Cloud Backup - How can it benefit you?

Cloud backup is increasingly more popular within our current technological environment, so we are taking this opportunity to keep you up to speed with what cloud backup actually is and why there has been an increase in its popularity.

Data Backups

Before cloud backup we relied on local backup, local backup is simply a copy of data to be stored in a different location to the original data, most commonly on tapes or another hard drive. However this form of backup cannot be seen as an effective form of disaster recovery. In order for this to be an effective form of disaster recovery the tapes or hard drives containing the copies need to be stored in a secure offsite location, to ensure that in the event of a fire the copies of your data are not lost along with the originals. This is where cloud backup comes in.

What is Cloud Backup?

Cloud backup or remote backup, as it is also known as, works in the same way as local or tape backup, except that your data is copied to highly secure off site data storage facilities over the internet. This form of backup is completely automatic, thus providing a more effective form of disaster recovery than local backup, due to data being stored offsite.

Why Cloud Backup?

Backup of this type offers a number of benefits to businesses, such as:

·         You only pay for the storage (GBs) you need

·         It offers a large retention period allowing for retrieval of accidentally deleted or modified  files

·         Flexible, limitless storage that can be scaled up or down as you require

·         Backup data can be accessed from any computer, even on the move

·         Backups can be completely automated, no user intervention is required

·         Offsite storage adding an element of disaster recovery

·         Scalability – it can easily adapt to deal with business growth

·         Most online backup services have redundant systems in place, increasing the safety of your  data

If you want to know more about online backup and how it can benefit you, why not give Andy a call on:

01723 587240

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Workplace Recovery - Prepare for the Unexpected

What is Workplace Recovery?

Workplace recovery is designed to prepare your business for the unexpected. Disaster recovery is of critical importance to any business and physical disasters such as fire, floods and lightning strikes are vastly overlooked when it comes to comprising a disaster recovery plan, yet these cause just as much harm to businesses as stolen, lost or broken hardware or data and email outages.

If your business was hit by fire or flood putting your office completely out of use, it will seriously inhibit your ability to trade. Over 70% of businesses involved in a major disaster either never reopen or subsequently fail shortly after reopening due to lack of client confidence or the customers taking their business to a competitor. That equates to one out of two businesses that never return to the marketplace following a major disaster. The businesses that do survive, plan their response to a disaster before it strikes.  Our workplace recovery service is designed to quickly provide you with office space, IT equipment, telephony and most importantly access to your business critical servers and data in order to help your business continue to function. 

Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity

In business, being prepared to respond promptly in the event of a disaster is vital to ensuring you can continue to trade as normal. Without plans in place to deal with emergency situations, the outcome will be devastating to your business. With our workplace recovery service it is easy to keep your business prepared for the unexpected, and your critical operations running as normal.

With one in five businesses suffering a major disruption to business every year, can you afford to be unprepared?  Our workplace recovery service can be completely tailored to meet the specific requirements of your business.

What Practical Networks Workplace Recovery has to offer?

Practical Networks has many years’ experience working with businesses of all shapes and sizes, so you can rest assured that whatever the disaster, we will have your critical operations up and running as quickly as possible.

The Workplace Recovery services on offer include:

•    Access to your business critical data and email
•    High speed internet access with enterprise firewall security.
•    Pre-equipped workstations
•    Dedicated rack space and cooling.
•   Telephony, including DDI and VOIP
•    Secure Server rooms
•     Fax, print and copying
•     Full onsite technical support
•     Easy access and onsite parking
•     Fax, print and copying
•     Meeting rooms
•     Secure storage
•      Kitchen facilities

Expect the Unexpected!

Physical or natural disasters are often overlooked in disaster recovery plans, yet there are a number of events that can put your office out of use such as:

• Fire
• Flood
• Lightning strikes affecting communication
• Theft or vandalism
• Severe weather

Natural disasters can cause a great deal of property damage and often leave some economic damage in their wake. The severity of the aftermath largely depends on the resilience of the affected party.

Reputation, Compliance & Delivery of Service

Customers expect to be able to deal with organisations during normal working hours and any drop in this service can damage the reputation of your business. The inability to operate can have a negative effect on your customers and their likelihood to remain loyal. Also with customers continually expecting more and more from the companies they work with, resilience is an important business trait to have.

A resilient workplace recovery strategy can be an integral element of meeting industry regulations. A number of industry governing bodies require a plan of continuous service and delivery at all times.

Our workplace recovery will help your business reputation stays intact, by ensuring you can maintain critical operations in times of crisis, while also helping you to meet industry regulations.

Is your business prepared for the unexpected? If not, we are on hand to provide a tailor made solution to meet your requirements.  For more information or to discuss your requirements call Andy on: 01723 587240 or email recovery@practicalnetworks.co.uk

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Cryptolocker - Don't Let It Hold You To Ransom

WARNING - RANSOMWARE!

Cryptolocker ransomware is spreading at a rapid rate, with business PC users being a primary target.

What is Cryptolocker?

Cryptolocker is a ransomware that encrypts files and charges a ransom to decrypt them. Below are examples of the prompt given once cryptolocker has taken hold of your files.  

How it spreads:

Cryptolocker spreads in two ways, via email attachments or as a secondary infection.

Email Attachments – Email attachments that require downloading are the primary tool used to spread cryptolocker. The emails often appear to be from a shipping company, for example; UPS, FedEx and Royal Mail, with the attachment portrayed as tracking information. See examples below:

Secondary Infection – PCs that are already affected by one or more viruses are more open to being infected with cryptolocker. This is because viruses offer a back door for further attacks. 

Prevention Advice:

Backup – It is always a good idea to make regular backups of important data, especially in this case. Backups can be set up to prevent the backup of infected files and provide a clear restoration point when files are lost or infected.

Limit – Limit access to important files, as this lessens the chance of them being encrypted.

Update – Maintain updates for your anti-virus, system and applications to keep your PC up to date and patched.

Educate – Make sure everyone in the office is aware of the dangers of phishing emails and suspicious email attachments.

Avoid – Avoid opening attachments you weren't expecting or from unknown sources.

If you would like more information, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us on 01723 587240.

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So What is OneNote?

So what is OneNote?

OneNote is an application designed for note taking, and is often overlooked in favour of Microsoft Word. However OneNote is set apart by its interface, which offers flexibility in the organisation of your notes. The layout is essentially that of a notebook, the pages automatically divide into notebooks, sections, pages and subpages, thus lending itself to easy organisation and reorganisation of vital information. OneNote is designed to allow text to be inputted anywhere on a page, as you would in a hand written notebook.

OneNote may also be seen as a collaboration tool as it also allows users to save images, tables, audio and other forms of communication in a free-form document.  When importing files such as Excel spreadsheets, images or Visio diagrams, OneNote stores a copy of the original file directly to the notebook while also allowing for editing. 

OneNote also saves all notes to your OneDrive online storage account, allowing access from a wide range of devices.

OneNote’s benefits include:

Email linking – Outlook includes a OneNote icon in the ribbon of email messages, allowing you to browse and choose where you would like to save the email within OneNote. This allows for emails to be linked to corresponding projects for ease of access.

Charts & Graphs – OneNote offers its own chart tool or allows you to import charts and graphs from applications such as Excel or Word.

Built in OCR – If you have an image in which you only need the text, paste the image into a OneNote document and choose the copy text from picture option. You will instantly get a plain text version of the text within the image that you can paste into a notebook or word document.

Collaboration – OneNote has a sharing feature which allows multiple users on a network to connect to the same notebook for viewing or editing purposes. Notebooks can have many authors and masses of information, so OneNote automatically highlights recent changes and lists the authors of new material for ease of collaboration.

Information storage and retrieval – OneNote has a built in search feature, which begins displaying results as you type, allowing for quickly locating files. Users can also add keywords to audio and video files in order to aid others in quickly locating and viewing the media. Searches can be altered to span the entire history of the application or to focus on specific notebooks or groups of notebooks.

All of these benefits aid productivity in the work place by allowing a wide range of media and information to be stored, organised and viewed in one place.

So if you have the Microsoft Office Suite, why not try OneNote now? You’ve got it already.

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Windows 8 - The Business Benefits!

Windows 8

Designed to meet its users’ need for speed, multi-device access and touch screen capabilities, Windows 8 has essentially improved on the Windows 7 fundamentals, and is re-imagined to support a number of different working styles. With a range of new features Windows 8 offers a number of benefits to businesses.

The Benefits:

The Layout:

Windows 8 is sporting a completely new layout to all previous versions of Windows, as well as a new app model. The design makes it easier for businesses to create their own line-of-business apps to help improve productivity, by allowing you to place all the information you need on the start screen. The start screen can be organized to group your apps and information, thus making everything you need, easy to find.

Available on a range of hardware:

Windows 8 will run on an extremely wide range of devices, from tablets to laptops, to desktop PCs with large, high definition screens, thus allowing users to pick the device that works best for them. Therefore making Windows 8 convenient and versatile, whether you work in the office, at home or out and about.

Flexible:

Microsoft has also added cloud connectivity to Windows 8, allowing for users to start a project on one PC and finish it on another with ease. Using the cloud to store your information dissolves the boundaries between devices, allowing you to access your information from any Windows 8 device, simply by signing in with your own Microsoft account.

Windows to go:

Windows to go is a fully manageable corporate Windows 8 environment and is a feature specific to Windows 8 Enterprise. Giving users the capability to boot and run Windows 8 Enterprise on compatible devices, from mass storage devices such as USB drives.  Unlike many other mobility solutions Windows to go allows you to be productive from almost any location you choose to work.

Windows 8 offers numerous other benefits and features such as:

• Direct Access

• Enhanced end-to-end security

• Built in mobile broadband features

• Manageability and virtualisation advancements

Windows 8 delivers enterprise-grade capabilities that IT departments need, by combining the power and familiarity of the desktop, with new ways for users to interact with line-of-business apps and offering support for more mobile form factors. All of its features are designed to aid production and keep your data secure.

Ready to make the switch? Then why not call us on 01723 587240 for a quote.

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What Does Mimecast Have to Offer?

Mimecast

We are proud to be a Mimecast partner and are taking this opportunity to tell you about the fantastic email security services we can offer our new and existing customers.

Mimecast offers three key services:

•             Email Security

•             Email Archiving

•             Email Continuity

Email Security

As the range of email threats has grown significantly over the years, systems for email security and encryption have become ever more complex. With users demanding ever higher levels of protection, along with expecting business enabling functionality, businesses are left spending significant amounts trying to secure email systems. Mimecast Email Security provides the most comprehensive, cloud-based email risk mitigation available in today’s market.

Mimecast Email Security protects against both inbound and outbound email-borne threats, including malware, spam, phishing, DHA & DDoS attacks, deliberate or accidental data leaks, outages and social engineering attacks.

Email Archiving

Email archiving is a critical requirement for every organisation, but it’s more than just email storage for record keeping and compliance. Mimecast Email Archiving cuts the cost and complexity of secure, accessible email archiving, giving users instant access to every email they’ve ever sent or received, while also giving you central control of email retention policies.

As much storage as you need, whenever you need it. No more email backups.

Mimecast’s cloud-based platform stores all your email, internal and external, in a highly secure and resilient archive, giving you as much space as you need. Data for all employees past and present is also retained, for your reference.  All this is charged by the number of users and offers a perpetual storage period, providing you with predictable storage costs. 

End User Benefits:

•             Bottomless mailboxes for end users

•             Personal email archive access from MS Outlook

•             'Drag and drop' between Outlook and Mimecast archive

•             Near real-time search

•             Familiar personal folder structures     

•             Personal email archive access through mobile devices.

Email Continuity

While email is now a critical from of business communication, its reliability does not always match its importance. Businesses can no longer afford email outage for any length of time, which is why Mimecast Email Continuity delivers always-on, seamless email availability through automatic service failover and failback in near real-time during an email outage. 

Mimecast Email Continuity is the only cloud based solution that steps in automatically to deliver email to end users during outages of your Microsoft email service, making it an essential part of your business continuity plan. It integrates seamlessly with Microsoft outlook, allowing you to continue using email safely and securely, whether the email outage is planned or not.

On top of giving users uninterrupted access to live email from Outlook during an outage, plus direct access to 58 days’ worth of archived email and up to 10 years when combined with Mimecast Email Archive. Also its flexible browser-based access through the Mimecast Personal Portal provides calendar information. All of this is managed from a single administration console, with no additional on premise hardware required. Therefore simplifying your network and reducing administration.

Unified Email Management (UEM)

Mimecast UEM simply amplifies the benefits of all three services mentioned above, by delivering them as a single, tightly integrated, cloud-based service. Thus, radically simplifying the complex world of email management, removing the need to deploy, integrate and manage multiple third party systems, leaving you with a high performance Exchange server to manage.

Mimecast UEM is offered in two packages; UEM Express and UEM Enterprise. UEM Express combines Mimecast’s Email Security and Email Continuity. While UEM Enterprise combines all three of the services mentioned above, in order to deliver maximum benefits to end users.

Mimecast UEM Enterprise

Mimecast’s UEM Enterprise is the only email management solution to offer fully unified email security, continuity and archiving services, building on the basis of the UEM Express service by adding powerful archiving to the combination.

As well as ensuring that both email availability and security are maintained during outages, UEM Enterprise also delivers tight integration between:

Security and continuity – ensuring that security and DLP policies are consistently enforced, even during outages.

Archiving and security – Providing context and help in the event of a security breach, while also being able to establish whether the data leak was accidental or malicious.

Continuity and archiving – ensuring that administrators and end-users enjoy uninterrupted access to the entire email archive, even on mobile devices (Android, Windows, iPhone and Blackberry), at all times even during an outage.

For more about Mimecast core services:

or to arrange a Mimecast live webinar, contact Andy Potts, our Business Development manager, by phone on 01723 587240 or by email at andy@practicalnetworks.co.uk

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Why Cloud Networking?

Cisco Meraki Cloud Networking

Meraki was set up with a goal to change the way in which we access the internet, leading them to become leaders in cloud controlled Wireless, Routing and Security. Unlike network products from other vendors, Meraki’s products are centrally managed through a cloud based portal, providing centralised management, visibility and control, all without the complexity and expense of on-premises controlled appliances or management software.

Why Cloud Networking?

The cloud increases IT efficiency and aids manageability and scalability, by offering easy installation and management, designed for immediate use. Cloud integration also keeps features up to date, reduces operational costs and is perfect for small and large scale wireless networks.

Cisco Meraki access points are able to offer faster connections, greater user capacity, more coverage and fewer support calls, as they are built from the highest grade components which are optimized carefully to create a seamless user experience. 

Key Features & Benefits:

• Meraki APs are self-configuring for easy deployment

• You can manage your Access Points from anywhere in the world

• Monitor and control iOS (iPhones, iPads), Android devices, PCs and Macs using the free Meraki Systems Manager

• Meraki offers a remote troubleshooting feature to reduce call outs and downtime

• Seamless firmware and software upgrades

• Built in support for BYOD - making it easier to securely support employees own devices and limit bandwidth for applications such as video and Facebook

• Guest wireless access with Splash pages that can include billing through PayPal

• Meraki supports the latest standards, such as 802.11N (up to 900Mbps) and the new fast 802.11AC (up to 1.75Gbps)

For more information and to qualify for a free Meraki AP, call us on: 01723 587240

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