TOP 3 TECH PIECES OF ADVISE FOR CONCLUDING 2014

As the year winds down, what are three pieces of advise which you should consider?

► Password protection

► Data protection

► Employee and employer precautions

Read below to maximize your technological experience!

1. PASSWORDS

The “key” to your technologies “front door” is your password. How secure is it currently? How can you make it even more secure?

While we all know not to share our debit cards pin with strangers, we may not always be so careful with our passwords.

Most people use the same password for most or all of their online accounts.

This is great for the user, since they don’t have to remember too many passwords.

However, there are a couple of pitfalls to this method:

1. When you create a password, someone working at the website company, may be able to access your information. If you use the same email and password, they can log into your other accounts with that info!

2. The website gets hacked and “professional” hackers attempt to use your credentials at various other websites.

Now that you understand the danger of having your password “yonatan123” or “PasSword”, how do you make a simple to remember yet secure password?

We recommend using the first letters of a sentence, with a variable such as the website name.

How does this work?

Take: “I Like Pizza and Fries With A Diet Coke”

Make the password: “1lp&fwadc”

Now to make it different for each account, add a letter in front for the account name.

For example:

Chase account will be “C1lp&fwadc”

What does this accomplish? A password which contains:

– A capital letter

– A lowercase letters

– A special character

– A number

– Not a basic word (which is easy to crack)

– Unique for each account

2. BACKUP

The hard drive of your computer is where all your data is stored. It’s a piece of hardware which will fail. The question is just a matter of when. Now what?

The question is what can you do to make sure if the hard drive fails, your data is not lost?

Local Backup – A local backup is done by plugging in an external hard drive to your computer and having your data backup automatically in incremental backups to the external hard drive.

Online Backup – An online backup is where your data is stored in the cloud. Some companies will back up only selected folders or files while others will backup up all folders and files on the computer.

Dual Hard drives – If you have two hard drives in your computer, that are exact copies of each other, so in case one hard drive fails, the other will keep on functioning without any downtime.

Solid State Drives (SSD) – These newer hard drives have a life expectancy of 200 years. Therefore the worry of the drive failing is much less then with a standard hard drive. (This does not ensure against any failures, just against physical hard drive failure.)

3a. FOR THE EMPLOYER

Your employees are using your desktop, laptops, tablets and cell phones. What they do on it may be come of interest to you. How do you stay on top of what’s going on?

Monitor – Are they looking to work elsewhere? Or worst, are they looking to go into competition? Are they doing not-so-legal activities or downloads on your computers? By monitoring all activity, you can see what they are doing and/or get alerts for certain key activities.

Filter – If they are going to be using your technology, you may consider blocking them from accessing parts of the Internet which can be a time wasters or get you in trouble!

Passwords – Make sure everyone has unique passwords and be cautious sharing passwords with your employees and among the employees themselves.

General security – If you have several employees, make sure they are all using their own credentials to log in, so that you can monitor employees activities.

3b. FOR THE EMPLOYEE

As an employee, receiving technology from the company may be great. But be warned, there are strings attached! Did you know?

Monitor – Your employer may be monitoring all your activity on corporate provided devices.

Availability – Your manager may expect you to be more available with the corporate cell and laptop.

Personal use – Once you have the laptop, tablet or cell, you may start using it for personal use as well. This can be against the corporate policy or even worst, if you lose your position, they may take away the device without giving you notice or time to take your personal data off. For all employees, regardless of the technology, if you store personal contacts or calendar events on company technology, that may not be returned to you if your position is terminated. Therefore we highly recommend keeping a strict separation between work and personal life.

Please note:

If you are not comfortable following these instructions, please contact us for assistance. We take no responsibility for attempting any of the above mentioned steps or instructions

Call Us Today : 718-676-6910

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