any sign of infection. With this event constituting a zero-day threat against all self-hosted instances of Outlook Web Access that had not been patched within that span of a few days, these activities need to be prioritized within every business if only to be certain. We?re here to help. As a managed service provider, part of our job is to help our clients identify and eliminate any risk factors and threats that issues within their technology may pose. Learn more about our services by calling (603) 889-0800 today.