October 2009 / 13 IT Nightmares

When it comes to your IT, what is your “horror movie” scenario? Fear of your hardware failing? Hackers stealing sensitive business information? A virus running rampant on your network? Your answer may be different, but the basis of the nightmare is the same for business owners and managers – unproductive staff, lost time or intellectual property, and ultimately risk to your business.

In honor of the Halloween season, this month we'll take a little stroll to the dark side with our list of 13 IT Nightmares. But have no fear; we'll discuss the simple steps you can take to make sure these scenarios don't happen to your business and that you make it to the end of the movie. We will even point out exactly how Staples Network Services can directly address each of these 13 Nightmares with a service or product that we provide to our clients everyday.

Staples Network Services' "13 IT Nightmares"

Nightmare #1 - The latest “security exploit of the month” brings your business to its knees when an employee downloads and opens a file which contains a security risk that uses that exploit, causing infection of that system and others on your network.

• Avoid it: Make sure that all machines are up-to-date with patches and security updates.


• How SNS can help: The ThriveProtect platform applies patches and security fixes to your business servers and workstations every month to make sure you never miss an update, in the office or on the road.

Nightmare #2 - An employee opens up a file emailed to them from an unknown contact. The file contains a virus which causes an outbreak across your network.

• Avoid it: Always have the latest antivirus definitions in place. Use multiple layers of antivirus security on your network – file level, Email data store level, and ideally gateway level. Antivirus at the gateway level will identify and quarantine malware and viruses before then even hit your network.


• How SNS can help: Thrive Email Filtering powered by MX Logic is available as a stand alone offering or with ThriveProtect. It not only removes malware and viruses before they reach your email server, but also quarantines SPAM messages as well.

Nightmare #3 - A disgruntled employee steals your corporate data and sells it to a competitor.

• Avoid it: Use encryptions software on your network to protect your most confidential intellectual property. Restrict access to that data only to select users and have monitoring put in place to log when the data is accessed and who is accessing it.


• How SNS can help: Our Business Technology Consultants and engineers are familiar with all of the latest encryption software and technologies as well as file access auditing best practices. They can work with you to develop policies and business practices geared at keeping your business data safe from inside as well as outside forces who may want to do it harm.

Nightmare #4 - You have a deadline to meet, but find that an important file for the project that you're working on is missing. You try to access the file from last night's backup but find that the media is corrupt and you can't recover it.

• Avoid it: Make sure that your business critical data is backed up either in multiple places or that you're regularly performing recovery testing on all your backup media.


• How SNS can help: Thrive Online Vaulting services back your data up to a secure and redundant data vault, and is recoverable anywhere that you have an internet connection. Files can always be recovered as media is no longer an issue. If you do still use tapes for performing your backup working with SNS will ensure that your tape media gets tested regularly to make sure you can recover when you need it the most.

Nightmare #5 - It's an incredibly busy day in your office when all of a sudden your email server crashes and nobody is able to send or receive email.

• Avoid it: Ensure that you have a message continuity plan in place so that even if your email server is down, you can send and receive new messages while the server is being restored.


• How SNS can help: Thrive Email Filtering powered by MX Logic includes full email continuity for your users. If the server is down, you are still up and running, and more importantly, responding to new email.

Nightmare #6 - You find out that an employee who was fired 6 months ago is regularly logging into your network for reasons unknown.

• Avoid it: Have a password policy in place that forces passwords to be changed on a time-interval basis (every 3-6 months). Also be sure to have an Employee Termination Policy that ensures that employees who leave the company have their passwords disabled or changed.


• How SNS can help: During prescheduled Thrive Onsite support visits our trained and certified network engineers will make sure that your Employee Termination Policy is established, maintained, and adhered to. We also engage our clients early and often to establish a strong password policy on their network.

Nightmare #7 - You're the owner of a small business. While walking around the office you see that all of your employees are on Facebook and Twitter. Nobody seems to be working and your business productivity is down.

• Avoid it: When the percentage of Hulu videos watched is up, and the percentage of employees being productive is down, it's time to invest in a content filtering and bandwidth control solution. Devices from companies such as Cymphonix can block access to specific sites or categories (such as social networking) as well as give you the ability to limit the amount of bandwidth that can be used for streaming multimedia.


• How SNS can help: Staples Network Services is a Cymphonix reseller and certified solution provider. Our engineers also have experience with many other tools and software used to control your internet circuit and make sure its used in a manner consistent with your business objectives.

Nightmare #8 - Your accounting application has crashed and your IT person tells you that it's a hardware failure. How come nobody saw this coming?

• Avoid it: Invest in hardware redundancy on your IT infrastructure and ensure that you have a service that is monitoring your hardware for uptime and critical performance metrics.


• How SNS can help: All hardware recommended and installed by the Integration Services team at Staples Network Services is specified with redundancy in all the right places, so a single failure won't render your business belly-up. SNS also provides a robust monitoring platform to its clients that can dig down to the machine level and watch for things like hard disk failure, power supply failure, system board alerts, and a host of other early indicators of a potentially big problem on the horizon.

Nightmare #9 - The CEO of your company is in another state attending an industry seminar where he'll be making a key note presentation. The day of the presentation he finds that he accidentally deleted his PowerPoint slides while at the hotel the night before. He created the presentation on the flight to the seminar, so they no longer exist on his laptop and were never on the corporate network.

• Avoid it: Ensure that traveling users have a solution in place that will back up their data when they're off the corporate network. The best solutions will back up that data to an outside location that can be easily accessed online for emergency restores, even to new or replacement hardware.


• How SNS can help: Thrive Online Backup is an agent-based online backup agent that secures laptop data to a secure internet vault. It provides your road warriors with more peace of mind than an upgrade to first class on the red eye home.

Nightmare #10 - You get to work one morning and find that your company website no longer goes to your homepage. Your domain registration has expired and someone else has purchased it.

• Avoid it: Always track and monitor when your domain names are set to expire and be sure to have a process in place to re-register all business-critical domains. You should receive proper warning from the company through which you purchased your domain, so also be sure that your contact information is up to date with your registrar.


• How SNS can help: Domain registrations are just one of the dozens of business critical configurations that Staples Network Services tracks and manages for its clients as part of our Configuration Management best practices.

Nightmare #11 - During a wind storm, a tree blows over in your office's parking lot, hitting a transformer. The resulting power surge fries all the workstations in your office. The servers, connected to a UPS, were spared, but none of your people can log into their machines.

• Avoid it: Battery backup isn't only for servers. Make sure critical work stations are plugged into surge protectors or battery backup solutions. Also, make sure the UPSs in your server closet are being monitored.


• How SNS can help: Our best practices call for surge protectors or battery solutions even for workstations. Thrive Monitoring will also indicate and alert SNS when your server UPS is on battery, is in a low run time condition, or has had a high voltage condition occur.

Nightmare #12 - You recently shifted all of your business-critical servers and applications to a cloud computing platform. Two weeks later none of your business applications work because your service provider is experiencing an unplanned outage.

• Avoid it: Make sure that you thoroughly evaluate all cloud computer providers and evaluate their Service Level Agreement, redundancy, and structure. Also, it's always best to diversify where you store your business critical applications, so no single outage or issue will eliminate access to all of your critical business functions.


• How SNS can help: As your technology advocate and trusted advisor, Staples Network Services understands your business applications and requirements and will sit on your side of the table when negotiating with third party cloud computing providers. Our best practices are applicable to what you should be evaluating in a hosting provider, and we are happy to share those with our clients to make sure their needs are met.

Nightmare #13 - As a prank, a employee sneaks onto the CEO's computer and writes a company-wide email offering free products/services. But, instead of sending the joke email out internally, the employee accidentally sends it out to a distribution list with all of your clients' email addresses on it.

• Avoid it: Have a security policy in place which all end users are versed on and have signed off on when it comes to acceptable use of IT systems. Be sure to regularly review this policy with employees to make sure they understand the rules. And of course, make sure that “lock your computer when you are away from it” is part of your security policy.


• How SNS can help: We have written IT security policies for small, medium, and large sized clients and can provide you with the templates, experience, and know-how required to turn what could be a tedious exercise into a streamlined process where all of your employees understand the value and need for the IT security measures.

Final Thoughts...

Perhaps you know someone who has experienced one of these nightmares. Perhaps they've even happened to you. If you've ever seen the results of these scenarios you know that preventative measures are significantly less ghastly then the repercussions of not taking them. At Staples Network Services we've heard all sorts of horror stories and know the steps you can take to make sure you're protected. If you have any questions or want to learn more about ensuring the safety of your network, contact us.