OnSite I.T. Blog

In August, LastPass suffered a data breach that allowed hackers to access the LastPass source code. Let’s take a look at this situation and see what you need to do to maintain proper password security moving forward.

We bet you’ve gone through your old files at some point to clean things up a bit by deleting files from your computer. What if we told you that deleting those files doesn’t actually delete them—at least not entirely? Let’s go over how you can securely delete your files for good while you go about replacing hardware or upgrading your technology systems.

Since its origins back in 1991, the blockchain has had one core purpose: to securely store data. The methods behind it are exclusive to it as well. Let’s explore the concept of the blockchain a little further to gain a better appreciation of what it has enabled.

There’s no getting away from streaming nowadays—if you’re not binging something on Netflix/Hulu/HBOmax (etc, etc), you’re listening to your favorite song on your music platform of choice. This is largely due to the rising popularity of the “as-a-service” strategy that cloud services enable nowadays. Let’s take a closer look at streaming, and why it is now so ubiquitous.

We like to focus our efforts on preventing data breaches and cybersecurity attacks, but it’s important to know what you should do if you do fall victim to such an attack. Let’s go over how you should respond to a data breach and what you must consider to come out on the successful side of it.

For years you’ve heard how technology is becoming a bigger part of the healthcare delivery system and how it can help stabilize costs, provide increased access, and further personalize care delivery. As these innovations have been taking hold it has brought up serious questions about data privacy. Today, we’ll take a look at some of the changes IT has brought to healthcare and what it means for patient data privacy. 

Passwords have been front-and-center for data security since 1960, but even their creator–MIT researcher Fernando Corbató–doesn’t think he should take full credit passwords. In fact, if you brought this up to the researchers who did create them, they would tell you that the security concerns for their time were much more limited.

Ransomware is a top threat, and it’s definitely not going anywhere anytime soon. To help you best combat it, let’s take a look at what you can do to keep ransomware from disrupting your organization and its operations. We’ll provide a brief overview of what ransomware is and what you can do to take the fight to it.

Data privacy is central to most conversations in the business environment, and in a time when ransomware and hacks of all kinds are constantly receiving media presence, it’s no surprise that it is sensationalized to a certain extent. That said, it’s critical for businesses to understand what needs to be done to future-proof their data privacy infrastructures.

In the business world, the term “informatics” is generally used synonymously with computer science. While they are certainly quite similar, they are also quite different. What exactly does the field of informatics pertain to, and how can knowing this help your business prosper in the years to come?

A good data backup protects your business’ information (and because of this, the business itself) from a wide variety of threats. Of course, to accomplish this effectively, a data backup needs to itself be secure and reliable. Let’s take a few moments and go over a few practices and policies you would likely find it beneficial to adopt.

We’ve all seen advertisements for the websites that offer to connect you with the professionals ready to help you with a specialized task around your home, from repair work to childcare to cleaning services. Unfortunately, cybercriminals have adopted a similar tactic to help market their services, leading to the creation of a sort of hackers’ gig economy on the Dark Web.

It’s a bit of a nightmare scenario for a business, born of watching too many crime thrillers: a criminal syndicate hacks into their systems, wreaking havoc and stealing all their data, while also destroying that company’s reputation. Is this scenario a fantasy? To a point, yes—but not so much as you might think.

When you have a thorough and powerful data backup strategy in place at your business, you are protecting your operations, your employees, and your customers from an array of terrible scenarios. Unfortunately, many businesses don’t think of data loss in the terms it should be considered in, a complete travesty. Today, we thought we would briefly describe the long and short of data backup and recovery practices that can put your business in a position to secure and restore your data should it be corrupted, destroyed, or stolen.

People look at their work differently, just as they view their lives differently. The many different perspectives of your staff brings a bit of variance of how they view data security. This isn’t so good for your business as you need to trust them to prioritize the security of your data and infrastructure. Let’s take a look at some of the best practices that you should be training your staff in, which will allow them to protect your data better, and theirs. 

A business’ data needs to be considered a priority, which means that its protection should be prioritized accordingly. One facet of doing so is maintaining a backup with a strategy in compliance to best practices. To accomplish this, your backup should feature something that isn’t often considered a benefit: redundancy.

If you are buying a new desktop or laptop, one of the specifications you might care about is how much data it can store. After all, your family computer needs plenty of storage for your photos and documents, and if you have kids, they’ll want to install games and other applications on it that fill up a hard drive. These days, however, it’s less about how much space your hard drive has and more about how fast it can run. Let’s explain this, and then talk about something you should almost always look for when picking a hard drive for your PC.

If asked to list its most valuable assets, every modern business currently in existence should include its data on that list. This is part of the reason that data security should be treated as a priority. We know—this isn’t exactly a small ask, so to help, we’ve put together a few tips to get you started off on the right foot. If you’re already working on your data security preparedness, consider this a refresher.

In the 1980s, there was a cartoon by the name of G.I. Joe, based on action figures manufactured by toy giant Hasbro. Due to the popularity of this cartoon, they set out time each week to do a brief PSA aimed to educate kids about the dangers of certain actions. The tagline, “Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.” became entrenched in the lexicon. Now, over thirty years later, kids that grew up on G.I. Joe are business owners and have come to understand just how poignant that message is. Let’s take a look at a couple of ways businesses can expand their knowledge base and use it to improve their operations using IT.

I want you to step out of your role as a business owner for a moment and see yourself once again as the average consumer. How concerned are you that so many businesses have collected and are now storing your personal data, and that you have no control over its privacy? If you feel at all uneasy, you’re not alone… 87 percent of Americans feel that data privacy is a human right in these modern times.