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Disaster Recovery – Do You Have A Plan?

Admin — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:16:43 +0000

This is a call to action for all my business owner’s or president’s or whatever other higher up decision maker name’s there are that you may carry. DO YOU HAVE A DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN? I mean, a really, really, good one? If you had to think about that for more than 1.4 seconds, chances are you probably don’t. If you’re over the arbitrary time limit I just set, pay attention to the next two case studies and then I’ll tell you why we are great at what we do.

Case #1

Once upon a time, we had a website hosting client. They decided to leave for another company, completely OK and, while we hate to lose a customer, that’s the reality of doing business. Anyway, some years and about 4 IT guys later, they noticed that their website was no longer functional or live. They thought OK, let’s give the domain registration company a call. This is where the disaster begins to unfold. Upon calling, they were told that they had failed to re-register and pay for their domain name but could do so that day if they took care of the fees. Whhhew, dodged a bullet right? WRONG! They did not have the security information that the original IT guy set up and had no way of finding or contacting him. They would not make changes or accept payments without that code word. Long story short, they called us but at that point it was too late for them. They lost their domain, spent thousands on a new site, and all the marketing materials they had for years were rendered useless.

Case #2

We picked up a packing/shipping company whom was responsible for a large amount of distribution throughout the country. Upon initial visits, we asked what is the one thing that, if it went down, would halt business completely. They informed us it was a large printer that processed and tracked all of the orders and output for the entire facility. They spoke about the machine going down once or twice a year and it costing them $20-30 thousand each time. Our very next question: “How much does one of those printers cost?” The answer: “About $20 thousand.” So our planning suggestion was not to investigate what causes the printer going down, but to just buy an exact replica. That saves about $40 thousand a year. Three days of downtime turned into only about 3 hours and thousands of dollars saved.

How We Help:

So these are nice stories, right? You’re probably thinking why do I care? Well, I’ll fill you in. Upon choosing us as your outsourced IT provider, we will come in and map everything out. Everything that has an IP address and will be managed by us, we will document with all the information you will need i.e. circuit ID’s, actual IP addresses, etc.. Then we work with you to get all passwords for any log-in as well as work with service providers when you have issues. We are your one throat to choke. We streamline everything so you worry about what you do best, your business.

Contact Access US For More Information:

Please call us today with questions, or to get Access US working for you.
Monday through Friday, 8:30 AM – 5:00 PM CST | 314.655.7700 | Toll Free: 800.638.6373 Or email us at info@accessus.net | Online Contact Form

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Does Texting Language Make You LOL?

Admin — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 14:31:23 +0000

Ok, if you don’t know what LOL means you’re not alone so don’t feel bad. If you receive this often in text, email or instant message responses, congrats! You’re probably pretty funny.

In today’s shorthand, e-language that kids and young adults use, that acronym stands for Laughing Out Loud. I have to admit, I’m one of the young adults who utilize this abbreviated version of English on a daily basis, however, some of them leave me SMH (Shakin’ My Head). There are many people who feel this e-language is ruining our nation’s IQ. Making us forget the basic fundamentals of the English language. So, is this true?

Fact or fiction?

Do these forms really represent a textual insurrection? People in the professional world are more than comfortable tossing around abbreviations such as ROI, BBB and ACT.

It seems that when it comes to shortened forms of the language, when adults do it we call them acronyms and they are a sensible part of officialese. But when young people do it on mobile phones, it’s called texting and it’s the end of the English language as we know it.

This is just one of the myths about e-language that we need to move past. Linguist David Crystal debunked most of them in his 2008 book Txting: The Gr8 Db8.

Crystal argued that there is nothing particularly new in text language and it is not the province of the young. More than 80 per cent of texts are actually sent by adults. And fewer than 10 per cent of the words used in instant messaging are terms such as LOL or PAW.

One Canadian study of 15- to 20-year-old’s found that texters’ were actually more literate than their peers, better able to adapt their text to different contexts.

In the US, a National Commission on Writing survey of teenagers and parents found that teenagers spend a considerable amount of time writing, and that they clearly distinguish between social media and more formal text. Their parents reported that their teens do a lot more writing than they did at the same age.

So what have we learned from this? Well, I can tell you that this abbreviated version of the language isn’t going away. Will it be the new English language? Doubtful. The sky is not falling and our society is not getting dumber. Hey, if you really need a positive from this, the next crop of court stenographer’s will be otherworldly!

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Employees Wasting Company Money With Social Media

Admin — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:42:31 +0000

When does twittering at work become frittering away your employer’s time — and money? When your tweets aren’t work-related. Business research firm Basex puts the productivity cost of workplace interruptions, including employee abuse and misuse of social media, at $650 billion a year. Now, some companies are fighting back.

Eliyahu Federman, senior vice president of 1SaleADay.com, a deal-a-day company in Miami that sells watches, clothing, jewelry, electronics (among other things), says he got fed up with what he calls employees’ “frolicking outside the work context.”

As first reported by the New York Post — and as recounted by Federman himself in a story he subsequently wrote for the website Social Media Today — he first tried blocking employee access to social media sites. Forbes says 42 percent of all employers have tried the same tactic to the problem of frittering by Twittering. Other employers have installed network monitoring software to keep tabs on employees’ communications while at work, says Federman.

According to Nielsen/Incite’s Social Media Report for 2012, Americans spent 74 billion minutes, or 20 percent of their time, on social media sites. Such networking, Federman allows, has become part of life, both on and off the company clock. Nor does he begrudge employees their impulse to socialize.

“The need to be social is a human need,” he tells ABC News. Workers will do it around the water cooler, or they’ll do it online. But social media sites, says Federman, make it easier than ever before. “They provide a high level of engagement — like a cocktail party,” he says. “They are designed to suck you into a vortex of social mayhem, and are designed to do that very well.”

The problem with trying to block access to them, he says, is that it’s become easy for employees to circumvent such blocking by using their own mobile devices. For that reason, he tells ABC News, 1SaleADay eventually gave up on blocking and tried a different approach.

Instead of trying to suppress employees’ addiction to social media, the company chose to channel it.

Federman installed an in-house, employee-only social media platform called Yammer, and offered it as an alternative to Facebook. Such platforms, sometimes called enterprise social networks, have become a big business: Microsoft bought Yammer for a reported $1.2 billion last June.

Federman says the benefits of weaning workers off Facebook and onto Yammer have been dramatic. In the customer service department alone, he says, productivity has risen a little more than 48 percent. “We’re getting, on average, $5 an hour more per worker in productivity,” he tells ABC News. Plus, he says, morale has improved. Employees didn’t like being denied access to Twitter and Facebook. Yammer gives them an alternative most of them seem to find acceptable: Their socializing is limited to fellow workers; but limited socializing is apparently better than none at all.

No matter what an employer does, workers will, of course, still stare out windows or phone their spouses or buy sweaters online. “But this is a major step in the right direction,” says Federman. The difference between banning social media and rechanneling the social impulse, he says, is simple: “If you try to remove it completely, people will find a way to access it and will not be happy. Our idea was to replicate it within the company and, by doing that, to increase camaraderie.”

The response Federman has gotten so far to his article — much of it from other employers — has been strong: As of Monday, he says he had received more than 400 tweets and more than 100 LinkedIn shares.

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How Is YOUR Email Etiquette?

Admin — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 17:53:33 +0000

Have you ever wondered why you were passed over for a promotion? I think we’ve all muttered this phrase angrily, “Why would they promote _____ over me!?” We all come up with our own conspiracy theory as to what the reason MUST be whether it’s the classic favoritism angle or the sexier office blackmail/cover-up. There is always a reason why it’s not our fault, right? Well, we could be wrong. If you are ever in this precarious situation you might want to evaluate your “email etiquette” before pointing the finger elsewhere. Here are some helpful tips to follow:

1. Reply

No matter what, always acknowledge promptly that you have received the message. If you don’t have time for a comprehensive response, let them know and create an expectation of when they can expect a reply.

2. Don’t Forget Attachments

We’re all human and we are going to make mistakes, that’s a given. However, you don’t want to be the person who constantly forgets to attach important documents.

3. Be Thorough

We’ve all gotten those novel length emails. No matter how much they may irk you, make sure and respond to each aspect of it’s contents. There are few things more annoying to your boss than having to re-ask the same questions over and over.

4. Get To The Point

As a caveat to #3, keep YOUR emails as brief and to the point as possible. Nobody wants to investigate an email to find the action needed or important message.

5. Get Rid Of The Emoticons

Yes, I know, they are like, so cute, right? Who doesn’t want to enjoy a smiley face? While we have come to love these little guys in our personal lives, avoid them like the plague in business. Nothing says unprofessional like a little face with it’s tongue sticking out.

Stick to these simple rules and you’ll be moving on up the corporate ladder in no time. That is unless somebody caught a less than flattering picture of the boss at this years Christmas Party.

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Importance of IT in Business

Admin — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 17:42:03 +0000

Despite companies now recognizing the importance of their enterprise data, they still have a difficult time effectively managing it as an asset. Some of those challenges arise from a lack of business involvement and sponsorship, an inability to identify data owners and encourage accountability, or a reluctance to share data. Although it is imperative for business to lead and sponsor data governance, it is equally important to align business and IT for organizations to fully benefit in a significant and persistent way from data management.

The importance of aligning business and IT is compounded by the trend to centralize information systems, resources and integration points. Many organizations are moving to centralize IT and with that recognize that data can also be managed centrally to achieve economies of scale, improve productivity, and effectively manage information. Consequently, the IT organization sees issues that span lines of business and geography, including enterprise data issues. As such, IT may be the first to recognize and often are the initial advocates of the need for data governance before the business. For example, IT can identify where data issues start in a source system and the changes that are made as data flows through different systems. However, the impact of the changes to the data is not always obvious to IT, nor is IT in a position to recommend changes to business processes to improve data quality either at the source or over its lifecycle. Challenges arise when it is time to assign resources to be accountable for data quality and fix data issues, which is precisely when IT needs to transfer ownership of data governance to the business while continuing with oversight and the essential role IT plays in data governance success. This places these questions into context: What is the role of IT in business-led data governance? How can the IT organization work with the business to ensure their needs are being met and the data governance initiative is a success? In order to understand the role of the IT organization in data governance, let’s first look at the goals and objectives of the data governance organization.

Data Governance Organization Goals

The overarching goals of a data governance organization are to provide direction on the capture, collection, security, transfer, quality and management of data within the organization to:

Ensure the integrity of information
Ensure information is secure while facilitating access
Support decision-making
Enhance services provided to customers and partners
Assist in information collaboration
Eliminate business and technical obstacles to achieving business goals
Standardize corporate data definitions, policies and processes so the data can be more readily shared, interpreted and used
Manage data as a corporate asset
Reduce costs and increase effectiveness through coordination of efforts
Ensure transparency

Organizations go about achieving these goals and measuring and reporting results in different ways based on their unique approach to data governance. What is evident is that the business cannot achieve these goals without relying on and involving IT to deploy and manage the enabling technology and tools. At the same time, business needs to own the data governance program and the decisions concerning managing data as a corporate asset.

IT and business must both play their requisite roles in data governance to avoid antagonistic or competitive impediments. Operating principles should be developed that define how the business and IT should work together in order to support collaboration. Moreover, the written guidelines should be agreed upon and communicated across and made available throughout the organization.

While there are many ways to implement a data governance organization, some common roles include the Steering Committee, Data Governance Lead and the Data Governance Working Group – each comprised of representatives from both business and IT. For example, as a cross-functional business and IT team, the Data Governance Working Group are the subject matter experts who drive data management and data quality strategy, and execution for their respective subject and line of business areas.

The Role of IT in Data Governance

The IT organization’s mandate is to ensure that the future state of information and application architectures meet the needs of the data governance organization and are aligned to business goals and objectives. It ensures that the organization’s information technologies sustain and extend the data governance organization’s strategies and objectives while providing a consistent view of the end-to-end business processes.

To meet its mandate, the IT organization must provide leadership, technical infrastructure and resources that collaborate with the business to identify data issues, provide alternatives and implement solutions.

At a minimum, the IT organization should provide the following resources to the data governance organization in order to meet business stakeholder needs:

IT leadership at the Steering Committee level to provide leadership, vision and oversight
An IT Partner who is a peer to the data governance lead and is responsible for development and ownership of the data governance technical roadmap
A Data Quality Lead who works collaboratively with data stewards from the business to gain an understanding of business needs related to the quality of information and ensures that best practices regarding data quality incidents are being followed
A Metadata Lead who creates and maintains the metadata repository and defines the content of the business
An Enterprise Architect who works with the data governance lead to provide architecture and data integration oversight
A Data Architect who is responsible and accountable for the creation and maintenance of the Enterprise Data Model
Data Custodians who work closely with the data stewards and data owners to implement data governance policies and data owner requirements, and who carry out the data delivery function

The IT organization is also responsible and accountable for providing technology and technical infrastructure for the management, storage, access, security, navigation, movement and transformation of data. In this way, it implements the necessary systems to support and measure data governance requirements and data business processes. It also ensures that the data governance strategy aligns with the IT design methodology, development process methodology and best practices.

By working together with business data stewards, the IT organization plays an important role in root cause analysis on data issues and building remediation plans. It is the role of the IT organization to measure, monitor and report on data quality and deliver stakeholder service based on service level agreements.

In order to successfully provision these services and support, the IT organization needs to understand why data governance is important to each business stakeholder, what the benefits are and how best to work together with the business. When the IT organization can clearly articulate the benefits for each business function, sponsorship and ownership is more easily achieved.

Originally published by Kelle O’Neal

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10 Reasons Why Your Website Is Outdated

Admin — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 17:40:11 +0000

Websites don’t last forever. Without consistent upkeep, sometimes they barely even make it three years! The rapid change of web technology can overtake what was once state-of-the-art and reduce a website to a quaint relic in pretty short order, which is why it’s so critical to realistically consider the “shelf life” of your website when you first build it.

But the truth is that predicting how technological change will affect your website is virtually impossible. There is bound to be something—whether it be the way browsers display your website or simply what’s in style—that will change in the near future and cause you to rethink choices you may be making right now. And that’s O.K., as long as you’re comfortable with your website being a work in progress.

Meanwhile, for many existing websites, the signs of digital decay are accumulating. Dormancy has been a very common strategy for reducing web-related expenses during the economic downturn, but there really is no such thing as true dormancy. As the web around it continues to grow, an unmaintained website is subject to a similar entropy as an untended home—a crumbling foundation, peeling paint, leaks, and pests.

If that sounds like your website, keep reading. In this article, I’ve identified ten very good reasons to rebuild it…

1. Your business goals have changed.
It’s nice to start off with a short one. It’s so simple and obvious, but still needs to be said: Business goals change, and if you’re going to have a website that accurately reflects the nature of your business, it needs to be as current as your latest business plan. In fact, I’m still surprised when I speak to website owners who describes an entirely different business to me over the phone than the one I’ve read about on their website.

2. Your site was optimized for now-obsolete browsers.
If your website was built five years ago, there is a very good chance that some aspect of it is dysfunctional or perhaps even completely invisible to many of today’s web users. Conversely, if your website was built within the last year or so, it’s likely that without a lot of patience and work, it doesn’t function properly or look right in older browsers, even though many people still use them. Actually, looking at browser optimization in the reverse—in terms of optimizing today’s sites for yesterday’s browsers—might be a more helpful way of illustrating this point.

Browser optimization used to be the greatest lament of the web developer, as significant differences occurred between versions. But general web standards ushered in a time of comparative stability—one during which a three-year-old website could conceivably still work and look great on the latest version of Firefox. Today, even with at least four big players in the browser space, that stability is undermined by the continued use of Internet Explorer 6. Released almost a decade ago in 2001—2 years before the first version of Safari, 3 years before the first version of Firefox, and 7 years before the first version of Chrome—IE 6 is like the ant of web browsers. It’s not smart, but it’s a survivor and has managed to spread … everywhere. (I wanted to compare it to the Borg, but the resistance of developers everywhere is not futile!) But back to the problem: Because IE 6 does not support CSS version 2, web developers have to create hacked versions of websites’ CSS files that divert from web standards in order to ensure that they function (fingers crossed!) in IE 6. This kind of thing is like time-traveling back to the 10th century with all the equipment to create a mini electrical grid just so you can plug in a lamp. So if we have to do all this work to get current websites to work right on outdated browsers, you can see why a website created when they were current would be a busted eyesore today!

3. Your site relies too heavily upon Flash.
We’ve been pretty consistently anti-Flash for several years now. The main objection to Flash as a web-development technology was that its architecture prevented sites built with it from being indexed by search engines. But today, Flash files can be indexed by search engines if properly optimized. But what about all those Flash websites from a few years ago? You know, the ones that made you watch a “Loading…” animation, reshaped your browser, started playing pulsing techno music and emanated all kinds of blips and ticks every time you rolled over links? Riiight, those sites. Those are still very, very bad. They’re still virtually invisible to search engines because they weren’t created with those new search-engine-friendly Flash settings, and frankly, they’re just downright annoying. And irritating a prospect is not a great way to begin a business relationship, is it? It’s actually rather shocking that sites built this way are still being launched in 2010. Perhaps if we referred those responsible for such sites as “Flashers” they’d stop?

Oh, and by the way, even though Flash has been adapting its architecture to search engines and is often used to facilitate individual features (i.e. slideshows, videos, and navigation menus), it’s still public enemy #1 to Apple’s mobile platform, so if you care at all about iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad users being able to access or use your Flash or Flash-enhanced site, consider rebuilding it as soon as possible.

4. Your site is unusable on mobile devices.
I may have gotten a bit carried away with my anti-Flash attitude in the last section, but this one is serious. The growth of the mobile industry is unprecedented and will certainly impact your business even in the next few years. Since Apple’s mobile platform devices first launched, more than 120 million people have signed up for service. Apple expects more than 100 million iPhone subscribers alone by the end of 2011. By 2012, an inflection point is anticipated at which time the number of active smartphones will exceed the total number of personal computers in the world. Soon, mobile will no longer be a peripheral web platform. It will be the primary one. In the meantime, the technological change within the mobile space is in rapid flux. Without beginning the process of acclimating your web presence to the mobile platform now, you are likely to experience a much more difficult transition later.

5. You cannot execute your content strategy with your existing website.
Most B2B marketing websites rely completely upon content-driven pull marketing. Clearly, if you know you need to change your digital marketing strategy to lead with web content and are hindered by an outdated website, you need to start there. But perhaps you built your last website around a content strategy that has proven ineffective. Now, after evaluating the failure of your PDF-filled resource library to attract interest, or your offsite blog to deliver valuable traffic to your main hub, you know you need your site to be a centralized repository for frequently updated, written, indexable, engageable content. To make that happen, it’s likely you’ll need to start from the bottom up, making sure that every aspect of your site functions in accord with its new purpose.

6. Your database has exceeded the scale for which it was built.
I’ll be honest, this one is a bit esoteric, but it’s a much more frequent reason for a website rebuild than you might think. Let’s say you were ahead of the curve and your website allows you to do all kinds of things that a modern marketing website should: You can add new pages with ease, even build entirely new sections with multiple sub-levels. You’ve been adding weekly news items consistently. You’ve created 5 or 6 case studies every year. You’ve published 4 or 5 blog posts a week, consistently, many receiving ample comments. You have several calls to action and receive far more form submissions than you ever thought you would. You’ve been writing multi-page monthly newsletters since you launched. If your site is a few years old, that kind of activity is likely expanding your database exponentially. That kind of growth is great, but if your site was built (at the code level, mind you) with much more modest goals expected, it could actually be creating a significant performance and reliability problem. While it’s possible that the site could be reconfigured to account for the change in scale, it’s likely that the work required to tune it up would be more than rebuilding from scratch and importing your legacy content. While this is certainly not likely to be the most common reason for a rebuild out there, I’ve seen it enough times to include in this list.

7. Your site does not generate leads.
What is your website for? Hopefully you’ve discovered recently that your website’s primary function should be to provide compelling information to people and routinely generate qualified leads as a result of their interest. If your site’s only point of engagement is a generic “Contact Us” form, you’ve got a lot of work to do. If you dedicate some time to developing personas for your website, you’ll likely begin to see how their influence will reach all the way to its core and demand that you rethink and rebuild it from the ground up. As soon as the prospect becomes part of the website planning process, it’s as if you have a real, live, new member of your web team whose influence cannot be ignored.

8. Your site suffers from Frankenstein Syndrome.
Many companies make large investments in their websites with the false expectation that it’s a one-time expense. But as technologies rapidly change, forcing their own expectations for how the website fits in to their operation to change as well, they try to manage that change as inexpensively as possible. Sometimes that isn’t very visible to the user, but for the marketing team managing the site who may have to keep track of many third-party plugins and free tools, numerous data repositories, and the overall instability of an ad hoc digital marketing scheme, the inefficiency is very visible. However, this kind of expansion often does have a significant impact on the user experience and appearance of a website. It can range from the kind of information architecture sprawl that turns once orderly websites into a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, to the even more common “just tack it on” phenomenon that makes web-pages look like a two-dimensional Times Square, with numerous blinking features all demanding equal user attention with no sense of hierarchy or order among them. No matter which clever metaphor applies to your situation, the point is that sometimes a refresh is just what is needed to ensure that your website portrays a unified voice and supports the best experience for users.

9. You cannot edit your current site.
Enough said. You need to have control over your site’s content. If you don’t, you need to have a plan to get it.

10. Your expectations for what a website should cost are not in line with what you expect it to do.
This one is a bit harder to describe, but I see it over and over again. In its most drastic form, it’s the type of disconnect that happens when a company’s first website is built by an executive’s nephew, setting a precedent for website and related budgets dwarfed by the growing reliance upon it to enhance and enable the company’s overall success. If a company expects profits in the millions but only paid $500 for their website, something is very wrong. Conversely, a $500 website is not likely to be an effective or reliable platform for a company of that size.

But its more common form is also more understandable, especially in light of the economic downturn that began in 2008. Many companies were forced to reduce spending in any possible way, shelving redesigns, functionality expansion plans, even needed maintenance and put many websites into operational and expense dormancy. But for most companies, prolonged web dormancy is not realistic. The longer a company gets used to a balance sheet lightened by web budget cuts, the harder it is to return to allocating a budget commensurate with expectation. In fact, most companies hope that expanding web capabilities will stimulate the rebound they so desperately need, but without an adequate budget to fund that expansion, those hopes are not realistic.

Discouraged?
Don’t be. These issues are bound to happen to any website, particularly if left alone for too long. The good news is that none of them are unsolveable.

by Christopher Butler on December 2, 2010

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Protect Yourself From Spam Emails – Useful Tips And Examples From Us

Admin — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 19:13:53 +0000

1. Be Very Careful With Your Email Address

First, I think it’s important to recognize the tactics spammers use to harvest your email address. If you know how they’re going to attack, then you should be able to avoid falling prey. One thing to remember is that spammers have programs that constantly search forums, and other publically available sites, for email addresses that people have posted. Thus it’s a good idea to never post your email address anywhere it can be viewed by the general public.

Also, if you decide to set a vacation autoresponder, or an autoresponder of any kind, make sure that you set it to only respond to people who are already in your contacts list. Most major email services provide this option. Also, if your email provider does not provide this option I would strongly advise that you do not autorespond to emails. If you reply to a spam then the spammers know that your email address is active and they will send you even more spam.

Also, it’s a good idea to refrain from signing up for any offers that require an email address, unless you trust the website.

There are also websites which will intentionally try to impersonate a safe site in order to trick you into giving them information. This information can include passwords, your email address, credit card information, or many other types of sensitive information. These are known as phishing sites.

2. Use a Secondary Email Address

Sometimes you will find yourself in a position where you have to break some of these rules. For those times it’s a good idea to have two separate email addresses. Use one only for communicating with friends and people you trust. The other should be reserved for interacting with sites you don’t have complete confidence in. The benefit of this is that only your secondary email should get any spam. If the spam becomes unreasonable you can just delete the account and start another.

3. What To Do With Received Spam

The sad truth is that even if you open a fresh email address, and follow all the advice provided above, you may still receive some spam periodically. One of the things spammers do is send spam out to a very large number of email addresses which they think may exist. Thus, if this is where the spam in your inbox came from, the spammers may not even know your email address is even active. Below I have explained what steps to follow to both make sure the spam problem does not get worse and to help solve the problem once and for all. Note that these steps are also helpful if you are receiving a large quantity of spam.

A) Don’t Buy Anything From Spam Advertised Sites

Although this should be obvious I will quickly mention it. Please do your part to stop spam by refraining from purchasing anything from a site that you were directed to via spam. For one thing, you have no reason to trust the company with your credit card information, or really with any information at all. Also, giving your money to companies that advertise in this way only continues to make it profitable for people to send spam. You will be hurting not just yourself, but everyone else as well. Please don’t fund spam.

B) How To Protect Yourself From Received Spam

One of the most potent defenses against spam is your own common sense. Never respond to an email unless you know, and trust, the sender. This includes unsubscribing from emails. If you don’t remember doing business with the company then I’d advise against trying to unsubscribe from the email. If you try to unsubscribe from something that turns out to be spam, they will know your email is active. In the same line of reasoning you should never click on any links, or pictures, in spam. Many of these will have code in them that alerts the spammers that the email has been opened. Even clicking on the website URL could have this effect.

Following this same line of reasoning you also want to make sure that your webmail client is not configured to load external images automatically. Luckily, most webmail clients do have this disabled by default. Also make sure that you do not click to load external images yourself. Loading these images may have exactly the same effect as actually clicking on a link, or a picture. It may alert the spammers that the email has arrived and has been opened. Then they will know that your email address is active and will add you to their lists of people to spam. After this happens the amount of spam you receive will likely increase drastically.

It’s also possible that the spam could contain malware.

C) Report Spam

In general, the best course of action is to report the spam and delete it without opening it. However, if you aren’t absolutely certain that an email is spam you may need to open it to make sure. If that is the case then make sure all of the above advice has been followed before you open any suspect emails.

Article Source: http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/how-avoid-getting-spammed.htm

Examples From Access US

In order to provide real world examples of spam, we would like to share two instances that we have found to be a problem recently.

We have received emails from “UPS” claiming that an expected package has been delayed. It provides a false “tracking number” along with a link to “check the status” of our delivery. Obviously we know when we are expecting packages and from whom they are being delivered from so we knew right away it wasn’t legitimate. Frequently, spammers will send out mass emails such as the one described in an attempt to catch somebody who is waiting for a package and might assume the email is from the trusted source it states. Sadly, many people fall prey to spam emails of the like. We recommend that our customers be vigilant in protecting their internet safety and take all necessary precautions to avoid such scams.
For business owners, this next example is especially troubling because it exploits our desire to provide the best customer experience possible at all times. We have received emails from the “Better Business Bureau” prompting us to follow a link to “check a recent claim” against our business. While we knew this to be false, many business owners aren’t aware of the process the actual Better Business Bureau uses to inform businesses of complaints and other grievances. We recommend contacting the BBB if you are not familiar with the process.

In summary, DO NOT open ANY emails that seem suspicious to you or that are not from trusted sources. However, if you are not positive whether a piece of mail is spam and you open it, DO NOT click on any links provided within the email until you can determine whether it is legitimate.

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Reduce Operational Costs With Colocation

Admin — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 16:57:55 +0000

Data warehousing is very important in current context as information is truly considered as wealth. Loss of data is as good as losing an important business deal or losing millions of bucks. Therefore, for running a business successfully, making sure of the data security is important. However, this comes with a huge cost. The installation charges for the server to be set up and the ambience for the server is also to be firmed up. The air-conditioners make sure the server stays cool and the unrestricted power supplying systems and batteries make sure that the server does not face power drips. Learn more about the economic option of server colocation for effective maintenance of the vital information.

By colocating the servers, you can reduce the costs involved in setting up the servers and also can save heavily on space. The space that is not allotted to the storage equipment can be used for accommodating other business needs.
If you have servers in your business, you need to provide security by installing security and alert systems and make sure there are access doors and other installations that would allow only the authorized personnel inside the rooms.
The costs for installing and upkeep on the air-conditioning and other ancillary systems for smooth functioning of these data warehouses are heavy if your organization maintains it separately.
The server room should be spic and span and should be cleaned regularly and checked if everything works well. The costs involved in housekeeping and maintenance of the server rooms all add up to the operational expenses.
There have to be more shelves where the backup data is archived, periodically, as it is vital for data recovery in the future, should anything go wrong. Therefore, more costs are incurred in payment for the engineers and technicians to maintain the sensitive equipment.
You would need to pay for the whole bandwidth if the servers are placed in your location, whereas you are charged only the usage charges in case you choose to place the stored data with the colocating service provider.
If you go for colocating your servers, then these costs imply to the outsourcing organization. They ensure all these factors are taken care of and you get to pay substantially smaller costs. This is because their costs are split across various clients who use their storage services.

The operational costs are reduced by server colocation services. Server colocation also takes care of humongous web traffic by handling data efficiently.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/4751268

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How Does Disaster Recovery Planning Benefit Businesses?

Admin — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 18:17:55 +0000

Most companies never experience an event that threatens to put them out of business. But those that do, know the value of having a disaster recovery plan in place. Disaster recovery planning involves anticipating what a company needs to survive an event that makes its location uninhabitable, and/or destroys important data that is stored there. In most cases, a plan involves at least four elements:

Establishing an alternative business location
Arranging for the delivery and setup of emergency hardware
Developing an offsite data storage arrangement
Establishing how the plan would be executed

Although the elements of such a strategy sound simple, selecting the right disaster recovery services provider, gaining support for the initiative, and then passing the initiative can be challenging. With that said, there are several reasons why companies are likely to pass such an initiative, particularly the ones below:

Simplifies decision making when an event occurs

When companies lack an effective recovery plan, they are not prepared to handle the effects that a catastrophic event has on their business. Instead of developing a workable plan on short notice, they are confronted with numerous options that they have not researched. As they decide which options are best, their chances of going out of business quickly increase. According to Bernstein Crisis Management, 80 percent of companies that do not rebound from a major data loss within a month are likely to close permanently.

Prevents data from being destroyed

Data storage is the most valuable aspect of disaster recovery planning. By storing its data on the servers of a disaster recovery services provider, a company ensures the data is safe from events that happen at its location. Because the provider also supplies emergency hardware, using the provider for both data storage and emergency hardware procurement makes the most sense.

Reduces the risk of casualties

When a catastrophic event makes the location of a company uninhabitable, the owners of the company may attempt to salvage storage hardware or paper files before departing from the location. When a fire or an earthquake has damaged a building, reentering the structure can be extremely dangerous. When business data is stored offsite, a company will migrate the information onto new storage hardware and in a new location, and therefore has no reason to return to the site of the catastrophe.

Helps companies stay in business

By developing an effective plan, a company increases its chances of staying business in the wake of a catastrophic event. According to DTI/PricewaterhouseCoopers, forty-three percent of companies that experience a major data loss will go out of business. According to the University of Texas Center for Research on Information Systems, over fifty percent of those that experience a major data loss close their doors within two years. These statistics are a sobering reminder of how a plan helps companies stay in business by protecting their data.

Conclusion

Disaster recovery planning is essential for a company to stay in business following a catastrophic event. To learn more about developing and implementing a recovery plan, contact a provider of disaster recovery services today.

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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7199993

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The Benefits of Colocation

Admin — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 16:32:02 +0000

Colocation can help reduce operational costs while providing access to future power, cooling, networking, and other growth needs.

The basic concept of data center colocation – housing a copy of your organization’s files, applications, and other data in a second data center for safekeeping – isn’t too complex. There are many benefits for business that can be gained from quality colocation services. Due to these benefits, most every web site on the entire Internet (over 99.99%) are hosted on servers in a colocation data center. In addition to this, every Internet radio station, Internet TV station, and almost every single Internet related service are all centered in a colocation facility somewhere today. Whether it is your refrigerator connecting to the Internet to reorder groceries, or your fax machine automatically reordering its ink cartridge to be shipped to you, or something as simple as sending and receiving email, all of these services reside in a colocation Internet data center.

Colocation Provides Reliable Uptime

There are so many ways that colocation provides redundant services to guarantee truly reliable uptime when you choose a quality colocation facility. Within a “Class A” colocation facility everything is redundant so that if anything goes down the colocation customers server and network equipment will not even notice it as there are redundant systems in place that automatically replace those that went down. This includes; the air conditioning systems, UPS (uninterruptible power systems), power generators, utility power, network routers, redundant Internet backbones with plenty of extra capacity, and redundant onsite network engineering staff. Not every colocation provider and colocation facility includes all of these important services, but those that meet the Class A certification requirements. For a list of these companies and their ratings see the colocation services section. Because a “Class A” colocation facility has all of the services setup as redundant it guarantees the highest possible reliable uptime for your collocated server and network equipment.

Better Network Speed and Reliability

Most colocation facilities run BGP and have redundant Internet networks and different Internet backbones coming into their facility. When a company sets up a network at an office they usually just get the Internet bandwidth capacity that they need such as a single T3, which is 45 Megabits, or an OC3, which is 155 Megabits without the redundancy. Premium Class A Colocation facilities go to a much greater extent to provide a fast and always reliable Internet network, for example Hurricane Electric’s colocation facilities network connects to over 500 major national and International Internet backbone networks. Also the Hurricane Electric Network connections are all OC192′s which are 10,000Mbps each and as of the time of this writing are the fastest network connection possible to have for any network. This kind of redundancy and size and availability of Internet networks within their colocation facilities makes for much more reliable Internet bandwidth than what is available or feasible at an office location. A few other colocation facilities have this kind of network redundancy and they are Switch and Data and Equinix, though there are several differences between these three providers colocation facilities.

Better Power Redundancy

At and office a company will have the primary utility supplied power and may also use a small UPS to backup the servers or computers on their network. Few offices have automatic emergency generators unless it is for a data center, hospital or other important office building. Even with the office buildings that do have an emergency backup generator it is usually the type of backup generator that has the ability to run for 2 or 4 hours and is rated for “backup”. In the best “Class A” colocation facilities the generator is a “Prime Source” type of power generator and the UPS system is a whole facility UPS system. This type of system can take up a whole room with the electrical breaker panels, automatic generator switch gear, and large UPS systems. If an office wanted to install these type of power systems they would need to upgrade the power grid to the facility and get permits from the land owner and the City for the pad mounted large UPS systems to be installed. In addition to this they would have to get permits from the fire department to store the additional fuel for the Prime Source Generator. All of this equipment can cost as much as $12,000,000 to procure, build the special rooms and safety structures and install. This is often not an option for a company to do at their office.

At a “Class A” colocation facility such as Hurricane Electric, Equinix or Switch and Data, the generated power is backed up with extensive power systems so that the power will stay up even in the even of a utility power outrage, and in the case of Hurricane Electric, the Prime Source power generators can run indefinitely to make sure that there is quality power in the face of an extended power outage.

Redundant and Improved Cooling

Many office environments have AC systems that can handle a set amount of cooling for the environment and are set to run during business hours. When you introduce a large amount of servers or network gear, the power used is converted to heat that must be cooled. Office AC systems just aren’t made to handle the additional cooling required for a large amount of server and network gear used for Internet applications. In addition to this, should the AC system at an office fail, or just need to be turned off for routine maintenance then the heat would rise. Hot computer equipment is prone to fail and has a much shorter life span.

This is why in the best Class A colocation facilities you will find that they have setup redundant AC systems. Should an AC system have to be taken offline for repairs or standard maintenance there is another system already working in place to keep the facility cool and at the best environment for computers and other network routers and gear.

Significantly Lower Setup and Monthly Cost

High bandwidth deals at a True Class A colocation facility can cost as little as $100/month for space for a server and Internet bandwidth on a dedicated 100Mbps Internet port or as little as $1080 for the whole 100Mbps within a colocation facility. This includes all the special redundancies and services that a colocation facility includes. Yet, if and office were to try to set up the same 100Mbps Internet bandwidth with just a limited redundancy to cut costs it would still cost more than 30 times the cost per month ($30,000) for a lesser service. Below is a detailed item by item explanation of what this would cost.

Setting up a Class A colocation facility with all the above and below services can cost as much as $80,000,000. In addition to this the monthly operating costs for redundancy and reliability are quite high. If an office was to attempt to set up some very basic redundancy it could easily cost much more per month to operate than the same service would cost at a colocation facility.

Office Network monthly costs; Redundant OC3 Internet connections $10,000/month to $50,000/month depending on the provider, 1 person working at all hours onsite to be available to help with the server would be 5 people working 40hr shifts (just to have one available 24/7) X $4,000/month each = $20,000/month. This alone equals $30,000 to $70,000/month just for these two aspects of getting the 100Mbps Internet bandwidth to an office and having one staff person onsite 24/7/

In addition to this there are many other costs such as increased office power costs for servers and cooling, etc. Thus it is easy to cost justify using colocation services for an Internet application verses trying to do it at an office, but there are many other quality and service benefits that are even stronger reasons of why colocation is the only way to go for Internet services.

Network and Server Specialists

At the best Class A colocation facilities the facility has the best Network and Server Specialists who do nothing other than help with colocation customers network gear and servers 24/7 and thus these are the very best trained personnel to be found. This is a tremendous benefit as experience can help you solve a problem that may take 8 hours in as little as 5 minutes when an experienced network or server specialist helps. This can make all the difference.

On-site Remote Hands 24/7

Not all colocation facilities are staffed 24/7, let alone most will charge an hourly fee for simple tasks such as swapping out a hot swappable hard drive or configuring a base ip address, or urgent help such as typing a few commands to help you recover a server, but premium colocation companies will include On-Site 24/7 Remote Hands service with their colocation plans at no additional charge. It comes in handy and is very helpful. This is the only way to go. It allows you to manage your servers as though they were under your desk, even if they are half way around the world they will seem close.

High Internet Bandwidth Availability

Another very important benefit of a colocation facility is the high availability of Internet bandwidth. If you need to upgrade from 10 Megabits to 100 Megabits to 1000 Megabits to 10,000 Megabits you can do it within days and sometimes as little as minutes. At an office to upgrade from 100Mbps to 1000Mbps Internet bandwidth can take 3 to 6 months, if it is even possible. This is a very strategic benefit of colocation facilities.

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