When it comes to security and IT there’s no single silver bullet solution, but at Outhouse IT we’ve come up with bundle of things I think will make a world of difference.
Encryption of Data with Truecrypt / bitlocker: First step, protect the laptops themselves, should they be lost or stolen we need to ensure no one can get access. For Windows 7 laptops we can implement a program called Trucrypt, it’s free and takes less than an hour to setup. Once setup you will not be able to turn on the computer or access anything on it without a secure password. Trucrypt only works for windows 7, there is no windows 8 version. Microsoft makes a program called Bitlocker that will do the same thing on a windows computer, however it only works on windows 8 PRO, not windows 8 standard, we would need to upgrade any standard computers to PRO to take advantage of this. The upgrade price is $129, again about an hour setup.
Total cost windows 8 laptops $129, install time 1.5 hours each.
Net difference in user experience will be an additional password at boot up (can be same as “regular” password)
Secure the Communications with VPN: When traveling outside your home / office network it will be important to encrypt the data as it leaves your network, we want to make sure no one sees your communications as they fly across the internet and isn’t snooping while you’re on their wifi / network. A VPN solution will address this by encrypting all of your communications out through a pipe that then lands in another country before going onto the internet. The cost of a secure VPN solution is less than $10 per user per month, setup time including training likely less than 30 minutes.
Net difference in user experience will be an additional application that needs to be “turned on” before using the internet when not at home / office.
Windows Security / Firewall / Anti-virus / Anti-phishing / Anti-spyware / Web filtering / Identity protection and Email scanning: Through a series of tools we implement here at Outhouse IT we offer a robust solution to protect your computers. This includes Firewall / Anti-virus / Anti-phishing / Anti-spyware / Web filtering / Identity protection and Email scanning all backed by a remote monitoring component that would allow us to ensure your virus update files are installed and your system scanned. Should malicious activity arise on your system we would be notified so corrective action can be taken.
There is no net difference in user experience as zero user intervention required, it runs silently in the background, alerting only if an issue is detected.
Online Backups: backing up your data is important, backing it up while you’re traveling even more so. We setup each computer to complete an automatic backup of the most recent changes to documents and files in near real time whenever an internet connection is detected. All backups are encrypted and stored in a secure server that can only be accessed through a secure password login. The backup cost is $10 for 10GB of data per computer, for most email and documents (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, PDF etc.) that’s enough for one laptop. If a large amount of photos, videos or music are to be backed up we can increase the storage capacity at the same rate $1 per 1GB monthly. When traveling outside the home office the backups would be completed through the secure VPN tunnel, “double wrapping” the data encryption levels.
There is no net difference in user experience as zero user intervention required, it runs silently in the background, alerting only if an issue is detected.
Remote system monitoring: Many of our clients prefer that we take an active and proactive role in monitoring and assisting with their hardware and software needs. To accomplish this we install a tool on our clients systems that polls their system on an ongoing basis for indications of errors or issues and reports back to us should something be out of place. This service monitors for more than 1,700 different potential issues and reports back to us constantly of anything concerning. Some examples of common issues we catch are hard drive almost full, hard drive damaged or bad sectors, system crashed or rebooted, missed backup, missed virus scan, virus detected, security compromised, software installed (malicious or otherwise), memory low or processor overworked (performance issues) and another 1,690 I haven’t listed!
There is no net difference in user experience as zero user intervention required, it runs silently in the background, alerting our office if an issue is detected.
What I’ve created above is a small business edition of the same tools that a highly secured protection suite would offer to a larger organization, these are all the same tools that 3 letter government organizations are using, but from providers who make them available at small business prices.
At Outhouse IT we take your security seriously, and think you should too.
Call us today for a no cost review of your IT and security needs.
