The Thurston, Pierce, Lewis, and Mason Counties IT Experts

Wearable Technology

Wearable technology as it is understood by most people is typically the use of fitness trackers or smart jewelry, but it can extend into innovative new technologies such as virtual reality headsets. In business, most of the time you will be dealing with endpoints such as smartwatches that must be considered if they are going to have access to your network, either directly through Wi-Fi or through access to your employees’ smartphones. 

What is crucial is data security inside a business environment. Many wearable devices don’t meet the demands of many of the compliance standards that your business may operate under, including HIPAA. More than that, since these devices get push notifications from an individual’s smartphone, they have some potential vulnerabilities that need to be addressed. Unfortunately, these devices often have a limited UI, making it difficult for organizations to improve the data security of the applications pushing communications to wearable technology.

What You Need to Do to Ensure Wearables Don’t Pose Security Risks

The first thing you need to do when you have people bringing devices onto your business’ network is to concoct a reliable Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy. This will help to define how these devices can be used within the confines of a workplace. Many organizations have built their BYOD policy with smartphones in mind, but it is important that any BYOD policy is revised to cover the appearance of other Internet-connected devices. 

Once your policies are ironclad and put in place, you need to have the management that this technology requires. This requires a reliable and robust Mobile Device Management (MDM) platform that can control all the mobile endpoints brought onto the network. With proper management and control over these devices, the chances of a wearable vulnerability affecting the network is reduced significantly.  

The truth is that people love new and exciting technology, and wearable technology will continue to grow and integrate itself into the business’ IT strategy. If you would like to learn how to properly secure your business’ IT from wearables to servers, give the IT professionals at PC Technologies a call today at 360-491-2227.

Let’s talk about some of the things that should be included in your backup and disaster recovery (BDR) preparations.

What Should Be Involved in Your Business’ BDR?

We always recommend that your backup strategy follow what is commonly known as the 3-2-1 Backup rule. This rule can be summed up as follows:

• You maintain at least three copies of your data
• This data should be stored in at least two different storage media
• One of these copies should be maintained offsite, ideally, in the cloud

These are the basics. However, for some additional value, we can go a bit deeper into the weeds and describe what a good backup will need.

Optimal Elements of a BDR that’s Designed for Success Include:

Image-Based Backups

Which sounds quicker to you: recreating each file that was lost individually, or dropping in a complete copy of your data storage all at once? This is the “magic,” of sorts, that image-based backups provide. Time is of the essence in a data loss situation, so the faster data can be restored, the better.

Redundant Elements

While redundancy isn’t often a good thing, backups are a shining exception. The more redundant your data is, the better, because you’ll know that you have a spare if something happens to one copy. However, your redundancy doesn’t have to stop there (and really shouldn’t). You need to make sure that your backups have guaranteed power, for instance, making redundant power supplies a necessity. The same goes for Internet connectivity—running multiple connections helps ensure you’ll retain access.

Protections and Defenses

Finally, you need to be sure that your backups aren't going to suffer from various security issues. It wouldn’t be good if your backups were infected by ransomware, for instance, or if someone managed to steal the data as you were backing it up. Therefore, you should have all of the protections you would have at your place of business also implemented where your backups are, and always make sure your transmitted data is appropriately encrypted.

PC Technologies is here to help you make the most of your backup and disaster recovery planning. Learn more by reaching out at 360-491-2227.

Infonomics and Your Data’s Value

Your business’ data has a certain value to you, and depending on whose data it is, to your clients, vendors, employees, and whomever else trusts you enough to share their personal data with you. At any rate, any data loss is a big deal; and nowadays it has become a large field of study called infonomics. Infonomics can put an actual dollar value on the data your organization has on hand and uses some very poignant questions to do so. These questions include:

• How much capital would replacing the data cost? 
• How much and what percentage is your organization’s data?
• What kind of revenue could your organization see if it were to buy and sell it? 
• What will it cost to completely protect the data? 

These questions will go a long way toward making you understand exactly what kind of data you need to protect in order to keep your business from suffering some of the negative circumstances brought on by data loss. Let’s take a look at some concepts you need to understand if you are going to successfully protect your organization's data.

Data Backup

The first is one of the most obvious. In order to keep data from being lost, many organizations roll out comprehensive data backup systems that take snapshots of data as it changes. This provides an extraordinarily useful tool for network administrators to have if the data is corrupted or has been lost or damaged somehow.

At PC Technologies, we offer a backup and disaster recovery service that features incremental backups that are stored both locally in a network-attached device, and offsite in a secure data center. The total data redundancy ensures that you will always have access to the data you need, when you need it. 

Disaster Recovery

The disaster recovery part of the BDR is not to be taken lightly. For data recovery, you make contingencies for situations and hope that you never have to use them. The two main factors in a disaster recovery platform are:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - The amount of time that your core business processes can be interrupted before your business begins to fail.
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - The amount of time your business can withstand interruption before it can be considered a complete break in continuity. 

The shorter the duration of RPO and RTO, the more diligent you have to be in keeping data ready for recovery. In managing your organizational expectations in regard to business continuity, it is essential that any strategy has succinctly taken into account the disaster recovery metrics. These will always dictate how you need to approach data recovery. 

At PC Technologies, we take data redundancy extremely seriously, and would like to help your organization set up a backup and disaster recovery platform that works to protect your business’ most important asset: its data. For more information call the IT professionals at 360-491-2227 today.