Capstone Works Blog

As the line between working in-office and working from home becomes more and more blurred, a new trend in employee technology has begun to emerge – BYOD, or bring your own device. Many companies are offering their employees the option to bring their own devices into the office environment as it can improve both employee satisfaction and office productivity.  But CIOs still must consider three different basic set ups/options before taking the plunge:

Angry customers, negative media coverage, frustrated employees, untold revenue lost, lingering anger from customers: that’s the status for Delta Airlines this week.  Of course this is not news to anyone; unless you have been living under a rock you have heard the numerous news reports detailing the Delta computer disaster.  Whether caused by a minor power outage at Delta headquarters or an internal computer hiccup, the airline was forced to cancel over 500 flights causing gridlock across America’s airports at the height of vacation season. You may not be running an international transportation corporation, but imagine what would happen to your clients if you had an unexpected IT failure.  Think something like this can’t happen to you? Think again.  The problem that Delta airlines faced was not the power outage at their headquarters; it was an inadequate IT Disaster Recovery Plan.  As a business owner you don’t want to be caught off guard in the middle of an IT nightmare.  An IT Disaster Recovery Plan may sound like a great idea, but you might not even know what one looks like, let alone know where to start.  Here at Capstone Works we are your IT partner and are ready to put together a comprehensive IT Disaster Recovery Plan.  The goal of any good plan is fivefold, it should:

Have you ever heard that loud fan whine noise coming from your server room? Is it your IT infrastructure hard at work helping you to increase profits or is the sound of the “zombie” servers? A zombie, or comatose, server is a physical server that is running but has no external communications or visibility and contributes no computer resources; it essentially consumes electricity but serves no useful purpose. For something you have most likely never heard of, it’s a big problem. An estimated one in three servers in North America falls into the "undead" category. Given those odds, it’s likely that most businesses are running servers that are no longer doing anything relevant and could be decommissioned.

Most small business owners believe cyberattacks are the concern of large corporations, however nothing could be further from the truth. According to Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report 71% of cyberattacks occur at businesses with less than 100 employees. [1]

Unfortunately, many “SMBs suffer from 'It can't happen to us' syndrome,” notes Robert Siciliano, security expert for McAfee. “They also typically don't have the resources to secure their networks to the degree a large enterprise would. But the information on their networks – and access to their bank accounts – still makes them a big target.” Even though it turns out SMB’s have a larger target on their backs than they realize, two thirds of SMBs surveyed by Symantec say they're not concerned about cyber threats; and more than 80 percent have no formal cyber security plan.