Are you ready for a disaster? Would you be able to bring your dental practice back following a local or regional disaster? Most dental practices (and small businesses in general) are woefully unprepared as the following statistics highlight:

• Gartner estimates that only 35 percent of SMBs have any comprehensive disaster recovery plan.
• Touche Ross estimates, the survival rate for organizations without a disaster recovery plan is < 10%
• Evolutionary IT surveyed over 50 (non customer) offices and found a mere 20% had any disaster recovery plan as of 2011.

In this the first part of my 3 part discussion on disaster recovery for the dental practice I will discuss a few misunderstandings that many dentists and dental practice managers hold regarding disaster recovery.

Local Backup Is Enough

The assumption that local backup will keep you safe is incorrect. Local backup only helps you if have a local system problem or hardware problem. If any other type of local disaster such as storm, fire, smoke damage your machine you will lose your external storage, backup drive, etc. It is imperative to have some form of off site backup (replication, virtualization, or cloud solution) as well as onsite backup.

Recovering From A Disaster Doesn’t Require a Plan

Creating a plan in the case of disaster helps mitigate your risks, improve recovery times and lessen the possibility of data loss. It allows you the piece of mind in knowing you thought out the steps to returning to normal business operations. Without taking the time to do this you have know idea what you need to accomplish recovery, how long it will take and or the process details. A written plan will give you all the required detailed and make everything known quantities. A plan is a dynamic evolving process as your environment changes.

Disaster Recovery Doesn’t Need Testing

Most practices with an unseasoned “IT Guy” have backups set up automatically that run on a scheduled unmanaged/unmonitored basis. They don’t monitor backups, don’t test the validity of these backups and or test restoring the data. Without planning and testing you can’t validate your results. Most “IT guys” haven’t done a full recovery test and therefore won’t be able to bring you practice back online in a timely or cost efficient manner. It is imperative that you work with a provider that not only has a plan but updates, maintains and tests it on a consistent basis.

We must have a plan or we should plan to fail. Disaster recovery is an ongoing effort of both technology and process. What steps do you plan to take to be prepared?

From our family to yours we wish you a very happy New Years! 2011 was an extremely successful year for us and we would like to share that success with you. Everyone (new and existing customers) in the month of January 2012 will receive a 5% discount on any single purchase of hardware or services. Simply reference the coupon code HNY2012 and receive your 5% off.

Evolutionary IT is a reseller partner of Dell, Netgear, Kaspersky, iBackup, Canonical (Ubuntu) so this discounts apply to our hardware offerings as well any of our service offerings. Please do forward and share this offer with your friends and family. Do tweet, forward and pass it on.

Happy New Year to all!

Social Networking allows us so many positives but brings with it key risks we must address in the modern enterprise. Social media can be a great place to connect with new customers, expand our brand presence and even drive sales. At the same time it makes for a veritable playground for social engineering or the latest web based malware. We face risks and rewards and need to balance them by practicing smart social media security. While comprehensive enterprise security technologies from the network to the desktop are a piece of the puzzle they are no security panacea. Uneducated end users can be a threat that circumvents all those efforts in one click, a cleverly disguised download or seemingly innocent email. End users don’t have to be the weakest link. In an interview I had earlier this month I with Jane McPherson on Patrolling the Channel of SearchSecurityChannel.com I spoke to this very issue. I’d like to personally thank Jane for the chance to share our knowledge. Take a listen and let us know what you think. Are you planning for social media security training?

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Download the Patrolling the Channel Podcast

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Saturday, November 26, 2011 is Small Business Saturday! A day to celebrate and support small & local businesses in our communities. As a small business, we support other small businesses and acknowledge our collective contribution to the local and global economy. After all, supporting small businesses creates jobs, supports your local communities and creates much more wealth than the other options. In celebration of Small Business Saturday, Evolutionary IT is offering 5% off any Evolutionary IT purchase of services, software or hardware on 11/26/11. Much thanks to AMEX for starting this great idea, now let’s all give it legs!

Open source software is about constant change and innovation. This is true in every space it touches and no less on the desktop. Recent releases of Gnome & Unity have caused quite a stir among new and experienced users alike. Why all the fuss? I think fundamentally we are at a junctural point of operating systems having to play well when pitted against other interface/desktop metaphors like those delivered by mobile computing devices like the smart phones and tablet computing. Don’t get me wrong, I like change, but it has to be change that make for more user friendly computing. In some cases these evolutionary steps in the Linux/BSD/Unix desktop aren’t going in a direction I find currently usable. This isn’t to say things will always be that way or that I condemn a project for bold moves in any current trajectory – I just have my favorites for my clients on the business desktop. Personally and for most of my clients, they just want software that is familiar and easy to use. I have to deliver. Comparing these 3 options below I give my *current* opinion of where we are with these 3 venerable titans of the open source desktop.  

Gnome 3

I’m a long term fan of Gnome 2.x but 3.x takes a lot of getting used to. Truth be told, I could have said the same thing about KDE when 4.0 came out. The lack of minimize or maximize makes me rather perplexed and annoyed. Users lack the configurablity they were used to in Gnome 2.x and I find that a distinct weak point. Additionally I have found users confused with the lack of visual cues as to which applications are running. For these reasons, I’m sticking with Gnome 2.x and not using Gnome 3 for the time being.

Unity

In my personal opinion I’m not a fan of Unity for its general interface over Gnome 2.x, or any other option for that matter. The first version of Unity in 11.04 lacks the overall polish I sought but I would consider it stable and generally usable. The lens functionality doesn’t lend it self very usable. It is supposed to help you get to your applications and yet, it accomplishes quite the opposite. Additionally erroneous assumptions that business users want or need 3d acceleration is comical. Business users don’t want their desktop to be like a video game – they want productivity. In general, customer feedback has been rather good but still most prefer the Gnome 2.x environment over Unity.

KDE

For me personally and for my customers KDE 4 is currently my first choice. It’s well thought out interfaces allow a user to feel at home with little effort. Users of Windows and OSX alike have commented on it polish and ease of use. Business users feel at home in the common desktop metaphor that KDE so beautifully creates. Coupled with its well integrated applications KDE often wows most every business user I’ve presented it to.

Options are GOOD

All 3 of these desktop environments have a long history of laudable contribution to the open source world. We can’t discount any of these amazing projects because tomorrow they could be THE source of the innovation we failed to see. Personally, I started back in the day on Solaris and CDE so, we are certainly progressing. I’m looking forward to seeing the great work that comes out of both Gnome, KDE and Unity projects. In open source innovation is a constant, and we can only expect much more from all 3 of these great projects.

It is often hard to believe and even comical what you can find by reading legal contracts. Unfortunately, this seems especially true in the world of web design and development. Evolutionary IT is involved in creating and maintaining many websites for clients on a variety of open source content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. New clients often come to us frustrated that the web development or web design company they are using often applies egregious terms to their contracts such as the following:

The Customer’s website (including all graphical content and related HTML coding provided by {insert name of illegit web development firm} is the property of {insert name of illegit web development firm} and the Customer has no rights to the website beyond the terms of its subscription.

Really? You have got to be kidding!!! Worse yet are that some web design firms claim ownership of the domain, multimedia and other all created works while you work with them. Can you say illegitimate vendor lock in? Not so with Evolutionary IT. We believe in providing you with the best service and earning your loyalty. We respect you as a customer – so you own your content and IP (Intellectual Property). We only endeavor to gain your loyalty not by any contract or technological/vendor lock-in but by delivering value to you and your organization.

The world of social media is often a double edged sword: It can be tremendously powerful tool for business but also a very risky and dangerous place in terms of information security. According to security firm Sophos malware and spam rose 70 percent on social networks in the last 12 months and 57 percent of users report they have been spammed via social networking sites. While it is clear that cybercriminals have long known and exploited the world of social networking to propagate their crimeware, gather competitive intelligence, and even conduct espionage – it doesn’t have to be this way. Truth be told; your organization doesn’t have to be easy pray. Fundamentally, I see it as all about planning and implementing solutions on multiple fronts – technology, end user and management training, policies & procedures to name a few. Of these I see social media security training to be the most lacking. Users simply don’t understand the risks and harms that could befall your company or enterprise as a result of their actions. It is up to us as Information Security professionals to change this.

Of all the remediation efforts I’ve seen in social media security space, I am surprised to see how few medium to large business have made any effort to address end users/management training in Social Media Security. Technology is no band-aid or panacea but only part of the larger security picture. Your users can be the weakest link, unless they know better. This can only happen with proper training. What does your social media security plan look like?