IT Tips Baltimore

IT Tips Baltimore

Working Nets
July 6, 2012

IT Purchasing Assistance: Finding the Right Technology for your Business

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As a business owner, you are busy enough running your business and trying to turn a profit. You don’t have the time to track business technology advancements and determine if your business needs to upgrade its current hardware or software. Unfortunately, without a dedicated IT department handling these duties for you, your business may be quickly falling behind the competition. So what do you do?

Outsource your IT assessment and purchasing needs to Working Nets – your Virtual IT Department!

Our philosophy is that business owners should focus on their business, not on the tools that make it run. At Working Nets, our outsourced IT assessment and IT purchasing assistance services help your business find the right solutions for your hardware and software needs.

Benefits of a Technology Assessment and IT Purchasing Assistance

  • Identify your current strengths and learn how to better utilize the technology you currently have
  • Identify potential security risks and learn how to fix them.
  • Identify the new technologies – both hardware and software – you need to operate your business as effectively and efficiently as possible
  • Reduce your total cost of ownership!

Your network is at the core of your business. Ensuring that it is designed correctly and properly maintained, is at the core of ours. So contact Working Nets today and develop a plan for future IT growth and development!

If you have any questions about Outsourced IT Purchasing Assistance, please contact Working Nets by calling (443) 992-7394 or visit WorkingNets.com today!

Welcome to Working Nets – your virtual IT Department!

At Working Nets, we support your business by providing top-notch Information Technology (I.T.) services to companies like yours: Companies that don’t need full-time I.T. services, but do need someone to turn to, when they are having a problem. We provide services like Network Design, Monitoring and Maintenance. We troubleshoot technical issues when they arise, and give you options for solving them. We help you use your technology investment to achieve your business goals.

At Working Nets, our focus is on your needs!

You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.

Working Nets
June 29, 2012

The Benefits of Outsourced Disaster Recovery :: Maryland IT Support

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With so much of your business relying on technology, you cannot afford to lose critical data. The outcomes could be disastrous to your business. In fact, of companies that had a major loss of business data…

  • 6% Survived
  • 51% Closed Within 2 Years
  • 43% Never Recovered!

So what do you do when disaster strikes?

Do you have a plan in place?

Don’t wait until disaster strikes to step back and look at what you could have done differently. Now is the time to act. Now is the time to address Disaster Recovery.

What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery is the process and procedures your business puts in place for the recovery of your technology infrastructure and critical data after a natural or human-induced disaster.

What is Outsourced Disaster Recovery?

Companies of all shapes and sizes – from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies – are beginning to realize the importance of disaster recovery. But what do you do if you cannot afford to hire an in-house IT technician?

You outsource your disaster recovery needs to Working Nets, your virtual IT department! We assure that your vital business data is available when you need it.

What are the Benefits of Outsourced Disaster Recovery?

  • It is often cheaper to outsource your IT needs than it is to hire an in-house IT professional. Plus, you can utilize an entire team of IT experts without having to pay a single salary!
  • There are no upfront technology or storage costs.
  • There are no hardware maintenance costs.
  • There are no software subscriptions.
  • Peace of Mind!

So do the right thing for your business and outsource your disaster recovery to Working Nets!

If you have any questions about Outsourced Disaster Recovery, please contact Working Nets by calling (443) 992-7394 or visit WorkingNets.com today!

Welcome to Working Nets – your virtual IT Deptartment!

At Working Nets, we support your business by providing top-notch Information Technology (I.T.) services to companies like yours: Companies that don’t need full-time I.T. services, but do need someone to turn to, when they are having a problem. We provide services like Network Design, Monitoring and Maintenance. We troubleshoot technical issues when they arise, and give you options for solving them. We help you use your technology investment to achieve your business goals.

At Working Nets, our focus is on your needs!

You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.

Sources:

Data Storage: 10 Compelling Reasons for Outsourcing Disaster Recovery

Outsourcing Disaster Recovery versus traditional in-house methods

Disaster Recovery Services FAQ

Disaster Recovery Guide

dspigelman
January 30, 2012

QuickBooks 2012 Can Automate Inv. Numbers in The Subject Line

Tags: , Explanations, IT Tips Baltimore

For those of you who don’t really use QuickBooks that much, this won’t sound that exciting. But for those who do, one feature that’s been requested since the early 2000’s, has been the ability to automatically put the invoice number in the subject line of emailed invoices. So, the outbound invoice can automatically say Invoice #2708 instead of just Invoice.

Well, now you can! The field code is “<NUM>”, so you just put in “Invoice #<NUM>” and it automatically comes up right when you go to email it. Alright, maybe I get a little overly excited about these things, but I’ve been wanting this for a long time! Oh, don’t use the quote marks, in real life.

dspigelman
January 25, 2012

DNSChanger Problems Not Over

Computer Security Baltimore, IT Tips Baltimore

For the past several years, one of the worst malware problems that we’ve seen has been what’s been called DNSChanger. It’s not because it’s particularly difficult to remove, although it isn’t easy. Rather, it’s because of how it compromises a user’s Internet security.

To understand what it does, we need a brief explanation of DNS. DNS stands for Domain Naming System, and it’s essentially the Internet’s phonebook. Your computer doesn’t really know what www.yahoo.com is. It might know it as  98.139.180.149. But you aren’t going to remember that. So instead, when you enter that into your browser, your computer asks the DNS system to give it the correct number, aka the IP Address. And how does it know? Well, it asks. It asks its upline, which then might ask its upline, etc. until it finds a DNS server that knows the correct address. Then the answer gets cascaded down to your machine, which then knows where to go.

But what would happen if your DNS server lied to you? What would happen if you asked for www.yahoo.com, and it came back with 173.201.243.1? Your browser address bar would still show you http://www.yahoo.com, but the actual website wouldn’t be Yahoo’s. But what if the webserver at that address was mocked up to look like Yahoo’s site? Well, now we have some real trouble, because you, as the user, would never know that you were entering your Yahoo username and password into a site that wasn’t Yahoo, and you’d be giving the owner of that fake-site your real Yahoo username and password.

And what would happen if it wasn’t Yahoo they hijacked, but Wells Fargo, Bank of America, PayPal, etc…? See the problem?

That’s what DNSChanger does… or did. Once installed on your system (and it infects both Windows and MacOS), it changes your DNS servers to ones that lie. They send you to custom-crafted websites made to look like other real sites, in order to steal your account information.

Now the good news is that the FBI and several foreign governments stopped it! Operation Ghost Click resulted in a number of arrests, and best of all, they got the fake DNS servers. And then they did a smart thing: They decided to fix those fake DNS servers, and make them real DNS servers, so that all the machines infected with it would just start working properly. Users need never know that their machines were infected, because the infection amounted to nothing.

But alas, bureaucracies can never leave a good thing alone. The German Federal Office for Information Security has decided that, on March 8, 2012, those fake-now-good DNS servers will be taken down. So now, and this is the reason I’m posting this, on March 8, many people will suddenly find themselves unable to use the Internet. If this happens to you, your machine is probably infected.

If that happens to you, you can call your local IT service company, or try to remove it yourself. Here are some links to get you started.

dspigelman
August 2, 2011

When Should I Replace My Computer

IT Tips Baltimore

When customers ask me whether it’s worth fixing their computers, I am often faced with a dilemma. The correct answer, for many of them, is that they need to replace their machines. But it’s an expense they may not want. At the same time, I don’t want to come off sounding like I don’t want to help them, and that the first thing to do is always replace them.

My rule of thumb has been, if the machine is over 3 years old, it’s probably better to replace it. Why? Because there’s a certain point at which you’re spending good money after bad. It’s usually not worth spending money on fixing an old machine, when the replacement cost is not much more than the repair cost.

Today, I saw an article on Yahoo! Finance that says just that.

“4. Computers and Electronics
Computers break – frequently. So do the myriad of electronic devices we have around our homes, such as CD players, GPS units, televisions and alarm clocks. Electronic devices can be expensive to fix, and often, impossible to fix. As the price of most electronics continues to decrease while the features and capabilities increase, it is often not worth the cost to repair them. This applies doubly to computers.

As new programs and online applications grow in size and complexity, they take up more memory. Older computers often cannot keep up after three or four years. While new memory can be added and minor repairs and disc cleanups can be made, using a clunky four-year-old computer often takes more time than it is worth. If time equals money for you, buying a new computer is often the best choice if the existing one is more than a few years old.”

This is especially true for business computers, where time really is money. The costs involved in fixing old machines, really can be more than the cost of replacing them. With the advent of Cloud Computing, a lot of old data doesn’t even really need to be migrated anymore. It lives in the Cloud, and can just be downloaded again. And if data needs to be migrated from the old machine to the new, we (or your IT service provider) can typically help with that.

dspigelman
May 7, 2009

How Often Do You Backup?

Tags: , IT Tips Baltimore

“How often do you backup your data?” is a question I very often ask small business owners. Now, I’ll admit that, as pickup lines go, that’s an odd one. But for business owners, there aren’t very many questions more important than that. Almost all businesses today rely on computer data to run their business. Whether it’s their Quickbooks files, or those contracts, proposals, or other work-product they’ve been working on for weeks, that data represents the core of their businesses.

So it might be surprising to learn that, while 85% of computer users say that they’re concerned about the prospect of losing their data, only 25% actually do regular backups! That’s a scary thought, because some 70% of small firms that experience a major data loss are gone within a year.

Here are some questions to think about for your business:

  • How often do you backup your data?
  • Where do you back it up to?
  • Do you keep the backup media somewhere near your computer, where it can get destroyed by the same catastrophe that wiped out your computer in the first place?

And here’s one that even those who backup regularly tend not to consider properly:

  • How often do you test your restores? (Hint: The time to test them is not when you’ve suffered a data loss, and need to get your data back now!)