With the introduction of new legislation that has made businesses more liable for keeping their information secure, data security is more important than ever. The regulations that effect many organizations are called the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Sarbanes Oxley Act. Also, those businesses that accept credit cards carry liability for keep customer’s information secure and fall under the regulations set by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council. Nearly all industry sectors are required to comply with these new regulations including healthcare, government agencies and financial services organizations.
As the ever increasing number of cyber threats become more sophisticated many businesses, large and small, are taking extra steps to insure that privacy safeguards are in place. One of the cost effective methods businesses are using to insure compliance with these regulations is the implementation of managed security ser ...
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If you are an owner or manager of a business there are certain steps you must take if you want to avoid losing your data in the event of a catastrophic disaster at your place of business. These disasters could be fire, theft, water damage, vandalism, natural disaster, computer virus attack, equipment failure, etc. To protect yourself here are the 4 steps you should take now:1) Make sure you are backing up your files every day. This seems like an obviously one but there still many businesses that don’t backup regularly. If you are one of those that don’t always backup every day just know this – it is not a matter of if but when an event will occur that will cause you to lose your data.2) Make sure your virus protection is always on AND up to date. Virus attacks can come from many different sources such a emails from friends & family, websites, spam, and downloaded files such as program and music files. Not only can viruses corrupt your computer but they can also bring down your whole network. Using a ma ...
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Tape backups were once the standard for backing up data, primarily because it was the most affordable way to backup large amounts of data. However, tape backups were never without their problems. If you are still using tapes for data backup you are probably already well aware of these shortcomings:
- Tapes have a high failure rate. Depending upon the source, failure rates are typically reported anywhere from 10% to 99%. However many experts consistently report a 40% to 60% failure rate, on average, when attempting to do a restore from tapes.
- At least once a month tape drives need to be cleaned. Most user’s don’t properly clean their drives on a regular schedule which is probably the reason why restore from tape failure rates are so high.
- Like most computer hardware with moving parts, tape drive systems have a 3 to 5 year lifecycle. Tapes should ...
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So you realize that you need a better solution to eliminate spam and provide virus protection for your organization. If you have done any research you maybe thinking that a hardware applicance such as Barracuda Networks or some other spam blocking appliance is probably your best solution. Let’s investigate this further. One issue you will have with any appliance that you install is the cost of on-going licensing fees. This is in addition to the initial capital expense you will incur for the appliance itself. Although Barracuda does do a good job of blocking spam you will always need to manage the appliance with on-going updates and patches. Then there is the backscatter issue. Barracuda Spam Firewalls are often configured to auto respond to spam emails by letting the sender know that their email has been blocked. The problem is that usually spammers use legitimate email addresses by forging the “From” address in a spam email. When Barrcuda auto responds to the innoce ...
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