Why you can’t survive without a backup

It’s simple: Businesses that suffer data losses usually fail as a result.

That’s according to a study by the Department for Trade and Industry, which found that 70 percent of small businesses suffering a major data loss are out of business within 18 months.

What this means is most small businesses have failed to protect themselves from a plethora of problems. According to Ontrack, data loss is the result of human error 44% of the time, hardware or system malfunction 32% of the time, software malfunction 14% of the time, computer virus 7% of the time, and site disaster 3% of the time.

And data loss is bad, because your data is your business. To illustrate, consider the impact if you lost access to your IT systems, including:

* Customer databases
* Supplier details
* Financial documents, from invoices to tax records
* Product catalogues
* Marketing materials
* Letters and emails
* Document templates
* Staff records

You already have insurance to protect your business assets, and the same principle applies to your data. Regardless of where your data is, it needs to be protected—and protected continuously—from every possible threat.

The good news: A solid backup solution will allow you to get back to business within minutes or hours in most cases.

So protect your data, and secure your business.

Bumper Patch Tuesday

Today’s Microsoft Patches

Later today, Microsoft will release 11 security patches, covering security vulnerabilities in Windows, Office and Exchange. As usual, we recommend installing these updates on all machines as soon as possible. The breakdown of the patches is as follows:

• 5 patches with a severity rating of Critical for Windows
• 2 patches with a severity rating Important for Windows
• 1 patches with a severity rating Important for Windows and Microsoft Exchange
• 2 patches with a severity rating Important for Microsoft Office
• 1 patch with a severity rating of Moderate for Windows

Adobe Updates

Critical updates from Adobe are also due out today, fixing well-publicised flaws in Acrobat Reader. You should install these on all systems as well.

The Adobe updates are due as part of a quarterly patch batch. More and more vendors have begun updating regular patching cycles (following Microsoft’s lead perhaps), either monthly or quarterly, to help IT systems administrators predict and manage patching workloads.

Patch, Patch and Patch

As ever, we recommend installing all security patches for ALL of the software programs that you have on your machines, not just the Microsoft ones. More and more malware programs (viruses, Trojans, spyware, etc.) are targeting vulnerabilities in other non-Microsoft programs as their entry point into to your systems.

Microsoft Office 2010 is coming, time to buy Office 2007

Microsoft Office 2010 will be released on 12^th May 2010. So as not to stop sales of Microsoft Office 2007 in their tracks, Microsoft are offering a free upgrade to Office 2010 for qualifying purchases of Office 2007 before 30^th September 2010. (Microsoft’s offer can be found on this website.)

The table below shows the “qualifying purchases” (for Retail, non-volume license Office editions):

Office 2007 Qualifying Product	Office 2010 Upgrade Product
Office Ultimate 2007	Office Professional 2010
Office Professional 2007	Office Professional 2010
Office Small Business 2007	Office Professional 2010
Office Standard 2007	Office Home and Business 2010
Office Home and Student 2007	Office Home and Student 2010
Office Basic 2007	Office Home and Business 2010
Word 2007	Word 2010
Excel 2007	Excel 2010
PowerPoint 2007	PowerPoint 2010
OneNote 2007	OneNote 2010
Access 2007	Access 2010
Outlook 2007	Outlook 2010
Outlook with Business Contact Manager 2007	Outlook 2010
Project Standard 2007	Project Standard 2010
Project Professional 2007	Project Professional 2010
Publisher 2007	Publisher 2010
Visio Standard 2007	Visio Standard 2010
Visio Professional 2007	Visio Professional 2010

This time round there will only be three Retail (non-volume license) editions of Office:

• Office Professional 2010 – Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, Access, Publisher and OneNote.
• Office Home and Business 2010 – Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Word and OneNote.
• Office Home and Student 2010 (for non-commercial use) – Excel, PowerPoint, Word and OneNote.

Comparing these editions and their equivalent Office 2007 qualifying products, shows the following:

• All of the 2010 editions include OneNote, which was previously only included in the Home & Student, Ultimate and Enterprise (volume license) editions of Office 2007.
• If you purchase Office Small Business 2007 now, you will get an upgrade to Office Professional 2010, which includes Access. Previously you had to purchase Office Professional 2007 (or above) in order to get Access. So for once, Microsoft is giving you something for free!
• Similarly, if you purchase Office Basic 2007 (Excel, Outlook and Word) now, you will get an upgrade to Office Home and Business 2010, which effectively gives you PowerPoint for free.

So, if you have older versions of Microsoft Office and plan to upgrade them sometime in the next few years, I personally recommend thinking about doing it soon, and definitely before the 30th September.

What is the best antivirus software?

Everyone (hopefully) understands the importance of having antivirus software installed on each of their computers and servers. However, I’m continually amazed at just how many businesses & individuals want to spend as little as possible (ideally nothing) on their antivirus software. This is just plain wrong.

I’m also appalled at how many of our competitor IT companies want to sell antivirus software purely based on the margin they can make or how easily they can install the antivirus software across multiple machines.

The unfortunate truth is that there is no antivirus product on the market that will catch 100% of all malware (viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware, adware, phising, etc.). However, some antivirus products are significantly better than others. In my opinion, you should not be buying your antivirus software based on the lowest price that you can get away with, but instead, you should be protecting your business with the best antivirus software available.

So what is the best antivirus software?

Each quarter several independent groups test the various antivirus programs in order to determine how effective they are. Personally, we believe that AV-Comparatives’ tests (www.av-comparatives.org) are the most comprehensive and reliable. They conduct various different types of test, to determine how effective the programs are at detecting all types of malicious programs (malware) under different circumstances. For some years, they have been testing 16 programs; this rose to 20 in February 2010.

So which one comes out on top? We’ll, it actually depends on how you interpret the results. On the “Stay Safe on the Internet” website (www.staysafeontheinternet.co.uk) (put together by my colleague David, with a little help from yours truly) we use the following five factors in order to compare antivirus programs:

• Protection, the ability of the program to recognise and block/remove viruses and other dangerous programs from your computer.

• Speed of the antivirus program, i.e. how much it affects the performance of the computer.

• False alarms, also known as false positives, occur when an antivirus program wrongly identifies a harmless program or file as being malicious.

• Ease of use is also a very important consideration.

• Telephone support from the manufacturer of the antivirus program is invaluable.

Taking these factors into consideration we have determined that the following are currently the top five antivirus programs:

• Kaspersky Internet Security – offers the best protection.
• ESET NOD32 – very light, fast, trouble-free antivirus program with outstanding technical support.
• F-Secure – good all round, with 24/7 telephone support.
• Avira – recommended for experts only, due to the lack of phone support (unless you can speak German).
  
• Gdata - same as Avira.

To see how these five programs compare visit www.staysafeontheinternet.co.uk/intermediate/antivirus/. For the full analysis results and to see how your antivirus program rates visit www.staysafeontheinternet.co.uk/intermediate/antivirus/testresults.html

At Solutions Shared, we tend to recommend ESET for business clients and either ESET or Kaspersky for home users, depending on their Internet surfing habits and the age of their PC (ESET is better than Kaspersky on older PCs).

Maximum Protection

Unfortunately simply having antivirus software will not guarantee that you will never be infected with some form of malware. Instead you need to apply a multifaceted approach, which includes all of following:

1) Installation of all operating system (Windows, Mac OS, etc) security updates as soon as they are released.

2) Installation of the latest security updates for application programs, including, but not limited to, Microsoft Office, Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime, Real Player.

3) Ideally removing local administrator permissions from all staff – if you don’t have admin rights most “drive-by” malware installations will fail when you open the infected file or click the dodgy web link.

4) Educate your staff. A small amount of training goes a long way.  Staff should be provided with some basic education on how to be savvy email and Internet users.