Some information we just got from Microsoft I thought was worth sharing.

"Research shows that our customers are actually enabling their cyber attackers: despite all the warnings, a staggering 30% of recipients open phishing messages and 12% open malicious attachments. So it’s no wonder two-thirds of cyber threats can be traced to phishing attacks. "

Please don't be one of the above statistics and make sure you and your employees exercises caution when opening emails from unknown senders or if you are unsure about an email don't open it. Then ask you IT Service team about it.

Any questions give us a call here at iPing HQ

Until recently what has been the most essential tool in your business has changed every couple of years but over the past five year's it has been your Wi-Fi. Your Wi-Fi is your gateway to the internet and without it you can’t send or receive emails, update your website, access your SaaS software and any social media accounts that your business might have. So how secure is your Wi-Fi and do you know who is accessing it?

If you have open Wi-Fi access, where any of your staff or your customers don’t need a password to access it what are some of the problems that you could be facing?

Your bandwidth usage can go through the roof and you may end up with your broadband speeds being throttled and you might be facing a huge broadband bill. If someone parks outside your business and uses your Wi-Fi to access their Netflix, Amazon Prime accounts or even YouTube your bandwidth usage will increase.

People using your Wi-Fi could be using it to access and download illegal material such as pirated movies, TV shows and music, and as this is done via your Wi-Fi account you could end up facing heavy fines.

If it’s known that you don’t need a password to access your Wi-F, what’s stopping someone else creating a rogue Wi-Fi access point (also known as an Evil Twin) designed to make it look like users are using your Wi-Fi. By using this rogue Wi-Fi setup, they can then access any data going through it especially passwords and financial details and any computers using it.

Does your Wi-Fi connection appear as the name of your Wi-Fi router or your broadband supplier? If this is the case you are making it so much easier for people to access your Wi-Fi, so make sure to change what it is called.

If your Wi-Fi connection has a password how often is it changed? Changing your Wi-Fi password on a regular basis is very important especially if you own a business such as a coffee shop or a pub where your customers regularly use your Wi-Fi.

At iPing we install robust enterprise level WiFi for SMB's and if you need a businesses level WiFi give us a shout!

iPing provide managed services and IT services and we can help provide you with an overview of your Wi-Fi setup and how you can improve it and make it more secure. So, if you need some help with the above please contact us or give us a call on 01 5241350.

Thought I would do a quick post of this beast of a custom built computer that we just put together. This is a state of the art rig and a real beauty!

Some Specks are

CPU = i7 7700K 4.2GHz by default
Graphics card = Nvidia 1060 TI
Memory = 32 Gig DDR4 3200 MHz

This Computer has a sound insulated case so it is inaudible!

I came across an interesting problem today that had me scratching my head for an hour or so and could not find anything in google to resolve the issue.

I was in the office of one of our clients and he had just setup a rule in Outlook 2016 to move all the email from his lawyer into a folder. This is simple stuff so far.

He then decided to move the folder that he had the rule on to a new location and all of his email just disappeared.

All the email also disappeared on the IMAP email server and at this stage things were starting to look very bad. There was a lot of important information and advice from the lawyer in the email folder that had built up over the past year.

Once I was able to confirm exactly where the folder had been all we had to do was recreate the folder with the exact same name. Like magic the emails started to appear back into the folder.

The problem seems to be something to do with having an email rule setup to move things to an non existing folder. Outlook seems to put the emails into limbo.

I am going to assume that if the folder was renamed this would cause the same issues.

This issue can also be resolved by going into rule manager in Outlook 2016 and updating the folder selection to where you moved the folder to.

The client was very happy that he had a managed IT contract with iPing and we were able to get him all his important email back!

If you would like iPing to manage your IT please contact us

Did you know that there may be hidden security risks in your office and that they can be found on your computer?  These security risks can make you more vulnerable to data loss and data theft.  So, what are these risks and how can you combat them?

There are four main security risks that you should be worried about and these risks are:

1 - The browser/browsers that are installed on your computer can be a security risk, especially if they are not updated on a regular basis or no longer supported. Older versions of Internet explorer are no longer supported and only internet explorer 11 and its replacement Edge are still supported by Microsoft. If you use other browsers such as Firefox and Google Chrome, make sure that you have the latest versions installed.

2 - The operating system that is running on your computer might not be supported anymore by Microsoft and that means you can no longer get updates for it. Microsoft ended mainstream support for Windows Vista 5 years ago and they will end extended support in April 11, 2017. Microsoft ended extended support for Windows XP in 2014. The extended support for Windows 7 ends on 14 January 2020 while the mainstream support for Windows 8 ends on 9 January 2018 (and extended support for Windows 8 ends on 10 January 2023). The difference between mainstream support and extended support is explained here.

3 - Legacy software and legacy systems can cause major security headaches and you must ask yourself if you still need them? If you are using older software that only works on an older Operating System, you should think about replacing the software with an up to date version. If this is not possible then you should think about limiting who can use it and if the computer that it is on needs to be connected to your network. If you have an older computer that is still being used, you must ask yourself if it can be replaced and if not take it off your network if it does not require internet or network access. If you are not sure if any Microsoft products that you use are still supported, please click here.

4 - Do you have Anti-virus software on your computers and how often is it updated/upgraded? You should be updating your Anti-virus software whenever an update is available and that should be around three to five times a week. Some Anti-virus software can slow your computer/computers or cause issues with any browser based SaaS software you use. If this is the case look for an alternative that won’t do this, as you might be inclined to just remove the Anti-virus software.

iPing provide managed services and IT services and we can help provide you with an overview of your computer/computers security risks and how you can improve it. So, if you need some help with the above please contact us or give us a call on 01 5241350.

Passwords are one of the main things that protect your IT infrastructure and they are also the weakest link, so how often do you change your passwords and what areas of your IT infrastructure is password protected are two questions that must be asked regularly.

Passwords are used when you want to log into your employer’s network onsite or offsite, and they can also be used when you want to access certain folders/directories in your employer’s IT network.

Make sure that your employees :

1- Never have an open network that allows you to access everything once you have keyed in your password to log into your computer. When Sony got hacked a few years ago, the hackers hacked into the main network and then had access to everything on the network as every user had open access to everything on the network. They also found a file called passwords which had the login details  and passwords for every employee who had access to Sony’s network. Make sure that users only have access to files, folders and software that is relevant to their job, why should the HR department have access to all the files, folders and software used by the website development team.

2 - Never leave Post it’s with passwords written on them on your computer screen or your desk. If you need to write passwords down, keep them in a notepad that is locked away in a drawer that only one person has access to, or use .

3 - Never have passwords that are too easy to crack, make sure that they are a minimum of eight characters long, comprised of alphanumeric characters, must have at least one uppercase letter and have a symbol. Passwords like your partner’s name, your children’s name or your date of birth are way too obvious. One of the easiest passwords to crack is one belonging to someone in your IT support department, because as they have so many passwords to remember, they make sure theirs is so easy to remember.

4 - Make sure that passwords are changed on a regular basis such as once a month or once every two months. The more often they are changed the harder it will be to crack them and make sure that everyone is reminded to change their password on a regular basis.

iPing provide managed services and IT services and we can help provide you with an overview of your IT networks password setup and how you can improve it. So, if you need some help with the above please contact us or give us a call on 01 5241350.

If you have a system failure in your organisation, two important questions will come to mind. How long will it take you to get your organisation up and running again? How much downtime and data loss can you afford?

This is where business continuity should come into play as it’s where an organisation has planned and prepared how it can continue to operate when faced with major incidents or disasters. Your organisation continuity plan should have three core components resilience, recovery and contingency.

Resilience
You can increase your organisation’s resilience by redesigning all its critical functions and infrastructures with various disaster scenarios in mind. What this should include is staff rota’s and data redundancy. This will help you maintain essential services on and off site.

Recovery
You must be able to recover or restore critical and less business functions and this can be done by setting recovery time objectives for different systems, networks and applications. Recovery time objectives will help you prioritise what needs to recovered or restored first.

Contingency
Your organisation will have procedures in place to deal with whatever incidents and disasters might occur, including ones that could not be foreseen. Contingency preparations are only brought in to play when resilience and recovery arrangements have not worked.

When you start thinking about business continuity, you should also be thinking about your data and how it is backed up. Backing up your data can be done in three ways:

You only backup your data, and this is normally stored on a local external hard disk or in the cloud, but you could use both just in case you might encounter issues with your local external drive. If you only need your data back as quickly as possible then this is the backup solution that you should be doing, as backing up your data can be done daily.

You clone your hard disk which results in an exact duplicate of your hard disk being made. This is more useful when you need to reinstall an OS and any software needed, especially if you have a disk failure and you need your systems back on line yesterday. This will require you having one or more donor hard disks that will be used to clone your hard disk.

You make an image of your hard drive and this is where image backup software copies everything on your hard drive into a large compressed file which can be saved in the cloud or an external hard drive. Images can be very handy as you can store various images at the same time and this can come in handy especially if you have malware/viruses infecting your hard disk and you want to bring your last known good configuration.

Each of the three-backup solutions have their uses, but when you need to be up and running as quickly as possible you must choose which one suits you best and decide how often you will back up your data, clone your hard disk and make images of your hard disk.

iPing provide managed services and IT services and we can help you with your business continuity and how you back up your data. So, if you need some help with the above please contact us or give us a call on 01 5241350.

One of the most important things that you should be doing is making sure that your data is stored in a safe and secure place and this is now much easier and cheaper to implement since cloud storage has become so widely available. There are two kinds of cloud storage available, local cloud storage and external cloud storage, and knowing who will be accessing the data helps you determine the type of cloud storage that you will be using.

Local storage is where your data is stored in a NAS (Network-attached storage) box in your office and is designed to plug into your network seamlessly. NAS boxes are essentially storage case in which you can store 1 or more hard disks in them and they can be bought with or without hard disks. They also vary in price from €30 to over €6000 making them very affordable.

External cloud storage is where your data is stored offsite with Amazon, Microsoft etc. and it can be accessed anywhere in the world. External cloud storage is normally used by companies who have sales people out on the road who need to access data 24x7. I

If you are planning to use external cloud storage it is worth noting that there are 2 types of external cloud storage, synced and non-synced storage. Synced cloud storage is where all the data on your computer/server is replicated in the cloud. Non-synced storage is where you decide what data is stored in the cloud.

The one problem that you will run into when you use synced cloud storage is that if you decide to delete a file from your computer or sever, it will also be deleted from your online cloud storage account. The purpose of cloud storage is that it is a place you store files that are too big to store locally, or where you store multiple versions of the same file. If synced cloud storage is not going to be an issue then feel free to go with it, otherwise go with non-synced cloud storage.

iPing provide managed services and IT services and we can help provide you with various cloud storage options. So, if you need some help with the above please contact us or give us a call on 01 5241350.

Over the past few days we have started seeing a notice from Microsoft in the bottom right hand corner of Windows. The notice is to let you know you can now upgrade to Windows 10. Firstly we wish to reassure our clients - this is an official message from Microsoft and it is safe to click on the message.

Microsoft are offering customers presently using Windows 7 and upwards a free upgrade to Windows 10.  This free offer will be valid for one year from July 29^th 2015.  If you avail of this free upgrade, there is no additional cost for the first year of install, after this one year period,  there will be a cost for Windows 10 and there will be a cost for installation on any new computers.

Microsoft have confirmed to us:

“Once you upgrade to Windows 10 with the free upgrade offer you will able to clean reinstall Windows 10 on same device any time.”

The free Windows 10 upgrade is a full version and can upgrade from an older version of Windows or perform a standalone install. Microsoft will also make the software downloadable as an ISO disc image, for those who want to keep it on DVD or a USB memory key.

iPing are advising our customers only to register for the free version of Windows 10 for now. We are suggesting a ‘wait and see’ period of around six months for Microsoft to iron out the bugs before we start planning whether or not to move iPing’s customers to Windows 10.

If you have any questions on this please give us a call or an email 01 5241350 or visit www.iping.ie