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Email Security Do’s and Don’ts

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Many of you savvy users have already adopted simple email security measures. Such as immediately deleting vague emails and not clicking on attachments unless they come from a trusted source. As attackers employ greater sophistication, businesses need to build more sophisticated defenses. Within our customer base, the vast majority of Crypto Locker threats have been in the form of emails to random staff. It is so easy for these criminals to create an email that masquerades the “From:” field within the email so you can NEVER trust this field.

If you ever suspect an email might not be from the recipient in the “From:” field there is a way to check in Outlook. This may be a little bit complicated for some but it show you who *actually* sent the email. Below is an actual scam email indicating I have a parking ticket and it came from Alain Lafortune. When I click on the little tab shown by the top Red arrow, it opens the box containing the email header. When I look at the header I can see the actual sender and it came from “Open-Dictionary.com” which is clearly not a parking ticket company. If I am still uncertain, I can go to www.geoiptool.com and type the sender’s IP address: 194.87.202.3. Based on the output of this tool, I can now see this email originated from Moscow in Russia. I know without a shadow of a doubt that this is a SCAM.

 

Here are some basic, but powerful, email security measures you may not have implemented:

 

  • Ensure that your business email system includes a multi-layered, proactive security solution. Also, keep security and operating system software up-to-date.
  • Enforce a robust password policy to ensure that employees use strong passwords and change them regularly.
  • Use extreme caution with any Microsoft Office email attachment that instructs you to enable macros to see its content. Use similar caution with JavaScript or .wsf attachments. Unless you can verify the source, immediately delete the email without enabling macros.
  • Establish clear procedures for communication of sensitive information. Be wary of any email that suggests a departure from normal security protocol.
  • Instead of simply clicking “Reply,” obtain the supposed sender’s email address from a corporate address book and send a reply to that address.
  • Before clicking a link in an email, be sure that the link is legitimate. Type the URL directly into the address bar, or hover your cursor over the link to display the full URL.

 

 

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How to Determine if Hyper-Converged Infrastructure is Right for Your Business

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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

At this time of year, it is common for many of us to reflect on the past 12 months and think about what we want to achieve in the New Year. For those in the IT space, many teams have already begun to envision and define which projects they will be working on in 2016. Is your infrastructure one of them?

In the past year, hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) has grown in popularity. With vendors like Nutanix in the market space, IT departments are now provided with a new option when it comes to scaling their data-centers. We’ve have had many conversations with our clients on this relatively new offering in 2015 and have helped determine if this solution is right for our clients’ business.

In our last blog post, we covered off the main differences between converged and hyper-converged infrastructures. Yet the question remains, is HCI right for you? [Read more…] about How to Determine if Hyper-Converged Infrastructure is Right for Your Business

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: What Canadian SMBs REALLY Need to Know

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hyper-converged infrastructure

According to IDC, the hyper-converged infrastructure, or HCI, market is currently growing at 116%, and is expected to reach $800 million by the end of 2015, and to pass $1.5 billion worldwide in 2016.

Virtualized environments have increasingly become the standard, because of its many benefits to IT departments. Who doesn’t want reduced power consumption, high-availability, and more streamlined IT deployment and support for rapid change?

Still, even in virtualized environments, IT infrastructures exist in figurative silos, with different infrastructure elements of network, storage, compute, software operating on different systems, often with difference experts.

But for many organizations the silos are disappearing. Large cloud providers, such as Amazon or Google, have developed an infrastructure model to extend the benefits of virtualization to meet their exponentially expanding IT infrastructure needs, dubbed hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI).

Converged vs. hyper-converged infrastructure

Virtually all major infrastructure companies are looking at, and developing, solutions for the converged infrastructure space. Open source analyst firm Wikibon has estimated that by 2017 nearly two-thirds of all infrastructures that supports enterprise applications will be packaged as converged solutions.

On the other hand, hyper-converged infrastructure takes the decoupling of function and hardware even further by delivering the function using software. In this software-defined approach all infrastructure components run across a mesh or fabric of low-cost hardware components turning them into a single pool from which resources can be drawn.

While hyper-converged is an exciting, up & coming technology, is it right for your business?

A great deal of confusion still exists around converged infrastructures, their benefits and challenges, and what businesses and environments for which they are well suited. We get it! At their simplest, converged infrastructure is based on blocks of hardware and hyper-converged is software-defined. But this distinction creates significant concerns that SMBs must consider.

Our recently published whitepaper “Demystifying Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: Investigating the Pros & Cons of HCI for Canadian SMBs” looks at HCI and what SMBs must consider in evaluating such solutions. If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, download the paper here.

For more information about Lanworks & our core IT solutions, contact us today!

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