Is Your Business
Disaster-Ready?
By
Jeff Wuorio
Reprinted with permission from the
Microsoft
Small Business Center
Hurricanes, earthquakes and
other natural events are disasters in every sense of the word. Lives are
lost, property decimated and entire communities disrupted.
For your small business,
these events can be just as devastating. But there's a great deal you can
do — both to prepare before a disaster strikes and afterwards, to get your
business back on its feet quickly.
Here are 10 tips to better
protect your business and, if damage occurs, what you can do to speed your
recovery.
The first five tips will help
you protect your business:
1. Identify what you need
to protect. Many businesses spend far too much time piling up the
sandbags without considering what really needs the most protection. Your
first step in adequately preparing your business for a disaster is to
identify what matters most and take steps to address that. "If you run a
food service business, if you lose electricity for 24 hours, you can lose
$50,000 to food spoilage," says Donna Childs, co-author of "Contingency
Planning and Disaster Recovery: A Small Business Guide." "Look into backup
power supplies and make sure any possible damage is covered in your
insurance policy."
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A Letter from the President
It is my
great opportunity to
send you this newsletter. This is the very first of
what we hope will be many Circuit, ARRC Technology’s
monthly newsletters. It has been a goal to
communicate more news, tips, and information to our
clients and friends. We feel a monthly newsletter
would be the most efficient way to service you and
keep you apprised as to what is going on at ARRC
Technology.
At ARRC Technology,
it is our mission to design and develop technology
solutions while proactively managing all technology
services for individuals and small business clients.
Our products and services are delivered in a prompt
and courteous manner, are cost effective, more
efficient and encompass all IT equipment,
telecommunications and cabling needs.
Our priority has
always been and continues to be our valued friends
and clients. If there is something you would like to
see in future newsletters please email us
info@arrc.com.
Alex Rogers
President/CEO |
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Do You Need
Managed Services?
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Four
questions for you to answer
Are managed services a better choice than the way you
are doing things now? Like everything else in your office,
the answer will depend on how you want to measure it. Your first step is to answer these four questions.
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- Do your employees need to regularly enter data
or retrieve information from a centralized server or
database? The more they rely on this, the stronger
the case for managed services.
- Do your employees rely primarily on e-mail
communication with important clients, vendors and
partners? Again, the higher the impact on your
bottom line, the more you should consider managed services.
- Do you use e-commerce? You don't want that
capability lost for a minute - period.
- Does your network go south occasionally? And,
consequently, are your employees unable to use
e-mail or access network data? One of the ways to
justify managed services is to calculate the cost of
your people sitting on their hands.
If you answered "yes" to one or more of these
questions, you now need to talk to someone who can help
you identify the specific issues related to your
company. The difficult part is deciding who to talk to.
These are the four points you should consider:
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The New Wave of Spam
Spam
continues to be a pervasive problem that all small to mid-sized
businesses must deal with. According to the most recent Symantec
Internet Security Threat Report:
- Between July 1 and
December 31, 2006, spam made up 59% of all monitored email
traffic. This is an increase over the first six months of 2006
when 54% of email was classified as spam.
- 65% of all spam
detected during this period was written in English.
- Spam related to
financial services made up 30% of all spam during this period,
the most of any category.
- During the last
six months of 2006, 44% of all spam detected worldwide
originated in the United States.
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Is
It Time To
Upgrade Your Firewall?
You've
heard it before -- the only thing that is constant is
change. That statement seems to be particularly true of
technology. We want to share a announcement that we
received recently from Sonicwall
about their product line. Many of you have been protecting
your network for several years with their reliable firewall
products. But now, due to the ever-increasing
sophistication of hackers, hacking tools and security
threats, it has become necessary for
Sonicwall to revamp their entire
product line to combat these new dangers.
No doubt
you've heard about some of the newer threats such as
Nimda, Code Red, SQL Slammer,
MSBlaster,
SoBig, MyDoom &
Sasser. Some of these are so
sophisticated that they actually have the ability to
disguise themselves as "legitimate" network traffic which
allows them to get through many firewalls.
Over the past few
years these exploits have affected millions of computers
worldwide causing billions of dollars of damage in downtime
and lost productivity.
SonicWALL
has responded to these new threats by adding a high-speed
Intrusion Prevention Service (IPS) to their product
portfolio. This service is only available on their new 4th
generation product line due to the intensive processing and
memory requirements.
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Letter from President