Windows 7 will no longer receive security updates and extended support as of January 14, 2020, from Microsoft. Although mainstream support ended for Windows 7 users almost five years ago, the final termination on the roll-out of free security patches and extended security updates is quickly approaching.  This means that while users of older versions of the OS who continue to use Windows 7 can still operate on them, they will not receive updates of any kind including software, features, and the biggest whammy of them all – security.

Working with an IT consulting company in NY is an important step to meeting your business’s IT needs. You can save time and money by having a real expert to advise you and/or implement solutions that your small to medium-sized company might not have the internal IT skill set to do. Yet, with so many IT consulting companies in NYC and Long Island to choose from, picking the right one may not be an easy task.

So you think proper security is too expensive. We hear this a lot. But, a company doesn’t need to use every security solution out there to be properly protected. It comes down to the level of risk that you’re trying to mitigate. If you follow security and cyber security news, you’re going to hear the word risk in almost every sentence, because that’s the core of what security is about — determining your level of risk.

Firewalls have been around for about 20 years now. They emerged more prominently as the Internet became commercialized and more networks and people connected — which meant more targets. Having a firewall is pretty much a mainstay today. You will find dedicated firewall appliances or Internet routers with so-called firewall capabilities.

We all know that authentication is vital to security, but passwords suck. Creating them and remembering them for every single web site or software system we use is a pain. Gone are the days of sticky notes on our monitor for all to see, and even password protecting a spreadsheet of credentials with a carefully obfuscated name on our computer isn’t safe — a simple Google search for “Excel 2016 password recovery tools” will show you why.

For a business of any size, the ability to quickly diagnose issues with their IT infrastructure and act on them before they become a major or long-term issue is incredibly valuable. Minimizing or eliminating costly downtime is the primary objective of any IT strategy, and Remote Monitoring & Management (RM&M) is an effective tool in achieving that. With it’s early detection ability, RM&M abates falling employee productivity, customer dissatisfaction and potential revenue loss, because critical infrastructure issues are dealt with proactively as opposed to reactively.

Consul-vation hosted a webinar on IT Security: Facts vs Fiction where we highlighted our top 5 myths of IT security. This webinar is now available on our web page for anyone to view the full presentation. We were very happy to have John Verry from PivotPoint Security join the webinar to add his decades of experience, knowledge and wisdom to the webinar. We hope you enjoy the video and feel free to give us feedback and please feel free to share the video.

An easy way to speed up and increase reliability on an old computer is to replace the hard drive (HDD) with a Solid State Drive (SSD). What is the difference between the two? The fundamental difference is that a SSD has no moving parts. The mechanical workings of a HDD is very similar to a record player. A platter is spun and read by a header to attain information. Therefore, the speed of a HDD is limited to how fast the platters can spin. This is measured by the amount of Revolutions-Per-Minute (RPM). A HDD’s RPM can vary from model to manufacturer, but on average it is between 5,400 to 7,200 RPM and up to 10,000 RPM on servers. On the other hand, SSD’s use NANDs as storage. NANDs are a electrical memory component on a circuit board. The CPU can access data on a SSD instantaneously.

While preventive measures will reduce the chance of this happening, two ways of protecting data against potential loss is to create on-site (local) and/or off-site (remote) backups. An important concept to understand while determining your backup needs is the 3-2-1 rule. This rule is a strong general practice to follow, and will help you in […]

Businesses of all sizes are taking their first steps into the cloud. From email to online backups (see our post on cloud backups), there are plenty of services available for companies to utilize. One cloud service, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is becoming more popular than ever. This allows major data centers around the world […]