A few months ago I posted an entry about cloud computing. Since then there have been lots of start ups and lots of new services provided by some of the old players, like Microsoft and Google, the latter needed no mention here but what’s done is done, needless to say for small businesses and even larger organizations these services allow you conduct business in ways you never have before.

While I have been keeping tabs as best I could on the progress of various cloud services, and believe me at this point there are way too many for just one person to keep track of, I also took the time to test a few of them to determine whether they may have a place in KCCS and/or can be recommend to our customers for use. Now before I continue this post I should probably admit a few things,

1. I am still not drinking the Cool Aid
2. I still love traditional desktop/ server applications

Recently I made a big push to move our most common used applications to a cloud version or a cloud alternative. For example things like CRM, Support Ticketing, Invoicing and even Project management, as a result we are about 90% cloud based. But being the none trusting type there is also a traditional application on our servers that serve the same purpose and before you point out the fact that it just doubles the workload I will say this, most of the services we use also integrate in some way with our desktop applications like Office, meaning that changes made using either the cloud of the desktop application will reflect on the other.

To give you a general insight to what I am referring to I will give a break down of what service we use and how we use them.

Today with the advent of cost effective small business high speed internet access and movement of many traditional brick and mortar businesses now moving to the online realm. Companies are dealing with more and more data than ever before.

More companies are also doing mobile computing via VPN and other remote access technologies. While some Software as a Services (SaaS) solutions come with things like SSL encryption. However more companies like ours are hosting our own applications such as CRM and various other mission critical applications almost all of which can be accessed over the public internet with little or no encryption, even though you can do things like using none standard ports, hackers can still use tools like Nmap or other port scanners to find these open ports in order to hack your network and destroy this precious information or use keyloggers and other exploits to capture confidential customer data such as credit card numbers.

How do you stop or at least give your self a fighting chance to prevent such attacks? Get an enterprise strength firewall with Intrusion Detection (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention(IPS). The trouble with these systems is that up until recently these appliances have cost thousands of dollars, Until now. Because of the growing trend in network based attacks we at KCCS have spent countless hours researching and testing various hardware solutions and are proud to announce that we have built a custom solutions that is specifically designed for small businesses.

It’s been a while since I have written a post so I decided to write one. I have been using Windows 7  now since the release candidate became public and I must say I am loving it. But instead of trying to write a review I decided to repost one from one of my favorite geeks Paul Thurrott from SuperSite for Windows. I know I should have down my own but since there are tons of these are out on the net I decided to cheat a little bit so here it is in it’s entirety

Windows 7 Review

What a difference a few years makes. When Windows Vista debuted in late 2006, I was full of questions: Windows Vista was a big, messy Windows release, delayed time and again, and suffering from too many features and too little cohesiveness. This time around, things are clearer. Windows 7 is less ambitious than its predecessor, but also a better product. It suffers from none of the aimless feature bloat that plagued Vista upon its release, and none of the aimless uncertainty that followed Vista’s five-plus years of development. That the public reaction to Windows 7 has also been universally positive–another sharp contrast with Vista–is also gratifying. Windows 7 deserves the accolades, and it’s one of the strongest entries in the Windows family of products ever.

These days the biggest buzzwords in the IT industry have been the expansion of Cloud computing and the major push towards virtualizing the traditional computing infrastructure. But with these two new concepts come questions from business owners like you and me and the biggest question without a doubt has to be “which one is better?” or “which should i use?” While there is no one answer that can work for everyone I will say this, for some things it maybe better in the long run for certain services to be outsourced to cloud providers. One such things would be storage especially back up storage.  There tons backup providers out there, for instance, Carbonite, Mozy and some ISPs are now providing backup services. However the other services seem to have limitations, for example Google Docs work great for simple documents and make it real easy to share those file, Microsoft also has a similar service called office live, and while this is a bit more robust than the Google alternative allowing you to create and/or edit files in your traditional Office applications and via the Office Live plug-in you can save it to you cloud account which like Google give you about 5gig of storage, which is pretty modest I must say.  In the the end I still don’t think the various technologies have evolved enough to a serious consideration at this point, even though it may have its merits the price of small business servers including second hand or whitebox servers not to mention the fact that users will need to be able to get on the internet at all times limits the use for now until offline editing becomes more prevalent.

I have been writing a lot about virtualiztion and going green over the last few weeks, but a thought hit me today as I was planning my next article. I realized that some Small/ Medium Sized Businesses(SMBs), may not even have an established data network to even begin implementing these solutions. I have been to many SMBs for various reasons both as a customer and as a technician and what I discovered was while most had one or several computers they were all stand alone boxes with little or no networking being used. To top it off most of these businesses depend on one computer for things like order tracking and even finances with pretty much no access control.

This is the follow up to my last article in which I promised to walk you through how to build your own small scale data-center for you Small Business. For our first part of the project we will start by building a simple but very robust hardware firewall running a Free BSD(Unix) operating system, called PfSense that can be deployed in less than an hour for the basic configuration. For this example this is the hardware I will be using an old Dell Dimension L866r pictured below ( yes a white Dell!). The reason that

I have mentioned virtualization in the past and have given overviews of how it can be beneficial to business. However what I noticed that when I try to explain it to customers even the ones that are pretty tech savvy are usually pretty confused as to how it works exactly, so I will try to break it down in terms that everyone should be able to understand.

So lets start off by saying this. Virtualization is a technology that lets an operating system run on top of another operating system, think of it like this, if you are using windows on your computer, that is what you are stuck with, you can’t run any Linux programs. In fact you can’t run some older windows programs either, because of the way the new Windows Operating Systems are designed. Your only option is to either have a computer for every operating system and you want to use or create a multi-boot system that would allow you to boot into a different operating system, while this is fine it is very inconvenient because you have to stop working on what you are working on to reboot your machine and boot into a new OS. What happens when you need to share information between two OSs? Well this is where having more than one computer will work, but if you use 3 or 4 OSs for different applications then this will be very tedious. This is where virtualization comes in.

With virtualization provided that the computer that you are running your virtual machines on is powerful enough in terms of processing power, hard drive space, and memory, you can run all 4 of those operating systems at the same time in addition to the main OS that you are using for your everyday use.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted but in my defense I’ve been busy with work and some project for a couple of clients not to mention school. Well let’s get down to it.
I’ve been doing a few deployments for small businesses for people like me who do their day to day business administration from their house. In addition I have been doing some smaller deployments of windows boxes. The biggest complaint from customers is the cost of licensing, since each computer running windows requires it’s own license to be considered legal even if you are using a single image for all of them. Typically I include the batch licenses in the over all price of that the customer is billed, however this is sometimes make customers uncomfortable about the price of the project.

Hey why can’t I access the file server? and why is the network so slow today?” Hmm maybe you should have been paying closer attention to your network environment. This is probably one of the most over looked aspect of network administration. Being able to get a snap shot at what your network looks like and how your systems are performing can be one of the best things you can do for preventative maintenance. Usually only large networks invest in this arena but as a small business owner and a serious computer nut I love to know exactly what’s going on all my systems. And it is all relatively simple to set up and requires very little supervision or maintenance after it is set up.
As I stated before I am very strict about the way my network is being used and when if there are any errors on the connected nodes. And because of this and a few connections and some Googling within the corporate IT world I got my hands on some stuff.
Orion NPM from Solar Winds. This was a pretty good piece of software. It does a very good job of detecting everything on your network even things on different subnets. The layout wasn’t that great but this is probably because I am a visual person and a snazzy UI always peeks my interest. It uses maps to show the general layout of the network but in all honesty the maps are kind of cheesy granted they map is really a layout of the WAN. The Network Summary is a little

Today received a call from my mother telling me that none of the computers in the house had Internet connectivity and also that the house phone wasn’t getting a dial tone. Of course because I am a professional I was able to narrow down the problem within a few seconds because I could hear the TV in the background I knew that the issue was limited to the cable modem. Long story short the power cable broke probably because there was another issue on the ISP side and my family was probably trying to rest the modem but in the process the broke the cable and made the situation worse.Which brings me to the point of this article.
The first step in securing your data and mission critical systems is not a firewall or super complicated password, but something much more simple, a $2 lock. Yes believe it or not the first step is something as simple as placing your servers in a locked room with limited access to only the people that need access to it.
Disable all external access to your devices. Like disabling your USB ports, disabling your CD-Rom. Yes these are scary thoughts because I know you are thinking about “what if I need to fix something?” Well the answer is simple, you can access everything through your network and if by chance your network is also down, notice I didn’t say to remover your keyboard and mouse access so you can still log in traditional means if need be.
Another security measure is plain and simple, CREATE A SECURE PASSWORD! Using your dogs name with a few digits from your address is not a secure password, granted it is better than just using your name but with a bit of social engineering a hacker can put two and two together. A secure password should probably be about 8 characters at the minimum and contain uppercase letters lowercase letters a number or two and one and more special character such as @ or !.