by Felicien | May 4, 2018 | Education
Your business is at risk every day.
Simple daily backups are no longer enough to ensure your business can keep running in the event of IT equipment failure– equipment fails due to:
Human Error
Fire
Flood
Cybersecurity Threats
If a disaster strikes, how will you ensure that your IT environment has enough flexibility, redundancy, and resilience to protect your data, while remaining simple to set up, use and recover?
You can with Datto Siris–the first fully featured, Total Data Protection platform in one integrated solution.
With Siris, you can choose from a family of physical, virtual and software appliances, as well as a variety of storage options to craft a unique data protection solution tailored to your business.
Siris supports a wide array of operating systems, including Windows, Mac, and Linux.
It protects and restores both physical machines and virtual environments. You have the option to restore no matter where your business data lives.
Your backups are scheduled every 5 minutes.
They’re tested, stored locally and replicated to the secure Datto Cloud.
And, this isn’t just any cloud. It’s stored within Datto’s Globally Distributed Data Centers.
With Datto Infinite Cloud Retention, you can store your data for as long as your business requires.
You can’t risk losing any piece of data to corruption.
Outdated data backup methods force you to restore an entire system from a single restore point. This results in data loss for any files created after the restore.
Siris uses Inverse Chain Technology and ZFS Snapshots to make each file interdependent. Each snapshot saves the changes between each data point, ensuring that any individual piece of data can be recovered from any previous backup without losing the most recent data.
When disaster strikes your business, there’s no time to waste waiting on outdated technology to restore backups–even 15 minutes old.
With instant virtualization, your business can restore within seconds from your local device or by using Datto’s powerful cloud.
While a complete image of your system runs through a virtual machine, regular backups continue.
And, if you lose the entire source machine, Siris also provides the option for Bare Metal Restore, into new hardware or a virtual destination.
Detect ransomware threats before they happen.
Siris monitors and targets specific patterns of ransomware within a single backup.
Plus, it notifies you and helps you get back to business without paying a ransom.
Imagine the power to backup, restore and secure your business data integrated into one solution.
And supported by a world-class, 24/7/365 tech support group.
With Datto Siris, your business can run anywhere, protect anything and restore any time.
Find out more by contacting the Datto Experts at VersaTrust.
by Felicien | May 3, 2018 | Education
On May 7th, all smartphones on an LTE network will receive a test notification for the new Public Emergency Alert System.
Don’t let it catch you off guard – coming up on May 7th, 2018, if you live in Ontario or Quebec, your smartphone will receive a test alert for Canada’s Public Emergency Alert System. The same test will run in the rest of the country on May 9th.
Be aware that this first notification will simply be a test by all major broadcast and telecom companies that offer LTE service. In some cases, you may be required to acknowledge receipt of the alert. Depending on your service provider, the alert may also make a notification sound that circumvents the settings on your phone (i.e., even if you have your phone set to silent, in some cases it may still notify with a noise).
These notifications will be sent out as a part of the Alert Ready Emergency Alert System. According to their website, Alert Ready is “designed to deliver critical and potentially life-saving alerts to Canadians through television and radio. The Alert Ready system is developed in partnership with federal, provincial, and territorial emergency management officials, Environment and Climate Change Canada, The Weather Network, and the broadcasting industry and wireless service providers, to ensure you receive alerts immediately and know when to take action to keep yourself and your family safe”.
Once tested and verified, these types of alerts will be sent to Canadians to inform them about a range of types of emergencies and imminent threats, including:
Natural Disasters
Tornado: a vortex of violently rotating winds, often forming a funnel-shaped cloud that is capable of damaging property and injuring people.
Flash Flood: Usually caused by river ice jams and excessive unpredicted rainfall, a flash flood is a sudden onset of water causing immediate flooding of the local area. The danger is in the little to no warning to local residential areas.
Earthquake: A sudden release of violent seismic waves due to energy generated by the movement of plates in the Earth’s crust, which can cause extensive damage in urban environments.
Hurricane: A violent storm made up of intense winds and heavy rain that can lead to storm surge, floods, coastal erosion, and landslides.
Fires
Urban Fire: Any urban fire that presents a threat to multiple residential and/or commercial properties.
Industrial Fire: A large fire in an industrial building or complex that poses a threat to human health.
Wildfire: A large natural fire involving combustibles such as grass, brush, and trees.
Forest Fire: As opposed to a wildfire, a forest fire burns in a forested area, grass or alpine/tundra vegetation and poses a threat to human safety.
Biological
Biological: A potentially dangerous or poisonous substance that is both unstable and easily transferred between living organisms.
Chemical: The misuse or release (unintentional or otherwise) of a chemical substance that could result in serious injury or death.
Radiological: A radiological (radioactive) substance with sufficient concentration to do serious or lethal harm to exposed populations.
Drinking Water Contamination: In the event that drinking water is negatively affected and as such, a boil-water advisory is raised, cautioning use by the public.
Hazardous
Explosive: A potentially dangerous substance or device that may explode within an affecting radius of an urban environment or concentrated population.
Terrorist
Terrorist Threat: The use of violence or threat of violence by individuals or groups against civilians or infrastructure.
Environmental
Air Quality: Caused by an elevated particulate count in the atmosphere that could negatively affect visibility or the health of individuals.
Falling Objects: Natural or human-made materials at risk of falling, which may threaten people or property.
Civil
Civil Emergency: Occurring when humans cause a disruption of services or require varying levels of support, law enforcement, or attention.
Animal Danger: Occurring when a wild or domesticated animal poses a threat to human life or property.
Amber Alert: Issued when a child has been abducted and police services believe that the child’s life is in grave danger. This type of alert gives the public immediate and up-to-date information about the abduction in order to gain their assistance in ensuring a fast and safe return of the child.
911 Service: This type of alert occurs when there is a disruption or outage of telecommunication services between public and emergency responders.
Check out the Alert Ready website to hear an example of the specific alert tone that will play through television, radio, and wireless broadcasts to notify Canadians of an impending emergency.
Be sure to take note of how the test occurs – it is the public’s responsibility to ensure that they understand what the alert is informing them of, to consider it carefully, and to respond appropriately and as directed.
For more information about Alert Ready, check out their website here.
by Felicien | May 3, 2018 | Education
Do you use 800 million pounds of paper each year? That’s the latest estimate for the average professional – and nearly 20% ends up in landfills. Would your habits change if you were taxed on paper consumption?
The use of paper to record thoughts, plans, transactions, agreements, or anything at all, is nothing new. Ancient Egyptians invented the earliest known type of “paper”, named papyrus from the plant which the material was created. The more modern forms of paper are likely created from a process similar to that invented by the Chinese, who remain the leading paper manufacturers today.
The ability to document everything from knowledge and information to financial transactions and taxes brought the foundation of the technological era – though not quite as we see it today. For the first time in history, accountability no longer relied on memory or spoken word, but the origin of the “paper trail” concept.
One of the earliest modern ways we’ve found to scale back paper use is the predecessor to the smartphone, the personal digital assistant (PDA), like the Palm Pilot. Migrating from paper planners to a handheld organizer enabled professionals to have easy calendar access, along with a variety of other resources like the Internet and telephone.
Would it surprise you to know that the first person to coin the phrase “PDA” was a former Apple CEO, John Sculley?
The intended purpose of technology is to improve our lives and simplify our tasks. For example, email was designed, in part, to expedite communication in a cost-efficient manner. Written communication that previously took more than a week to deliver via U.S. mail with the added cost of a postage stamp and envelope – also relying on the correct mailing address of the recipient – was now nearly free and instantaneous. The fax machine was intended to serve this same purpose of timely delivery, but still involved paper waste. In fact, fax machines created a unique problem: the sender had to have a print copy to scan and fax, and the recipient thus received a paper copy of the message. In the case of email, technology should decrease the use of paper, and successfully has.
The average professional has indeed cut back on paper use. Statistics vary, but no matter how you look at it, we consume far too much paper for the amount of technology we have at our disposal. Notice the word “consume”? The sad reality is that not all consumed paper is used. Have you ever visited a print station only to have to dig through sheets to find the printed document(s) you’re looking for? How many times do you see the same sheets that never get picked up?
Every year, organizations look to trim costs from their budget in unique ways, but rarely are paper costs fully considered. It’s estimated that U.S. companies spend $120 million annually on printed documents – a number that can, and should, easily be reduced.
Companies like Microsoft are trying to facilitate less paper consumption, and therefore, less waste. From online storage with Microsoft OneDrive or SharePoint, where users can store, share, and access files from anywhere without needing to produce paper copies, to collaborative software solutions like Microsoft Teams or Microsoft Project which help groups jointly communicate in real time, modern solutions are geared toward less paper consumption.
One industry where paper consumption has significantly decreased in recent years is the medical field. Patient charts used to be entirely paper, including test results, office visit notes, and full patient history. For large medical practices, this involves a lot of expensive real estate for a physical item that isn’t often used. The movement toward electronic health records is more efficient in every way: cost savings for less paper and less space taken, easy to share and access from anywhere, and less chance of a test result or document getting lost or damaged.
Banking is another industry to vie for the record of worst offender in terms of paper consumption. Between lending for auto purchases or mortgages and account statements, banks recognize the high-consumption of paper and have (slowly) been moving toward online signatures, email statements, and digital records.
Even major metropolitan areas are jumping on the “green” bandwagon. Bike lanes are being rolled out in cities across the country. Mass transit light rail systems are being installed and adopted for easy navigation and decreasing carbon footprints and toxic emissions. On the smaller scale, but no less important, it’s becoming more common for consumers to be emailed a receipt at a point of purchase, rather than have a paper receipt printed at the time of transaction. Most cities have designated locations to return printer ink cartridges for recycling to help cut down on waste.
Commonly purchased with large print workstations are service agreements to maintain the printer. Rather than a set cost, these agreements are based on use and consumption, with fees for black-and-white documents ranging from 5¢ to 12¢ on average, and color documents ranging from triple to more than five times the cost of black-and-white fees. By comparison, cloud storage costs are far more economical!
So, what can you do to help cut down on paper waste, thereby cutting costs for your company?
Evaluate who uses a printer at your organization and for what purposes.
Determine if your printer(s) are the most efficient available, and if they are maintained for efficiency.
Monitor overall usage, and then assess how usage can be decreased.
There are so many ways technology can help decrease print usage and costs, and here are a few to get started:
Cloud storage
This cannot be stated enough. Moving file storage to the cloud is a big leap, but can save you time and money.
No more file cabinets taking up real estate.
Documents are easier to find, access, and share from anywhere.
Reusable notebooks
Do you or your team still prefer to take handwritten notes? Using a smart notebook like the Rocketbook Wave propels your note-taking into the next century. Once captured, notes can be shared to the cloud using your smartphone. Once the notebook is full, a quick run in the microwave and it’s empty to use again!
Collaborative platforms
We mentioned Microsoft Teams already, but there are countless options available. From Slack to Basecamp, most offer users a similar feature base intended to encourage digital collaboration and eliminate paper waste.
It’s not unheard of to offer incentives to decrease waste, but the greatest incentive is decreasing costs for the organization resulting in increased revenue – and hopefully increased salaries! Decreased paper waste shouldn’t have to rely on staff incentives – and hopefully, it won’t come to taxation, but you never know…so let’s get ahead of the game and help ourselves while helping the planet. Saving two kinds of green – money and Mother Earth – with one effort!
by Felicien | May 3, 2018 | Education
Recently, several big class-action lawsuits have been filed in California over whether adequate notices are being given to consumers when their personal information is sold. With the major controversy surrounding Facebook and the use of its users’ personal information during the 2016 presidential campaign, the public has become more aware and informed about this topic.
A recent Newsweek article reports that data brokers typically try to stay below the radar so as not to draw attention to what they do for a living. This may be partly responsible for the fact that over half of all Canadians and Americans say that they do not know exactly what happens when they give their name, address, phone number and email address to a website or company.
Recent lawsuits use California’s Shine the Light Law (S.B.27) to object to how these marketing companies use all our data. The lawsuits allege:
“The company failed to properly identify a method for obtaining a disclosure as to how the company shares its customer’s personal information.”
With the publicity surrounding these lawsuits, other consumers are taking notice and filing their own suits, many of them class-action suits. Before deciding whether to file or not, it’s important to know exactly what S.B.27 is and how it works.
Overview of S.B. 27
According to S.B. 27, certain companies must disclose how they share their customer’s information each time a customer asks for it. Each time a company receives a request from a customer wanting to know how the company has shared their information with marketers, they must provide the information. This only covers the previous twelve months. In addition, S.B. 27 only allows consumers to make these requests in cases where the customer was not given access to the company’s privacy policies containing opt-out notices.
In order to be compliant with S.B.27, a company must create a privacy policy that includes opt-out rights, and provide that to their customers in an acceptable manner. It’s important for the consumer to fully understand the privacy notice and how they should proceed with opting out if desired. Many consumers are claiming that they were not notified about how their personal information is being used and who it is being sold to.
Who must comply?
Not all businesses must meet the terms of S.B. 27. Those affected will have these four things in common:
20 or more employees
Business relationships with customers in California
Have in the past, shared a customer’s personal info with other companies for the purpose of marketing
The incident must have taken place within the previous calendar year
There are some businesses who are exempt from the bill’s requirements. These include:
Financial organizations subject to certain provisions of S.B. 1, the California Financial Information Privacy Act.
Those administering business-related disclosures to third parties. For instance, administrative or customer service personnel who do not use the information for their own direct marketing needs.
Rights of each individual under S.B. 27
Consumers have the right to be notified by the business using a designated contact method such as email, phone, and regular mail. In the notification, the company should outline how it shares the personal information of its customers with other businesses for the purposes of direct marketing.
Notifications can be completed in any one of several ways:
A customer service representative from the company may contact customers who request this and go over their full policy for sharing customer personal data with third-party marketers.
Customers may view the company’s privacy policy by visiting a store or branch and asking to see it.
Customers may be directed to view the privacy policy statement by visiting the company’s website. The website must clearly show a link to “Your Privacy Rights” or “Your California Privacy Rights”. The privacy notice can be posted on the company’s website or on another web page that includes all this information. The disclosure must include wording that clearly indicates that the information is being given at no cost and is updated regularly with any changes to the law.
Consumers also have the right to request the following information each year from any California company they do business with:
Customers can contact the company to find out whether they implement and comply with S.B. 27.
Customers can request information about how to opt-in or opt-out of information sharing. The company is then responsible to notify the customer free of charge and in writing about opting in or out of sharing personal information.
There are additional requirements for a business that does not provide their consumers with the opt-in and opt-out information. This information must also be provided free of charge in writing or by email.
Companies are required to go into some detail about exactly what customer information they are sharing. They must provide:
Names and addresses of all third parties that obtained personal information during the preceding year from the business for direct marketing purposes.
Exactly what information they shared, i.e., the customer’s name, address, phone number, birth date, etc.
They must ensure that the customer understands what type of business they’re private info has been sold to. For instance, in cases where an individual might not readily recognize the business name, the company must provide examples of the types of products and services the third party vendor sells.
For those who wish to contact one or more companies to ask about how their personal information is being used, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has drafted a letter that can be used to request this information from any company.
The Penalties for Failing to Comply
There are legal remedies provided under the law when S.B. 27 is not properly followed. If a company fails to respond to a disclosure request, the customer is entitled to recover a civil penalty of up to $500 per violation. If the court decides that the company was willful, reckless or intentional in not adhering to S.B. 27, those filing lawsuits may be able to get $3,000 per incident. In some cases, the plaintiff’s attorney fees are also included in the award. A suit should be filed within 90 days of learning that an individual’s personal information was bought or sold without the person’s knowledge.
by Felicien | May 2, 2018 | Education
Got data? Then you’ve got needs – the need to make your data make sense. Microsoft Excel has amazing built-in magic tricks, and all it takes is just a few clicks!
Information is important. Information is critical. Information is what keeps the world moving. Life can depend on having the right information – especially the life of a business. Information is the lifeline for the professional world.
If you think we’re overestimating the value of information, try not being able to access what you need when you need it. There is a reason data is such big business today. Data storage and protection of stored data have become a $30 billion industry, with several large players in the game, including Microsoft and Amazon. Growth is expected to explode in the next five years, to nearly $100 billion by 2022. Brands have embraced the flexibility of cloud data storage with its scalability and efficiency.
The growth of cloud storage is two-fold: brands are recognizing the ease of storing data off-site, and the cost efficiency of increasing storage needs over time due to their own growth. An invisible bonus is the decreased need for in-house redundancy, with data back-ups taking more space on servers and requiring staff to oversee these processes. What do we mean by “in-house redundancy”? We’re talking about how critical data is to the success of organizations, small and large. Think about your data – your information. If your data suddenly disappeared, how long would you be able to continue normal operations? Yes, you could revert to the most recent data back-up with minimal impact – hopefully – but there is also the question of how the data loss occurred. But these are considerations better left for your cybersecurity team.
Back to your data – your information. You need your data. Your data gives you great insights into your brand performance, your customer base, your revenue, and your operational details. But how do you make sense of your raw data? If your information is stored in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software solution, you likely already have custom reports established to give you the details you need. These CRM solutions are often expensive and require further customization to get the details you need in a way that is meaningful to you and your organization. Not very helpful, is it?
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software solution allows for the continual data analysis to improve customer relationships and provide the insights needed for customer retention and revenue growth.
A CRM often pulls data from multiple sources to compile reports, like a company’s website or site analytics account for traffic metrics, various marketing efforts like direct mail or email campaigns, or even inbound marketing campaigns to measure response rates, and even social media profiles. All of this may be incredibly helpful, or it may be presented in a way that doesn’t have the right information and meaning that you are looking for to gain particular insights.
Don’t overlook the basics!
Microsoft Excel is a fantastic tool for data references and building tables to find deeper meaning from your data. Microsoft Excel helps you take raw data and organize your information in a way that holds meaning for you. You want to manipulate your data so that you can get helpful insights from the information within. For example, you’d like to identify the group of customers that purchased or canceled with your business within a certain date range. You may be able to customize a report somehow from another platform, like a CRM, but if you either do not have one of these costly software solutions, or just need this information quickly and want to avoid the time it may take to set up a custom report for these details, Microsoft Excel is the perfect solution for this purpose.
Data presentation is rarely perfect for your needs – without that costly and time-consuming customized reporting solution we mentioned earlier. A couple of quick keystrokes can help you get what you need in Microsoft Excel. For example, if you need to quickly ascertain the number of customers who purchased or canceled service within a set month and year, you have multiple options in Microsoft Excel.
First, your raw data probably isn’t formatted how you need it to be. What can you do?
Text to columns feature:
In Microsoft Excel, users have the opportunity to import data in a comma separated values file, a CSV, and then use this feature to separate the information into clean column format.
If your data is somewhat clean and consistent, this is one option. Otherwise, this is going to be manual and laborious.
How are your VBA coding sills? Can you write a macro? This seems like overkill, but it’s one way to get your raw data into an organized format. If you’re going to put this kind of time into your data, you may as well consider the customized reporting features we discussed earlier.
Sort and count manually
This is the least desirable option, as it’s the most manual and will take you the longest – isn’t the goal of technology to improve our lives and increase efficiency and productivity?
So, let’s look at our realistic option:
The super handy formula bar in Microsoft Excel is your best friend here. Follow these steps to get the magic number you need using this “magic trick” in Microsoft Excel.
Step 1: Ensure the date column is formatted properly. Excel defaults to a standard presentation for dates: MM/DD/YY. If your dates vary in presentation, this is an easy step that will save you a headache in later steps!
Step 2: Sort, or don’t sort. This is the magic of Microsoft Excel!
Step 3: A wonderful tool called the COUNTIFS formula is our best friend here. Using this specific example, if we’re looking at a specified data column in B, rows B1 through B50, and the date range is the month of April 2018, we can use this formula:
=COUNTIFS(B1:B50, “>04/01/2018″,B1:B50,”<04/30/2018”)
What this formula does is tell the spreadsheet to return the total number – not the specific rows or cells, mind you – of rows that include customers that are within the date range at you are looking.
Users will either need to update the cell range for the total count (“B1:B50”) or the date range (“04/01/2018” and “04/30/2018”) to update the total count.
If users will need to reflect on this data more often than just once, we recommend users set up a separate tab or sheet within the file for each month, even if the full data is the same, to simplify the process. This will help users compare months at a quick glance.
There you have it.
Quick note: adding more rows, etc., and this count will update accordingly and automatically. Also, sorting won’t impact the formula, just the display.
Microsoft Excel has a huge number of neat little magic tricks designed to help users – and it just takes a bit of manipulation to make your data “talk” to you and tell you what you need to know.
