With the infectious nature of COVID-19, virtually every company on earth is now shifting to operate remotely. Which means a sudden influx of highly needed quality IT services.
This is where we come in and to make sure we can effectively support your business during these trying times, we have compiled a checklist we can offer to help you and your company with the transition to effectively work from home.
Phase One (Basics)
We will scan and check for any viruses
Clean any existing viruses
Set you up with proper anti-virus software to protect you from future infections
Install critical updates and drivers
Update and patch your Operating System (OS)
Phase Two (Report)
We will provide you with a status report.
Since this is a home environment and others may be in the house you need to take into consideration high usage of internet bandwidth resources by IP-TV/game consoles and more. We can help you plan ahead to set up ‘quality of service’ (QoS).
Your employees might require an internet upgrade or higher bandwidth.
Phase Three (Roadmap)
We will provide you with next steps to get your WHM environment more efficient.
We will manage your ongoing support requests via our priority Ticketing System to ensure you get the support you need on time.
We will ensure all your data is backed up and up to date.
We will cover everything with End-Point protection. User information and transactional data can all be exposed during online transactions from specific types of threats. Including:
Phishing (How to avoid Coronavirus email scams)
DNS poisoning
Keystroke logging
Screen grabbing
Cookie scraping
Clipboard grabbing
Browser and session hijacking
These are all done by malicious software mounting man-in-the-browser or man-in–the-middle attacks, so we will send out employee awareness material to empower them to be extra vigilant against these attacks.
Information Technology Pros in the healthcare industry may want to get a head start on their spring cleaning. Microsoft extended support for Windows XP ends on April 8, 2014. After this date, Microsoft will not release any security patches or updates for Windows XP. This will effectively make Windows XP non-compliant with HIPAA / HITECHafter Microsoft support ends.
Goodbye XP
Windows XP was released August 24, 2001 and has been widely deployed in homes and corporate environments alike. In the Healthcare arena, XP may be found on workstations used by clinical staff, CT machines, and other critical medical devices.
Most of these devices are connected to the network to connect to EHR/EMR systems, so simply disconnecting them is not an option. In addition, many of these devices are running old and proprietary applications that may not run on a newer operating system such as Windows 7 or 8.
What can an IT pro do when faced with this dilemma? In an ideal world your systems would already be off XP or you would be well into a migration effort. However, some of us have inherited this problem and must find a solution that not only addresses this problem, but also does so in a cost effective manner. Ideally, you will even have the opportunity to make technical improvements in your infrastructure, enhance security and manageability of your systems, and provide your clinical staff with a more efficient computing environment.
Evaluate your current situation
Getting your vendors involved is very important at this stage. You will want to find out about how to move to newer versions of their software which are compatible with Windows 7 or beyond. If you have current maintenance you may just need to download their newest software and apply your testing process. If you are not in maintenance, you may face pricey upgrades to move to their new platform.
Another option may be to run the application on a terminal server and have your clients access the application via a remote desktop connection.
Lastly you will also want to do an assessment on your medical devices to see which of these systems may be impacted by the Windows XP “sunset”.
Your next steps are to evaluate your current workstations. Do they have the resources to run a newer version of Windows? If so you can exercise your volume licensing upgrade options, or purchase the proper licensing to upgrade your environment. A more likely scenario would be that you have old workstations that are overdue for replacement anyway, in which case, upgrading would not be practical.
You can look at simply replacing your desktops with new shiny boxes and work on your migration plan for applications and user data. Another option you may strongly consider is implementing a VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure).
Virtualization
Virtualization has been hugely successful in the server arena. This technology uses a hypervisor on top of the hardware that allows multiple copies of an operating system to share the resources of the hardware. In most applications, there is no penalty for running multiple servers on the same hardware if your environment is planned correctly.
One can do the same using VDI. You can run fifty maybe even one hundred desktops on one physical server. These desktops would share the fast CPU, memory, and storage of the physical server to give the end user a high performance-computing environment. You can repurpose your existing desktops to connect to your VDI setup, or you can deploy thin-clients to your endpoints.
VDI also will provide your staff with centralized management and control of your desktops. This will help your lean staff manage and maintain your environment effectively.
Bottom line
Now is the time to take action. Start working on your strategy for moving your computers and medical devices off Windows XP. Size up your vendor support for upgrading to a newer OS, get an inventory of your impacted devices, and evaluate how you will update your endpoints. Moving to a newer operating system will help you provide a more secure environment in your facility and ensure compliance with HIPAA / HITECH.
The diversified range of new products being built and provided by Google now make the company accountable for nearly 25 percent of all Internet traffic, up from a mere 6 percent just three years ago, according to a new study. Based on measurements of end device and audience share, that makes the Internet company’s reach larger than Facebook, Netflix and Twitter combined, according to Deepfield, a big data and Internet infrastructure research firm. Some 60 percent of all Internet end devices exchange traffic with Google servers during the course of an average day, said Deepfield, which conducted the ongoing study. The analysis includes computers and mobile devices as well as hundreds of varieties of game consoles, home media appliances and other embedded devices like Apple TV, Roku, Xbox 360 and mobile apps.
The data focus primarily on North America and cover roughly one-fifth of the U.S. consumer Internet, making it “the largest ongoing study of its kind,” the group said in a blog post.
Deepfield co-founder Craig Labovitz attributed the meteoric rise in traffic patterns to server growth at Google as well as the success of a range of products such as YouTube, which the company bought for US$1.65 billion in 2006, Android-based mobile devices and various Google cloud services like Google Drive.
Only Netflix has larger bandwidth, Deepfield claims, but Netflix peaks last for only a few hours each evening during prime time hours and during Netflix cache update periods in the morning.
“The odds are, if you have an Internet-connected device, at the end of the day it will be exchanging information with a Google server,” Labovitz said in an interview.
Google, for instance, has seen serious growth in its Android mobile operating system since its launch in 2008. At the company’s I/O developers conference in May, executives reported that the Android OS had 900 million users.
“While it is old news that Google is big, the sheer scale and dominance of Google in the Internet infrastructure has significant implications on network design and evolution,” Deepfield said.
The results, Labovitz said, speak to the growing trend of not just Google, but other major technology companies like Facebook, Netflix and Apple either building out their own networking infrastructure or relying on the hosting services of other companies like Amazon’s S3 cloud hosting.
The rise in Google’s presence online is strongly linked with the deployment of thousands of Google servers in Internet providers around the world, Deepfield said.
Growth of the company’s Google Global Cache (GGC) dedicated server program in the U.S. in particular is an important factor in the trends — Deepfield’s last large-scale study in 2010 only revealed GGC deployments mostly in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
– See more at: http://itnews.com/internet-based-applications-and-services/64751/google-accounts-25-percent-all-internet-traffic-study?source=ITWNLE_nlt_networking_2013-07-24#sthash.Pp05zCXb.dpuf
If you deactivate your account, your timeline disappears from the Facebook service immediately. People on Facebook won’t be able to search for you, though some info, like messages you sent, may still be visible to others. We also save your timeline information (ex: friends, photos, interests, etc.) in case you want to come back.
If you don’t think you’ll use Facebook again, you can request to have your account permanently deleted. Please keep in mind that you won’t be able to reactivate your account or retrieve anything you’ve added. Before you do this, you may want to download a copy of your info from Facebook. Then, if you’d like your account permanently deleted with no option for recovery, log into your account and fill out this form.
If you can’t log in to your account, you’ll need to reset your password first. To do this, go to www.facebook.com and click the Forgot your password? link below the password field. Once you’ve followed the instructions to reset your password and can log into your account, you can deactivate or delete your account using the steps outlined above.
On April 8, 2014, Microsoft will end support for the decade-old Windows XP.
This means you will no longer receive updates, including security updates, for
Windows XP from Microsoft. Support of Microsoft Office 2003 will also be ending on the same date.
No Updates:
Without critical Windows XP security updates, your PC may become vulnerable to harmful viruses, spyware, and other malicious software which can steal or damage your business data and information. Anti-virus software will also not be able to fully protect you once Windows XP itself is unsupported.
Software Issues:
Many software and hardware vendors will no longer support their products that are running on Windows XP as they are unable to get the Windows XP and Office 2003 updates. For example, the new Office leverages the modern Windows and will not run on Windows XP.
No one to call:
When problems arise, online and phone-based technical support will unfortunately no longer be available to assist you or your IT partner, leaving you on your own to deal with the problem.
Down Time:
The risks of system failure and business disruption could increase because of the end of support, lack of supported software, and the increasing age of hardware running Windows XP.
Transforming and optimising the data centre has benefits across business operations, and can deliver significant bottom-line payback. This is according to Brent Lees, senior product manager at Riverbed Technology, who stresses that while data centre management was traditionally the domain of the IT department, it now underpins all areas of business.
“The structure and performance of the data centre has become a management issue. Because the data centre is the heart of enterprise operations, the repository of all corporate intellectual property, and a key factor in risk and compliance management, the data centre is now management’s problem.”
According to Lees, data centres were seen as cost centres until recently, but factors like virtualisation and cloud computing have transformed them into something that propels forward-thinking enterprises to new levels of competitiveness.
“The global focus for data centres now is moving to the cloud, the software-defined data centre, and ensuring optimum security and performance while keeping costs to a minimum,” says Lees. “In addition, data is now being recognised as an enterprise asset, which needs to be stored, managed and accessed efficiently, in order to support business growth.”
In order to deliver on their potential, data centres must be transformed, says Lees. “Not only can data centre transformation revolutionise the enterprise’s operations, it can also deliver substantial savings and a significant return on investment,” he says, adding that consolidation is key.
“By consolidating data centres, enterprises are able to reduce the complexity and cost of running multiple data centres, as well as enabling greater control and security over data.” An enterprise with branch offices in high-risk and remote areas, and the rise of an increasingly mobile workforce, means employees need to be able to access enterprise applications from remote areas, he notes. “The consolidation of data centres delivers significantly improved control as well as reduces operating costs. Riverbed itself runs one main data centre, with one backup, which delivers significant efficiencies.”
In order to deliver on their potential, data centres must be transformed, says Lees. “Not only can data centre transformation revolutionise the enterprise’s operations, it can also deliver substantial savings and a significant return on investment,” he says, adding that consolidation is key.
“By consolidating data centres, enterprises are able to reduce the complexity and cost of running multiple data centres, as well as enabling greater control and security over data.” An enterprise with branch offices in high-risk and remote areas, and the rise of an increasingly mobile workforce, means employees need to be able to access enterprise applications from remote areas, he notes. “The consolidation of data centres delivers significantly improved control as well as reduces operating costs. Riverbed itself runs one main data centre, with one backup, which delivers significant efficiencies.”
