At Channel Dynamix, we believe that to completely manage our customer’s IT infrastructure, it starts with sharing knowledge that empowers the community around them. When businesses interact with one another using safe computing practices, and understand that they’re a part of interconnected system – we all strengthen our security and reap the benefits. We all know how easy it easy for an email virus to travel from business to business. So, help us out and review the list of IT issues below that many businesses deal with and see if there things that you might consider improving:
- Spyware infections – can cost a business up to $8,000 per year* for removal and downtime. Spyware, as their name indicates, is made to avoid detection by most anti-virus tools and often slip past firewall security via emails and web page links. They work silently in the background transmitting data back to their originator, and typically don’t make their presence known until unusual patterns in bandwidth and network performance are detected through monitoring.
- Network downtime – Connectivity is mission critical to a business. Being disconnected can bring an organization to its knees. With everything from phones to your entire cloud infrastructure relying on internet connectivity, businesses can lose nearly 1%* of their annual revenue due to unplanned downtime. The number is even greater with smaller companies. It could be as simple as your provider going down, or a misconfigured firewall. Losing connectivity translates to an immediate loss of productivity.
- Sub-optimal systems and hardware – Anything operating in your data center that is out-of-warranty, or has officially been deemed “end-of-life” by the vendor needs to be on the high priority list for virtualization or upgrade. Older devices may fail unexpectedly or even worse die after a scheduled or unscheduled reboot.
- Lack of 24/7 monitoring, alerting & reporting – Need to know why your Internet connection always slows down to a crawl at 2:38PM? Monitoring enables you to detect threats like spyware, pending hardware failures, and unapproved activities. Alerts help you stay a step ahead of failures, and get you out of the break-fix mentality. Most businesses handle IT like the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand. Ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away. Waiting for a problem to go away or blow up may cost much more in unplanned downtime than becoming proactive with your IT. Finally, share reports throughout the team, this keeps everyone moving in the same direction, and they may even notice something you may have overlooked.
- Security breaches due to viruses and out-of-date patching – Unlike spyware, viruses are meant to take a machine down. Keeping all of your devices up-to-date with the latest patches and virus definitions is a simple way to quickly secure many known vulnerabilities. In addition, having procedures in place that teach users how to detect and react to a virus will limit the exposure of the infected machine to other devices.
- Backups are untested or non-existent – Most businesses take the time to go through a variety of backup methods. Whether it’s on portable hard drives, cloud backup, or whatever. Very few actually test and verify that their backups are actually usable or successful. Schedule a time and procedure to simulate a disaster recovery drill. It’ll help you sleep better a night knowing how long it’ll take to recover and how much data you might actually lose.
- Not testing your backup power supply – You may have a room full of UPS devices and even a backup diesel generator, but simply not testing whether your plan will succeed might mean they’re completely useless in the event of a power outage. This very thing has taken down whole data centers, so be sure when lightning strikes or a tractor trailer smashes into your local transformer. In addition, utilizing scripting or remote management to safely shut down devices when an outage is detected could extend the life of your hardware and save data.
- Not having an inventory of IT assets – The first step to controlling IT is to make a list and check it twice. Know what devices you have, where they’re at, who has access to them, what operating system and applications they’re running. Also, make sure they’re all still under warranty against damage and loss. You can’t control your IT without know what you’re dealing with.
- Emailed passwords and secure information – Just to be clear, email is usually if not ever, secure. Let your staff know that sending usernames and passwords over email is not safe practice. Also, show them how to password protect or encrypt documents by zipping them up.
- Lack of mobile security policy - It’s a fact of life that corporate laptops and mobile devices, phones, and tablets, can fall into the wrong hands. Ensure that all laptops are password protected and even better, remotely wiped in case something happens. With Windows 7 Enterprise and Vista Ultimate, you can turn on BitLocker to fully encrypt your drive. Finally, teach your staff how to lock their machines and create strong passwords.
We hope some of this information will help make your organization's IT more resilient and secure. If you need help implementing anything, let us know.
*Source: Level Platforms
