Did someone just try to PHISH Me?
I want to start with a personal story. Last week, I received this very realistic (and Sneaky) email from who I thought on Initial inspection was American Express.
I saw the AMEX logo, A gold card that kind of looked quite similar to my card (although on second thought my card was platinum).
The message: someone from China had attempted to use my account!
How terrible! I need to take action Now!—that was my initial thoughts (and I’m sure I wouldn’t have been alone!).
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Why you can’t just go with a solo guy that helped your husband’s company last week.
Just like that old story about the man that was too busy shoveling snow that he had no time to use the snow blower, having the wrong IT Support—inadequate or under-qualified—is constantly costing businesses much more than simply their costs for the IT guy. Recently I had been talking to a couple of prospective clients that really wanted enterprise-level IT support, but had an awfully hard time justifying the cost of it. Because all business owners think about costs, I wanted to plainly lay out why getting ‘bargain IT Support’ may end up costing more money, more headaches and more risk than you might have ever expected. And as you think about IT costs, consider whether you are using a shovel or a snow blower to dig out of a blizzard and how is that shovel slowing you down?
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Last April (2016) laid underscored the reason why businesses should not use Gmail.
On April 1st—yes, April Fool’s, Gmail caused many bosses (including myself!) problems. That was the day Gmail introduced the [now removed] “Gmail Mic Drop” function. The mic drop allowed users to “send and mic drop” an email that automatically attached a GIF of a minion—those weird little yellow creatures from Despicable Me.
Gmail’s prank had replaced the “send and archive” button, which lets a user close a conversation and archive the email thread, in exchange for an attached minion dropping a microphone before closing a conversation and archiving it.
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I want to briefly go through 4 questions to ask when determining whether you need an outsourced IT recovery solution. If you answer any of the following questions with a ‘NO’, you should seriously consider an outsourced solution.
Do you understand the business impact of downtime of your applications?
To sufficiently confirm that you understand consequences of application downtime, you need to have performed a business impact analysis (BIA). A BIA allows you to understand the relative importance of each business application to your business operations. In particular, how application failure can affect different roles in your organization.
You also need to have mapped application inter-dependencies. In many situations, processes may require more than one application for successful completion. Understanding how different applications are linked to each other across your operational process network will paint you a clear picture of how important it is to your business. You need to understand how long your business can run without specific applications.
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Having not been home for a couple of weeks over the holiday season, upon coming back to a cold house in early January, I realized that my thermostat was doing a poor job regulating house temperature in a smart way. When I unlocked my front door, I noticed the house was awfully cold—I recalled setting the thermostat around 64 degrees Fahrenheit, but it seemed much colder in the house than that.
Come to find out the furnace had shut off at some point while we were gone. Without warning signs that something was malfunctioning. Without someone regularly monitoring the house temperature to make me even consider having someone check for a problem during the course of the 2 weeks I was gone. Without assurance that the house was running efficiently—that we weren’t using more energy than we needed to, but that temperatures didn’t get too low to cause problems either.
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Are You Aware of HIPAA Penalties?
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has established rules protecting individual identifiable health information and safeguards to maintain confidentiality, integrity and availability of protected health information (PHI). HIPAA non-compliance isn’t something you can ignore, as in-compliance can come with severe penalties and consequences.
It doesn’t matter what healthcare sector your business falls into—if you store medical records or patient data, you may be violating HIPAA compliance if you aren’t taking certain data security precautions. With hacking and data breaches are at an all-time high, I want to make sure everyone understands how serious HIPAA consequences can be.
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