Security
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.
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
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