November 2009

 

Greetings from “Your IT Department”!

 

We get many questions around this time of year about archiving older data. It’s always a little confusing in determining what should be archived and for how long. Feel free to view our recommended guidelines for data retention and storage. These are only suggested guidelines and should discuss any specific guidelines surrounding your specific industry requirements with your legal counsel.

Protecting your network from intrusions a mission critical requirement in today’s world. But how do you know what’s required to protect your home or office network? At a minimum there are 7 basic things you must do to protect your network, read our complete article below. Being “proactive” is what OurTech Solutions is all about. In addition to protecting our client’s networks from unnecessary vulnerabilities, we proactively manage their networks to prevent network downtime. The true cost of network downtime is not what you spend to prevent it, it’s how much you stand to lose in lost company revenues.  Call us at 402.778.7999 for more information.

  

 

 

Tips and Tricks
Hardware Rotation Tips
 Derrald Farnsworth, Vice President of Systems, OurTech Solutions™

 

OurTech Solutions™ recommends a hardware rotation plan that will allow hardware costs to be distributed and predictable year after year. Generally, workstations and laptops purchased from a top tier vendor come with a 3 year warranty. This warranty covers most hardware failures and physical problems that can arise. Once a machine is outside this warranty period the manufacturer is no longer required to hold parts and if there is a failure it can not only be expensive to replace, but it generally takes a while for the parts to be tracked down, if they can be found at all.

In order to take advantage of a 3 year rotation plan OurTech Solutions™ recommends that approximately one third of the computers in a company be replaced yearly. In addition to providing unending warranty coverage, this has several benefits:

•  It takes many more hours in support time to support older hardware. This translates into more downtime and frustration for the client.

•  Newer software could be rotated in as well minimizing the learning impact for the client.

•  As software progresses the hardware requirements generally increase, this allows for a gradual move to more powerful hardware.

•  Out of date systems with out of date software can lead to interoperability issues with the client’s customers and vendors. A standard rotation reduces the number of versions of software decreasing document conversion issues.

OurTech Solutions™ can identify several computers as out of warranty and lists these machines on the client monthly report. By replacing some of these machines and designing a rotation policy clients can keep their downtime to a minimum and increase productivity.



Seven Things You Must Do

Protect Your Company from Common Disasters
 Robert Troyer, CEO, OurTech Solutions™

 

While it's impossible to plan for every potential computer problem or emergency, a little proactive monitoring and maintenance of your network will help you avoid or greatly reduce the impact of the vast majority of computer disasters you could experience.

Unfortunately, I have found that most small business owners are NOT conducting any type of proactive monitoring or maintaining their network, which leaves them completely vulnerable to the types of disasters you just read about. This is primarily for five reasons:

1. They don’t understand the importance of regular maintenance.

2. Even if they DID understand its importance, they simply do not know what maintenance is required or how to do it.

3. Business owners often rely on the one or two man internal IT staff to ensure that their systems are being properly maintained but have no reporting to verify that work is actually being performed.

4. The vast majority of businesses lack the necessary systems diagnostic tools to monitor and maintenance security and performance concerns.

5. Business owners are already swamped with more immediate day-to-day fires demanding their attention. If their network is working fine today, it goes to the bottom of the pile of things to worry about. That means no one is watching to make sure the backups are working properly, the virus protection is up-to-date, that critical security patches are being applied, or that the network is “healthy” overall while there are over 37 critical checks and maintenance tasks that need to be performed on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
 
I’m going to share with you 7 steps that are most important for protecting your company.

Step#1: Make Sure You Are Backing Up Your Files Every Day

It just amazes me how many businesses never back up their computer network. Imagine this: you write the most important piece of information you could ever write on a chalkboard and I come along and erase it. How are you going to get it back? You’re not. Unless you can remember it, or if YOU MADE A COPY OF IT, you can’t recover the data. It’s gone. That is why it is so important to back up your network.

There are a number of things that could cause you to lose data files. If the information on the disk is important to you, make sure you have more than one copy of it. (Read Even More!)

 

 

Proactive vs. Reactive
Benefits of Proactive Maintenance
 Nick Troyer, Systems Engineer, OurTech Solutions™


We all know that it's important to take proactive steps when caring for a home or car. Oil is changed regularly to keep the engine from breaking down. Reactive solutions for car maintenance lead to very expensive and time consuming resolutions. It is much more cost effective, in terms of both time and money, to institute a proactive maintenance routine for your car. The same is true for the devices on your network.

Nothing can waste time and money like dealing with malware. Malware is any software whose sole purpose is to disrupt a computer’s normal performance. Eliminating malware from a computer may be as simple as removing a few infected files, or as costly as the destruction of critical files on the device followed by a rebuild of the entire machine. By running a variety of different anti-virus/anti-spyware scripts every week OurTech Solutions™ can eliminate the malware before it becomes infested on a network.

Working on a slow computer is no fun. One of the most common reasons for a computer to be running slowly is that the hard disk is fragmented. No one likes watching the hourglass cycle when there’s work to be done. Taking care of this process automatically via managed services every month helps keep the computer's performance up with the user’s performance.

Microsoft has been the leading provider of Operating Systems since the 80’s. This means that it is the most targeted operating system for hackers. Microsoft releases patches almost every Tuesday to fix vulnerabilities in their product. Patching machines automatically as soon as possible greatly reduces the hacker’s chances of using one of your machines to gain access to personal or company data.

OurTech Solutions™ can help you with all of your proactive maintenance needs. Contact us for more information on how we can help keep your network in optimum shape at 402-778-7999 or info@ourtechsolutions.com.


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