Business Environment Archives - Tech Prognosis Blog

The Business Case for EndPoint Security in Small Organizations

January 12, 2020 by Daniel Ihonvbere

According to BAE Systems, almost 50 percent of small businesses have experienced a cyber attack, and as much as 60 percent of hacked small- and medium-sized businesses go out of business after six months. By deploying endpoint security solutions, most cyber attack attempts can be prevented.

Devices and services protected by endpoint security solutions

Faced with limited IT personnel and budget, small business environment usually end up with non-standard computer configurations, inadequate or non-existent security policies, old equipment etc.

The impact of the failure of an endpoint on business processes can be a little scary sometimes. A good example is a call I got from a friend the other day. The boss’s computer had a couple of viruses and they had to disconnect the computer from the network.

Of course that meant business had to come to a halt because everything was on the boss’s computer. There were no anti-virus software on any of the workstations and of course no firewall of any kind, so it was free for all.

Securing Windows 7

August 7, 2009 by Daniel Ihonvbere

Windows 7 has been released to the consumer market and small business integrators, administrators and owners should start thinking about their strategy for deployment and how they will go about securing their environment. From our experiences with the beta, release candidate and official release (RTM) versions of Windows 7, I must say we’ve come a long way from the days of using National Security Agency (NSA) templates to harden and secure enterprise computers. Starting with Windows Vista, Microsoft started delivering products that were significantly more secure than previous versions out of the box.

In this fast moving internet age, the biggest threats these days come from malicious trojan executables and user laziness. The trojans you can get tricked into allowing into your computer system; the laziness is what happens when users naively lower their default Operating System defenses like disabling the User Account Control (UAC) in Vista and/or Windows 7, turning off automatic patching and deactivating the built-in firewall. The UAC and firewall, by the way, performs the same functions as applications we spend money on with products like Zone Alarm, Norton, McAfee etc. where you get notified if an application is trying to do something fishy.

Backup Options for Small Business Owners

April 6, 2016May 26, 2009 by Daniel Ihonvbere

You’ve heard it a thousand times: backup your data. But I still find it rather amazing to walk into a client’s environment and ask, “so what do you do for backup?” and get a blank stare or “oh, we are doing ok”.

The “it will never happen to us” syndrome is prevalent in the small business environment. The result is a constant break-fix scenario that ultimately turns out to be very costly.

The cost of hard drives has fallen so dramatically that it is inexcusable for a small business owner not to have at least, a removable USB drive for backing up critical data. There are even “cloud” offerings that are pretty reasonable, although they tend to be very slow especially if you have multi-gigabyte files to backup.

For example, Carbonite will back up any amount of data you have for about $55 a year, while Mozy (owned by Iomega/EMC) offers 2 gigabytes of free storage for those who purchase an Iomega external drive.