Is Switching to a Third Party Hardware Maintenance Provider a Good Idea?

IT managers usually face the fiscal pressure of reducing costs while improving operational efficiency. One of the major costs involves repairing and replacing system hardware components. Strategies that help in extending legacy hardware life cycles are gaining popularity. They allow organizations to continue using the hardware for a longer duration and thereby minimize the cost of IT.  While it’s difficult to maintain a balance between legacy and contemporary hardware, this complex environment invites major challenges, this complex environment is important to maximize the value of data center systems.

All of these strategies that aim at extending hardware life cycles focus on having alternative hardware maintenance plans. A major problem here is relying too much on the OEMs (original equipment manufacturers). They undoubtedly offer best-of-the-class experience; however depending solely on the OEMs would leave the hardware uncovered once the end-of-service-life date arrives. Moreover, the extended warranties are way too expensive. A better solution would be to hire the services of third party providers. Let’s see how…

Reduced Costs

Cash is often a huge concern and bottom line for IT managers while aligning operations and business priorities. Getting Dell, HP, EMC support from third party IT Managed Service providers seems to be more budget-friendly.

Simplified Approach

While concerning with OEMs for managing extended warranties of the hardware of your data centers is difficult. It leaves the IT managers confused with many points of contact and complexity that eventually increases the gap. A third-party provider possess the capability to handle multiple device types at a time ensuring that the IT managers focus on their core tasks rather than communicating with many points of contact at the OEMs.

Flexibility

OEMs have their support models. However, they concentrate more on their business’ core competency – selling hardware. Maintenance is the secondary goal and they often have rigid maintenance plans while they strive to excel in their primary goals i.e. the operational sales. IT managed service providers promote support activities as their core competency and therefore can adapt easily to different client demands. IT managers can be more comfortable working with these third-party providers.

Value Addition

A third-party IT maintenance provider offers reliable plans at the best market value. A partnership with them also gives IT managers the access to refurbished parts, making component purchasing decisions, migrating data, and help them move hardware between facilities.

Although hardware maintenance may not seem to be the game changer or revenue generator for businesses, it helps IT manager greatly to simplify operations. Net Activity, Inc. is an IT Managed Service provider in Cleveland that conforms to the latest technological advancements while delivering best-in-class service to its clients around Ohio. Please contact Harry Bhatia at 888-545-5346 to discuss further or visit our website https://www.netactivity.us/it-managed-services/ for more information.

Is Ransomware a Threat to Enterprise Back-ups?

Recently, in May 2017 a ransomware named WannaCry was the matter of discussion among many organizations. The considerable damage WannaCry made to some of the corporate giants was constantly in the news and organizations were horrified due to the extensive loss in data. However, interestingly it didn’t take much time for the organizations to recover the lost data back from back-ups. Although this is a good thing, it may be an alarming situation if the enterprises are slowly adapting to ransomware, it is surely going to target advanced backup strategies.

How could ransomware target system backups?

When the user attempts to hold data located at the target for ransom, it can be difficult for the target to restore it from the backup. Most of the home users and municipal corporations don’t invest heavily on data backup and recovery systems and rely on the basic, built-in protection for their computers, laptops, and servers. This basic system, known as Windows Volume Shadow Copy is present in the editions since Server 2003 and XP and stores pictures of the files on an endpoint. As it is commonly used by home users as well as small businesses, the ransomware such as WannaCry have tools to delete it.

Ransomware like Locky, WannaCry, Cryptolocker, and CryptXXX are capable of deleting the volume shadow copies with the help of strings in command line. This is probably the reason why some ransomware variants failed to make much profit as most enterprises use more robust protections than just shadow copies. WannaCry hit enterprises rather than attacking small businesses or home users and as a result global companies with thousands of employees fell victim to its attack. Within an enterprise, data backup adoption is at extremely high levels while cloud backup and recovery comprise a high percentage of cloud-based investments. Companies have the best potential to overcome a ransomware attack by restoring from backup.

Conclusively, with a malware like WannaCry, it’s proven by the ransomware authors they can attack enterprises. However, they don’t have a persistent mechanism. Additionally, the enterprise backups are too robust to cause much damage as they are capable of retrieving data from backups within a day at most. Although the enterprise backup systems are sufficiently secured, there’s something really to worry about as hackers intelligently innovate ways to overcome these technical obstacles. So, companies must be prepared with the possibility of ransomware attacking their backups for encryption or deletion.

Visit https://www.netactivity.us/microsoft-365-managed-security/ for more details about how Net Activity, Inc. is helping organizations stay protected from the malicious malware attacks.

Sophos Security Equipment – Security Made Simple

Choosing from the many brands of Unified Threat Management (UTM) is a tough task pertaining to the fact that many competitive companies have set their foothold on the market. The decision making process has become more difficult with overwhelming options available out there. To narrow down your quest for network security equipment, here is a proven technology that’s relied upon by many users for managing their IT security in a cost-efficient manner – Sophos.

Sophos Technologies, an international network security appliances provider features unified threat management appliances that offer user identity-based network security. Providing extensive security to individuals, it offers high-end security to organizations on a larger scale.

However, before deciding on a UTM provider, you must consider the following parameters:

Intrusion prevention

The UTM provider must be capable of identifying malicious activity and log pertinent information about any fraudulent activity. The Sophos Security equipment performs the intrusion prevention that is a to menace entities and prevent their access. It bounces back intruders even before they enter your system and cause further damage.

Anti-Virus scanning

With the emergence of various kinds of malware, ransomware, backdoors, malicious LSPs, Trojans, etc. the role of anti-viruses expanded to implementing strategies to protect the PCs from other computer threats such as malicious and infected URLs, phishing attacks, electronic spamming, and advanced persistent threats.

Bandwidth adjusting

The UTM provider must detect the tempering of your internet service by an ISP. Sophos abates the traffic coming to a network to avoid congestion and allows intersections to perform smoothly.

Data loss prevention

Data loss prevention is a strategy that is used to prevent sending critical data across in a corporate network, accidently or maliciously. Your unified threat management provider should ensure NDA (non-disclosure agreement) that is capable of protecting proprietary information or any type of trade secrets.

Reporting

Many UTMs create reports that show how your network is being used. The implementation of reports involves extracting, transforming, and loading procedure (ETL). Reporting is very important for knowledge administration and business intelligence.Sophos tracks and stores all the information and facilitates easy retrieval.

Call us at 888-545-5346 to know more details or visit https://www.netactivity.us/services/it-managed-services to browse through our IT managed service offerings.

Beware of PC Registry Cleaners: Are They Safe?

Windows registry is a repository which collects massive data about your computer as it practically records everything that is performed on Windows. It is literally a cluttered space as Windows, by itself is not capable of cleaning the system efficiently as it’s always busy in creating new entries. Even though you uninstall a program or application, it leaves some unneeded pointers in the registry and thus slows down your system.

To resolve this issue, many PC registry cleaners are marketed to the users with the claim that they would speed up the computer system making it function better. However, before making your decision to purchase or install a free PC cleaner on your computer system because above all claims they make everything depends on the condition of your registry and the effectiveness of the registry cleaner that you select. Another thing to be considered is that registry cleaners usually delete things from the registry. While most of the times it is safe, there are times when registry cleaners caused serious problems to the computers and their data. Though most of the modern PC registry cleaners feature built-in methods to reverse changes when things go against expectations, it is not recommended to invest in an advertised PC cleaning system. Being diligent while making your choice is the first step towards protecting your system from unwanted attacks. Also, remember to back up your registry before letting the cleaner to remove or delete entries. Doing this would save you even if the registry cleaner doesn’t have an ‘undo’ option, you can use the backed up registry file to restore it back.

One more important thing to be highlighted is that registry cleaners do not speed up the computers and so, you do not need to run them regularly. Hackers are talented enough to compromise the quality of the wide range of PC cleaning software as happened with CCleaner software in August and September wherein malicious hackers had illegally modified the version 5.33 of CCleaner software which was available for download for about a month.

Your computer data is precious and we, at Net Activity, Inc. recommend you not to install any PC registry cleaners without proper survey of their history. Also, think twice before going for cleaners that invest huge amounts on marketing and advertisements as they are no good.