Connecticut's IT Managed Services Blog

Are your backups taking too long? How often do you test them, and are you sure they would restore properly when you need them? The problem with most disaster recovery solutions is there is no middle ground for SMB’s (Small Medium Businesses). Large corporations can invest in complex virtualization strategies using technology from VMware, this is a great option, but companies with limited IT support or who don’t have the funds to invest in virtualizing their servers are stuck with strategies that don’t give them the support they need. Many are forced to continue using Tape as a backup solution, which has a notorious reputation of not being able to restore. Others rely on having a RAID array, giving them the benefit of allowing a hard drive to crash without losing data, which does give them some security, but only in that one respect. If the server were to die the data would be fine but wouldn’t be assessable until the server was back up and running. This leaves SMB’s with old outdated and extremely limited Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans that don’t even come close to the benefits that virtualization gives the larger corporations.

NSI’s main target audience has always SMB’s and having seen the gap in technology brought its technicians together to create the ZoomBox. The ZoomBox is an NSI ran and owned product that gives SMB’s the virtualization protection that their business needs without having to change their entire network. What happens is NSI installs a client on any Windows machine that the customer wants to ensure up time and data protection. The ZoomBox then creates virtual images of each server/desktop 1-3 times a day, this image is then backed up to the cloud for extra protection, ensuring that all your data is perfectly safe regardless of what might happen to your business environment.

Upgrading your computer

Everyone likes upgrading their PC because it means they can now use a faster computer with more features, but it’s also a great way to save money on electricity costs while going green. As technology advances so does the techniques used to save power. Anyone who had a laptop a decade ago remembers the problems with heat, size and horrible battery life. Nowadays these problems are barely a concern with laptop battery life being at minimal 3-4 hours, but generally can go up to 10 hours or beyond. New breakthroughs in battery technology have helped, but it has been the tech industry as a whole that has increased battery life. As new CPUs and Memory chips are being created, one of the main goals is to make sure the next generation runs faster, but also uses less electricity and generates less heat. This is done through new techniques created to create smaller transistors, which allows more to be placed on a single chip, and less electricity to be needed to use them. This combined with new features that keep energy consumption in mind have allows computers to lower their speeds when idle to decrease and consume less power, but can increase speed again when needed.

Password security is one of those things that you don't think about until its too late, here we outline a simple list of Do's and Don'ts when picking a secure password. Hint: if you password is a simple dictionary word with a couple numbers its not secure.

Its always been difficult for users and security experts to come to an agreement when it comes to password creation. Users want something simple and easy to remember so they can just log in without having to think of which password they need for that site, while security experts would like each person to have a to complex password with a mixture of capital letters, numbers and symbols. On top of that they say its best practice to use different passwords for each site, having the same password for each site leaves you vulnerable if your password leaks once it leaks for everything. But new research from Max-Planck-Institute for Physics of Complex Systems has come up with a way to help stop brute force attacks when it comes to hackers trying to steal your password.

Brute force attacks are when hackers run a program to try every letter combination in order to get into your account. This means that the longer and more complex the password is the longer it will take the hacker to try all the combinations.