Tag Archives: Canada

Safeguarding Your Laptop

In today’s fast paced world, business is always on the move. If you are like many businesses today, this means more than just some glossy metaphor. With lighter, more powerful laptops, your office can travel with you. You don’t have to be out of touch with your critical information simply because you’re “on the road”. With cloud computing and virtual desktops, every aspect of your business can be available to you at the tips of your fingers.

But what happens when you lose the ability to use that laptop? What happens when you have information stored on your laptop that you just can’t afford to lose? Perhaps it’s that latest details of your next major project or the start of a presentation you’re planning on delivering. Perhaps it’s a copy of an agreement or revision notes you’ve taken while you were speaking with a client. Can you afford to lose that work?

As we’ve discussed before, information is one of the most valuable assets of your business. Losing it can cost you and your business a lot.

There are many ways you could lose your laptop, including but not limited to:

  • theft
  • hardware failure
  • damage or dropping your device
  • hard drive corruption

Is the information on your laptop safe from these situations?

According to FBI’s Computer Crime Survey, the estimated cost of computer security incidents is $67.2 billion annually. And based on a recent study by Ponemon Institute, organizations lose up to $7.2 million each data breach and an average of $49,246 of data per lost laptop.

If you are concerned at all, consider the StaySafe Protection program. The Protection program is the newest member of our StaySafe suite of services all designed to help keep your most valuable asset, your data, safe. What makes StaySafe Protection unique is that is has a laptop specific component, Mobile Vault, designed for the “on-the-go” business person.  Mobile Vault provides your laptop will receive industry leading business-class backup service, fully encrypted data transfers, IP tracing and remote data removal. Compare this with traditional backup strategies.

Traditional Backup Plans StaySafe Protection Mobile Vault
Business-class backup of data
AES 256-bit encryption of data ?
Load balance/silent data transfer ?
IP Tracing of devices
Remote data destruction

Business-class backup of data

Let’s face it, not all backups are created equal. Business-class backup comes with a level of integrity that you can’t get from at home versions of backup. Business-class backup includes:

  • redundant systems to ensure optimal uptimes
  • professional level software enabling greater level of control over data
  • ability to apply policies and create procedures the increase compliance of data

AES 256-bit encryption of data

One of the greatest dangers of working with data over the Internet these days is the fear the information can be stolen. Without proper encryption, your business intelligence and competitive advantage is just floating out there for someone to pick up and steal. AES 256-bit encryption is the latest and greatest in industry techniques.

Load balancing and silent transfer of data

Most traditional backup plans will require you set a time to “run” the backup. It utilizes all of your system’s resources to upload the computer’s information into a remote location. This process can take hours to complete and tie up critical systems, slowing down the internet and any other operations on that system. As such, most businesses schedule traditional backup plans to run late at night, when they expect low traffic on their network.

But with remote systems, you can’t always predict when you’ll be hooked up to the internet and available to do this backup. Under the traditional backup plans, that could mean your computer will miss these critical backups. Or worse, your already slow remote connection will move even slower because you’re trying to share the bandwidth with your backup process. Many times, you’re not connected to these remote internet services long enough to truly perform a full backup, thus potentially corrupting your backups and losing your critical data.

Under Mobile Vault, the service is intelligent enough to perform data transfer in increments, transferring small packets so it not only using less bandwidth but can optimize on your limited remote access. If you lose connection to the internet, it will simply resume where it left off and thus prevent data corruption.

IP Tracing and Remote data destruction

One of the scariest things that can happen to any business person is losing their laptop. Not only is it a physical asset loss, it could also mean the loss of critical information and compromise of the business. With Mobile Vault, businesses are now able to track and remove critical information even if the computer is physically lost.

Using the administrative interface, Mobile Vault can put a listener out on the Internet. As soon as the computer tries to connect to the internet again (which is a standard process triggered when most computers turn on), the system will retrieve the location of the computer via IP address. From here, the lost device can be located and any critical information removed remotely from the system.

Interested to learn more about what StaySafe Protection or any services under the StaySafe line can offer your computer? Just give us a call or email today. We’d be happy to assist you further and help evaluate if this service is right for your business.

4 Considerations in Selecting Business Computer Systems

From time to time I get asked by people who don’t work regularly with me as to why I choose to deploy brands such as IBM and Lenovo. The price tags on these devices are often higher than some of their off-the-shelf counterparts. (Let’s not mention the bad 4-letter word please!)

I’m often surprised by this question because I don’t understand why anyone would want to go with something different for their business. Sure, in your personal life, you can get away with using just about anything. In fact, in my lifetime, I’ve built several thousand clone computers personally.

But as a business owner, I have to ask some critical questions that make my business decisions clear:

  • Do you care if your computers work every day?
  • Do you care about standardized platforms and reduced service costs?
  • Do you care how customer service treats you if something goes wrong?

As wonderful as computers are, the reality is there will always be situations where something can (and as Murphy states often does) go wrong. That’s where having a tried and true brand makes the difference.

Here are some of my real life examples of how these two particular brands made a real difference to my customers:

In-person and onsite support even on holidays

Anyone who knows me knows about the Christmas from hell. If you don’t, just ask me some time. Short story, even at Christmas Eve there was someone we could talk to from IBM who could assist us in bringing the system back. On top of that, they were willing to bring someone either that night or the next morning down from the main Toronto office to be onsite to resolve the issue.

Technical support that knows they don’t know everything

Another company, who I was not supporting at the time but had worked on the architecture of their environment, had a critical application go down because their current support decided to mess with the delicate setup in a vain attempt to optimize their environment. The end result is that the company called in IBM to get them back up and running. The IBM technician was told by this other support to basically wipe the whole server clean and rebuild the system from scratch. Having enough common sense, this technician was wise enough to stop and actually ask more questions. End result was the actual solution was a completely different problem and by not blindly following what he was told to do, he saved the company countless hours and service dollars to get the server data back.

Simple support at the convenience of the customer

A client of mine recently had a Lenovo laptop which had a video screen that started displaying a weird black band. With no fuss, I simply called technical support and reported the issue. Because the computer was a Lenovo T-series, it had a 3 year warranty upgraded to next business day onsite. The client was about to go on an extended business trip and Lenovo was willing to have the computer picked up and dropped off wherever was necessary for him. Fortunately, the issue wasn’t so critical that he had to have such an immediate response. But after he returned (nearly a month later) with the laptop, Lenovo still honored the claim and handled the laptop with ease.

Easy recovery and factory restore

Seems lately I’ve had the luck of dealing with several computer virus attacks. Many of them were on systems without a proper recovery media. A recovery media is important in ensuring the operating system (normally Windows), all drivers, and all default programs are restored properly onto the computer. In comparison, Lenovo offers the friendliest recover mechanism to ensure a clean restore to factory. This means less cost and less time until the computer is fully functioning again.

The above are extreme cases. It’s the hope that you never run into any of these problems. But do you really want to chance something as critical as your business computer systems? Isn’t your business important enough to you to go for the best?

At the end of the day, if you can’t afford a branded platform, can you afford to loss your critical business data instead?

If you’re interested in moving to a more standardized platform and want to know how your business can benefit from using branded products, please drop us an email here at Solve-IT.ca, a leading IT support for Southern Ontario.

Can Teleworking Save Ontario Companies Money?

Earth Day is April 22nd; what is your Canadian firm doing to help improve the environment?

Canadian corporations who promote teleworking and allow key employees to work a minimum of twice a week from home can help save over $53 billion dollars annually. That is not all there is to it; you could reduce greenhouse gases by a considerably huge amount and save almost 390 million litres of gas, says Canada’s first major national whitepaper on telework.

“WORKshift Canada: the bottom line on telework”, a report released by Calgary Economic Development in collaboration with the Telework Research Network, used census data and analysis of over 400 case studies, research papers and other documents related to telework to show the positive implications that the proper and regular implementation of telework could have on the country’s economy, environment and society.

Adopting telecommuting a minimum twice a week can help employers save $10,000 a year, and employees will also be able to save as much as $600 – $3,500 annually as a result of reduced commuting and work-related expenses. Other positive changes we will be seeing are an increase of 20% in productivity, a 7% reduction in attrition and increased employee empowerment and morale.

Teleworking will also be playing a major role in protecting the environment from degradation through greenhouse gases. And money is not the only thing teleworking will be saving. Teleworking can emerge as a quick fix to solve labour shortages and reduce energy consumption and pollution. With so many things that teleworking could help you change, you should not be wasting any more time ignoring teleworking. If you are an employer, incorporate teleworking into your organization; and if you are an employee, go convince your boss now.

Thinking it isn’t possible? It is. According to Kate Lister, principal researcher and lead consultant at the Telework Research Network, four in ten people can do their jobs at home (at least part-time) and eight in ten can do all their work from home.

As a Southern Ontario IT security focused company, Solve-IT can help your business set up secure remote access systems which promote secure teleworking. If your Niagara and area business is looking into the possibility of allowing key employees to work from home or other locations, consider contacting us today for a review of your VPN and remote access solutions.