When I first started working in IT, I would occasionally hear someone refer to their mirrored hard drive in their server as a "backup". I would explain to them that backups are a very different thing from hardware redundancy. A mirror will protect you if one of the hard drives fails, but offers no protection from accidental deletions, or file system corruption, or any number of problems that can destroy your data, such as ransomware, for example.

The New Year's Eve confetti had barely been swept up when the first headline-grabbing computer security problem of 2018 made the news. As you may have seen, on January 3rd of this year, it was revealed that a set of security flaws affects nearly every processor made by Intel, AMD, ARM, and Qualcomm over the past 20 years.

As I write this, we are approaching Christmas and nearing the end of Hanukkah. For our friends celebrating the Jewish Festival of Lights, we hope you had a Happy Hanukkah. And may it be a joyous Christmas for all those celebrating Jesus's birth. For everyone reading, we wish all of you much happiness and success in the coming new year!
Is Alexa under the tree?
As this is a technology-focused blog, I thought I'd touch on a piece of technology that is destined to be given as a gift many times over this season, if current sales numbers are any indication.

One of the things our company has made our goal since 2002 is to help "level the playing field" by bringing big-company style solutions to smaller businesses. Back then, server-hosted solutions were the norm, which sometimes required substantial investment, especially for solutions that were considered "enterprise" software.

Last week I spoke to two different groups of business leaders, giving a presentation on CyberSecurity. Even though Halloween was still a couple weeks away, I think I successfully scared the heck out of them. On both days, though, the executives in attendance were asking some great questions; it's obviously a topic that is a concern for many people, especially those running businesses.

At a comedy show I attended over the weekend, I heard a comedian tell a funny story about a guy she had met on a dating site. They hadn't gotten together yet, but had exchanged a few messages through the site. To this point, all they had was each other's first names and a photo.

Just this past week, I've made use of several convenient features of Office 365 that help to tie different parts of the service together. Since many of these aren't commonly known, let's talk about a few of them.
Skype Meetings
Hosting an online meeting certainly isn't a new feature, nor is it exclusive to Microsoft.

How does Shadow IT affect your business? What is Shadow IT, you ask? I know, sounds sinister, doesn't it? The meaning of the term has evolved over the past few years, but it's all about computer users in a company taking matters into their own hands.

The global spread of the WannaCry ransomware and the subsequent publicity related to it, have prompted many questions coming our way from clients. "Are we protected?" "What can we do to make sure we don't get this?"
What's Ransomware?
I'll start with some background.

What if I told you that your data in the cloud isn't as safe as you think it is?
Wait a minute, I hear you saying. Aren't you the guy who's been touting the security advantages of the cloud? Haven't you been saying that Microsoft Office 365 security is better in many ways than most companies' on-premises servers?

That's very observant of you (and thanks for reading my previous posts, I'm flattered). I have indeed been saying those things.