Danbury, CT - The Network Support Company (TNSC), Fairfield County’s largest provider of IT services to small and mid-sized businesses, is proud to announce their acquisition of the Connecticut operations of Florida-based IT provider SLPowers. As of February 1, 2013 TNSC, based in Danbury, CT took over SLPower’s operation at 64 Wall St in Norwalk, CT.
“Upon deciding to close our Connecticut based operations, we wanted to make sure that the clients served by that office would be well cared for. Knowing of their excellent reputation, SLPowers couldn’t be happier to have transitioned those clients to The Network Support Company”, says SLPowers’ Bob Hochmuth.
“It is always meaningful to be recognized by your peers for the quality of your work and we were extremely pleased that SLPowers chose TNSC as the best company to take care of their clients in CT,” says Jim Kennedy, founder and CEO of The Network Support Company. “We are thrilled to welcome our new clients and our new employee to the TNSC family and look forward to long mutually rewarding relationships.”
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Top Connecticut IT Firm Announces Major Acquisition
Social Networking in the Small Business Space: By Nathanael Blevins, Network Technician
Just a few years ago, the landscape of doing business in North America experienced a radical shift with the arrival and explosive growth of the internet. Major corporations scrambled to establish a presence on the web, a trend which filtered down through the economy until every establishment, both large and small, had registered their very own ‘dot com’, and set up a homepage.
With a few notable exceptions, those sites were set up in a very static fashion, operating as a kind of digital business card, a pixelated yellow pages ad. Over the years however, many of those larger companies evolved along with web technology, and their sites became increasingly interactive spaces. Some offered direct ordering, allowed clients to maintain user accounts, or even chat with company representatives.
In more recent years, another shift has occurred in the online space - the social networking explosion. While most business owners are familiar with social giants such as Facebook and Twitter, they are only two big fish in an ocean of sites and services which provide end users with a wide array of inter-linked access to reviews, recommendations, interaction, and feedback.
PCI Compliance- By Kevin Rhodes, Senior Enterprise Engineer
What is PCI compliance?
PCI stands for the Payment Card Industry which relates to what most of us refer to as “credit cards”. All issuers of credit cards (e.g. MasterCard, Visa, etc. or the banks that issue them) require all businesses that handle credit card data to a set of PCI Data Security Standards. These PCI security standards help protect credit card information from being stolen.
Who must be PCI compliant?
If your business accepts, processes, stores, or transmits any credit card information (such as the credit card number, account name, security code, and expiration date) then you must be PCI compliant even if you only process 1 credit card payment per year. Not being PCI compliant is grounds for the credit card issuer to fine your company a minimum of $5000 or even refuse allowing you to accept credit card transactions which can hurt your company sales.
Virus Protection by Doug Macomber, Systems Engineer at TNSC
Are you protected from viruses and malware?
It’s very important to protect your computer from viruses and malware. Viruses are malicious programs that are capable of gathering sensitive information from a computer and can even grant someone unauthorized remote control. Like a virus that affects humans, computer viruses can spread from computer to computer. Malware is similar to a virus, but cannot spread from computer to computer on a network. Most malware programs are either adware or spyware which generate unwanted pop-ups or disrupt normal computing.
There are many anti-virus/anti-malware applications available; some require a subscription and some are free. Free anti-virus applications work fine for home networks, but for corporate environments, a subscription-based solution that can be centrally managed is highly recommended. With a centrally managed anti-virus solution, administrators can insure that the anti-virus application is running on each computer, and that the programs update regularly with new virus definitions. Administrators are also able to deploy settings to client computers without physically touching each computer. There are also hardware devices that are capable of blocking viruses and malware before they enter a private network.
SonicWALL has a line of network security appliances that include a subscription-based feature called Comprehensive Gateway Security Service (CGS). The SonicWALL CGS scans incoming Internet traffic and blocks the traffic if it is determined to be malicious. Combining both a software and hardware anti-virus solutions will provide your company with the highest level of protection.
42: The answer to life, the universe and everything
The answer to life?
Douglas Adams said it was the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. He meant it as a joke, but a new book shows how the number 42 has played a significant role in history.
When Douglas Adams wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he added a central joke which has become more famous over the years than the novel itself: "The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42." Geeks have since wasted years and massive effort trying to ascribe some deep, symbolic significance to the number and its occurrences.
Now, in an attempt to cash in on their obsession, a new book published this week, 42: Douglas Adams' Amazingly Accurate Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, looks at real-life occurrences of the number 42. The book is timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of Adams's death this spring.
Managed Services, How they Impact You
By Angelo Spaziani – TNSC MSP Administrator
This blog will address managed services and their effect on the health of a network consisting of multiple workstations and servers. Managed Services is essentially a method of keeping a network running at peak performance by reducing the amount of problems related to the performance of the machines on that network. There are many components that make up a proper managed service platform, some of the main items include; Microsoft patches, antivirus software, backups, and alert monitoring. All these items when used together can greatly increase the stability of the network that will allow increased uptime and less time employees are idle due to the functionality of their machines. Not having these items managed can have numerous adverse effects on network.
Microsoft Patches: Microsoft constantly releases patches for its operating systems that address things such as security issues and program bugs. These patches are typically released on a weekly basis and can fix exploits in the operating system that may lead to a breach in security if not applied in a timely manner, as well as resolve issues such as program crashes and instability. Managed services provide a method of having these patches applied and maintained so that machines on the network are kept up to date. Patches can also be applied in a tiered approach, meaning some machines on the network get the patches before others. By doing this it allows certain machines to work with the patches before the others so there is little risk that a patch will have adverse effects on the performance of all the machines. Without a good managed service platform machines can become hundreds of patches out of date within a matter of months and can be the weak spot an intruder needs to gain access to the network.
Business Continuity in the New Millennium
Business Continuity
By Buddy Pitt, TNSC Product Development Manager
When I first entered into the technology field, the adoption of business continuity in the small business world was extremely different than it is today. I was an onsite field technician that drove around from client to client solving problems on small computer networks. Most of these businesses were not connected to the internet and accesses to any external systems were normally gained via a dial-up connection. In most cases, dialing directly to a vendor to achieve a very specific purpose such as transmission of payroll data to ADP or collecting punches from a time clock. While functions like this saved time, if they didn’t work, it really wasn’t a big deal. Employees would simply revert back to the way it was done in the recent past, “manually” or “on paper”.
Often I would have to deliver the bad news that a particular system would be down for an extended amount of time while a part was ordered or a repair was being made. At the time this was just accepted. When I think back to this reality and how it differs from today, the hardest part for me to believe is that it was only 15 years ago!
Protecting Your Network by Chris Holl, TNSC Network Technician
Keeping your network safe
This blog post addresses malware, viruses, protection, and what you can do to minimize the impact that malicious software has on your business.
First, a bit of background; there are several categories of malicious activity on corporate and business networks. Viruses and Malware are software that installs on workstations within a network and either will attempt to capture information, disable the system through malicious means, or turn your PC into a “bot”. The class that tries to capture information can do this via transmitting data from a PC out to the web, or more frequently, through attempting to con information out of you. You may have seen something like this with malware that disguises itself as an antivirus program and requests a credit card number to clean your system, the end goal of the entire package being to capture your credit card info when you give it to them. The “bot” class of infection often lies dormant until called upon from a controlling system on the internet to activate a workstation as part of a network of systems designed to yield massive amounts of processing power to the authors of the virus. These “botnets” can be used to launch attacks on other networks, send spam, and hack into other systems. In addition to these situations, there are occasions when a third party will try to hack into your network directly. This is unusual but does occasionally happen.
All this said the best defense you have against any kind of attack is having a solid virus protection package and a rugged firewall on your network. This combination will help to fend off incoming and outgoing malicious traffic, while attempting to make sure that the workstations on your network don’t become infected with malicious software. Your workstations should be protected by a solid malware and virus protection package such as AVG or Kaspersky Antivirus. These are fairly robust antivirus packages and should help to prevent the initial or continued infection of a workstation. We are currently recommending Kaspersky security products in most cases as this software provides very solid protection while allowing finite configuration of the protection to accommodate a network’s needs. In addition to protecting the workstations on a network from infection, you should also have a strong firewall in place. Our recommendation is to use SonicWall devices in most situations as they provide an excellent feature set and performance for the price. This will help to prevent common types of port scans and malicious traffic from entering your network from the outside and help to prevent maliciously generated traffic from infected stations from leaving the network. In addition to the Antivirus and Firewall protection, we also recommend running windows updates through a WSUS server or using our MSP offering. This helps to ensure that any security vulnerabilities identified by Microsoft are addressed as quickly as possible with little or no impact to your daily work.
Is your computer infected?
The FBI has identified a serious piece of malware software which could affect a large number of PC’s worldwide. TNSC has confirmed that this malware is real. To help protect you, we are providing the following information about this malware and what you can do to detect whether you will be affected.
Google Reports Claims that users Internet may shut down on July 9th:
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-57441163-263/google-alert-claims-users-internet-may-shut-down-july-9/
The DNSChanger Malware threat has been in the news since November 2011, when the FBI and authorities arrested the crime ring behind the malware. If you would like to find additional information about the arrest click on the following.
For anyone with a computer, having reliable, trustworthy advisors with cultivated expertise, comprehensive resources, and uncompromising service is imperative.
"In this technologically enabled world we live in, every business needs someone like us. We've learned over time that we work best with businesses that value IT," said Jim Kennedy, Founder and CEO of The Network Support Company (TNSC) located at 7 Kenosia Ave in Danbury with offices in Allentown, PA and Melbourne, FL.
Read the entire article here...