Tag Archives: Data Safety

Should you Outsource your Network Service

Truly a hot topic in every government or corporate boardrooms. Should we outsource our service on the computers and networks.

First let’s examine outsourcing. When you hire a painter to paint your house, or when you hire a mowing company to mow your grass, you are outsourcing. These are tasks that you could perhaps do yourself, but somehow you deemed it more economical or viable to outsource than do the work yourself. Maybe you would rather spend your time on a different or more rewarding activity or come to the conclusion that you simply couldn’t do as good a job given the time to perform the work. I’ll call this type of outsourcing “business process outsourcing” or BPO. You can find a substantial list of companies specializing in BPO in various segments including but not limited to human resource management, accounting and finance, and information technology to name a few. BPOs ideally should do the job they are hired to do better, faster, and cheaper compared to anyone else performing the same job. This is a very strong benefit and one that most companies are coming to realization with. BPOs allow a company to concentrate on its business without losing quality, cost or time.
So in reality of the fast pace business requirements of today, BPOs are, in  general, a necessity to meet today’s competitive environment.

When it is time to consider outsourcing, find a reputable and long lived company and ask a lot of questions. When you are satisfied with your answers. Just do it.

 

Flaws in computer processor chips

Authorized Information Released 1/5/18 by Concepte of Illinois, Inc. 618-438-5005, coi@ceillinois.com

What you need to know because of found flaws in computer processor chips

There are times when you just need to know. You might have heard about the computer chip flaws on the news.

Because you are one of our valued clients, we want you to know that we are following this worldwide industry problem with great interest. We want to make sure we can minimize any effect upon your computers and network.

On Wednesday (Jan. 3rd 2018) two security flaws that may affect nearly all microprocessors, which is the brain of your computers and networks were found. These two security flaws which are called ‘Meltdown’ and ‘Spectre’ might allow hackers to lift passwords and other important data from your computers and that includes smartphones, PCs, laptops, tablets and any other devices that contain microprocessors.

The industry is working on fixes to fix the flaws or provide a means to stop the exploitation of these flaws. Some researchers have stated that the Spectre is not completely fixable because of the way the fundamental flaw in the processor have been built over the last decades. (Stated by Paul Kocher, which is one of the researchers who discovered these flaws. The ‘‘Meltdown’’ is connected to processors made by Intel, which is a company that provides the chips for more than 90% of the computers and servers that have been sold over the past 20 years.

‘Spectre’ is much more difficult for hackers to exploit and affects Intel chips, microprocessors from another company that is a major producer of computer chips. AMD is a rival of Intel. These two chip producers cover about 98% of all computers produced in the last 20 years.

Companies around the world are working to find a fix for these chip flaws. ‘‘Meltdown’’ can now be fixed by installing a software “patch” on each computer. Microsoft has released a patch for PCs that use its Windows operating system and Apple is said that it has already released patches for their operating system.

Remember, the computer industry is scrambling to patch a massive security vulnerability that’s present in the processors used in almost all of the computers in the world. The widespread vulnerability could allow a hacker to steal information stored in the memory of the chip itself, including things such as passwords and cached files. It could also pave the way for attackers to weaken other security features. Although there are no known exploits for the problem yet, the problem is alarming because it could affect so many computers.

Concepte of Illinois is aware of the flaws and is working with industry vendors to ensure that when patches are released they will be available to us. Please contact our office to schedule a time for these patches to be installed or to obtain more information.

Professionally Yours
Erick Christy, President

FRCP – Email Storage

On December 1, 2006 the United States Supreme Court ratified changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). These changes shift the rules of discovery in a legal proceeding from a focus on policies for electronic records retention, disposition and preservation, to a focus on procedures that will streamline evidence presentation.

Email and storage administrators must now answer key questions such as:

  • Where is the data in question?
  • What actions were taken to preserve it?
  • How can the data be searched and reproduced?
  • Just what is the company’s established data retention/deletion policy?

With our Archiving Service your organization will comply with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.  Your archived data will be securely captured, indexed and stored with multiple copies of auditable hosted email for easy retrieval search and discovery interface.

You can quickly and easily comply with all regulations imposed on your company.

To find out more – call us at 800-267-4052 – ask for Archival Support.