Professional IT Services that Andromeda Provides for Hoffman Estates, IL Businesses:

Managed IT Services
Hoffman Estates,IL

Andromeda offers a range of IT support plans—anything from month-to-month "time & materials"-based assistance to fixed IT service contracts that permit "no-brainer" conformance to an annual budget. Beyond the functions you would expect from a full-service MSP, you'll have a dedicated C‑CATs team that includes an Account Coordinator directing the same field and remote technicians day-to-day, month-to-month, and even year-to-year to manage your IT network needs.
This isn't simply a glorified Virtual CIO offering. Imagine the cost of hiring your own CIO AND tech team for this same level of customized service and knowledge of your particular (and evolving) network setup!

Cloud Services & Migrations

Typically, the biggest issue you'll face when initiating Cloud IT services is not the services themselves, but rather the proper migration of your existing IT services to the Cloud without loss of functionality, downtime, and scores of other details that could undermine the whole process. Andromeda has a long history of expertise in physical on-premises systems. Don't make the mistake of turning all your current systems over to a "Cloud expert"; we'll save you from a lot of heartache and pain with a virtually seamless Cloud migration from your current setup— whatever it is.

Data Backup & Recovery
Hoffman Estates,IL

It's a crazy world. Literally thousands of people you don't even know attempt to break or steal from systems like yours every day. Good 24/7 monitoring is a first line of defense, of course. But no matter how great and state-of-the-art your defenses are, you'll almost certainly succomb to a successful attack in time. That's why advanced data backup and data recovery need to be tools that you and your IT partner have at the ready from Day 1. Don't be tempted to "shortcut" this element of your network in the name of expediency or to save a few dollars. Ultimately, you'll lose out on both counts with that thinking. You need a complete and integrated solution that addresses every contingency as well as IT professionals who know how to make that happen.

Cyber Security

Not only do we provide multi-tier approaches to your network security, but Andromeda also provides built-for-you solutions for disaster recovery and business continuity devices. We provide, manage and monitor a variety of devices including physical hardware, Cloud-based and hybrid options. Our team actively monitors over 403 servers and 101 physical backup devices in the field. All with 100% local engineers and technicians.

Onsite/Remote Support
Hoffman Estates,IL

Andromeda's team is completely staffed by local technicians near Hoffman Estates,IL. No matter the hour, your issue is resolved quickly and professionally. In fact, 68% of incoming calls are connected to a live technician for immediate response. When a technician isn't available, our average response time is less than 30 minutes. And if that isn't impressive enough, emergency after-hours support response times average less than 10 minutes!

IT Network Management

IT networks are our bread-and-butter. We have provided these services to clients since 1994. Some have continued to rely on us for their evolving network needs since the very beginning. We stand behind our work day to day and year to year because we foster relationships with our client-partners that absolutely demand that of us. It's in our DNA and how we prefer to do business.

AndroPedia Tech Library

As part of our service, it is important to keep our client-partners well informed on IT developments, news, and best practices. Here is just a sampling of typical items from our AndroPedia^SM library archive:

There are likely many kinds of devices and many different elements that makeup the unique network infrastructure at your manufacturing, logistics, transportation or distribution (MLTD) business. You probably have many of the standard devices we see across most of our IT clients – firewalls, routers, access points, switches etc. 

Not to mention any connected devices related to your production, staging or shipping processes.  

In recent years, the MLTD industries have been heavy targets for cybercrime and cybercriminals. This has been largely attributed to the way these businesses use technology and the fact that many businesses in these industries are leaning on older systems and technologies that are specific to their business models.   

Criminals have caught onto this issue and are attacking known weak points, disrupting production, and grinding businesses to a halt.  

One important step you can take to defend against this is to segment your networks and add layers to protect the different networks of your business.  

What does it mean to segment my network?  

Essentially, all this means is separating different groups or functions at your business into different networks so that you can control them individually.  

The most common network segmentation we perform and encounter in the MLTD market is between the operations network (back office) and the production network (on ‘the floor’ of your facility) and the BYOD Network (for guests and staff devices).  

Why do I want to segment my network?

Segmenting your network helps to keep all of the appropriate activities in their appropriate lanes. For instance, you don’t want your employees surfing the web on their cell phones on the same network that your primary business functions on.  

Imagine an employee accidentally clicked a bad link and infected/shut down the whole network – you’d likely want this to happen in an area that didn’t impact the entire business. Instead, if you segment properly, the impact would be restricted to the BYOD or Guest network and your employees couldn’t use WIFI on their personal devices until you got things cleaned up.  

Now, imagine this same example hits your back office. An employee opens an email and unknowingly gets infected with ransomware. That ransomware now spreads throughout the office and all PCs are down. With proper network segmentation, you have an added layer that will help protect your production floor from being infected. With a good <<business continuity plan – Link to that other article on business continuity>> your team can work on resolving the issues in the office but the production network would not be impacted.

The post Importance of Segmenting Your Network in Manufacturing and Logistics appeared first on Andromeda Technology Solutions.

Sometimes it sounds like the news and cyber experts are on loop or a broken record. Every day there is a new report about cyber security, threats and the like. But while these stories and warnings may start to seem like white noise in the background, the threats are still here and they are very real.

The upside of all of this coverage and conversation is that business owners are wising up and with the topic of cyber security taking center stage, users and business owners alike are being more proactive when it comes to protecting and educating themselves.

In the spirit of education we’d like to dive a little deeper into 5 features/protocols you can set up at your office to beef up your IT Security.

Top 5 Cyber Security Features/Protocols

Multi Factor Authentication

This feature is nothing new but it is becoming more and more common across all kinds of accounts. Financial services, email, social media and other applications/accounts are making use of multi or dual factor authentication. Essentially you have a password and second form of identification to prove your identity. Sometimes this is a randomly generated code – think Facebook’s code generator.

Another type of multi or dual factor authentication uses biometric data for identity verification. Things like a fingerprint or a retina scan are examples of this type of security measure. In fact, last month we took a look at biometrics, integrated security and banking applications – read more about that here.

An Employee Training Program

Statistically over 80% of all breaches and intrusions occur after an employee error. Clicking a link in an email, downloading a malicious file, visiting an infected website . . . there are so many ways this can happen and most of the time it isn’t intentional either. The best way to prevent this from happening is an ongoing security program for yourself and employees. A good program will have a varied focus: compliance standards for personal and customer info (commonly known as pii or personally identifiable information), strategies for recognizing and avoiding email scams, proper security protocols for best practices at the office and more. In 2017 Andromeda recognized this need and released our PII Protection/Cyber Security Training Program. See full details here.

Business Grade Firewall

A good firewall is your first defense against intrusion. With proper intrusion detection and intrusion prevention settings you arm yourself against cyber criminals and hackers. On top of that, a business grade firewall solution is an important piece of hardware when you want to set up public and private networks. You definitely don’t want guests at your building or passersby accessing company documents or networks because of low cyber security protocols.

Regularly Scheduled Updates/Patching

New viruses and threats hit the market every day. On top of that, hackers and criminals discover new vulnerabilities almost as fast as developers can protect against them. This is why keeping up to date and on top of patching and updates is so important. For instance, the WannaCry virus everyone heard so much about this year took advantage of a vulnerability that had already been addressed by a Windows patch. If companies had proactively updated and maintained their updates/patches, they wouldn’t have been as vulnerable to an attack.

Spam Filters

This ties into both firewall protocols and employee training but of course, the fewer random emails that make it into your employee inboxes, the fewer links and files you need to worry about employee’s (or even yourself) clicking on. A professional spam tool can be configured to your liking and can do a whole lot to prevent content from making it to those that might accidentally infect your network. See the photos below for a few examples of emails we protect customers from on a daily basis.

As always, Andromeda is here to help you protect yourself and your business from these ongoing threats. Take the first step today and sign up for a cyber security audit with our team of experts.

www.WeNetwork.com/CyberAudit

The post 5 Cyber Security Features/Protocols Your Business Needs To Protect Against Scammers, Hackers & Cyber Criminals appeared first on Andromeda Technology Solutions.

Are you a Pokemon Go fan? If so, we've got bad news.�Beginning in October of this year (2020), your game will stop working on older Android and iOS devices.

Support is officially being discontinued for Android 5, iOS 10, and iOS 11. Additionally, the company is ending support for the iPhone 5S and the iPhone 6.�If you're using any of the above, you'll need to upgrade either your OS, your equipment, or both.

Niantic, the company that makes the wildly popular game, didn't offer up a specific reason for ending support on the equipment and Oss mentioned above. However, one can safely assume that it's probably related to an upcoming feature the company knows won't run on those systems.

In any event, if you're a fan and you want to keep access to the game itself, the items you've collected, and to your PokeCoins, you'll need to upgrade before mid-October of this year.

Concurrent with the end of support warning, the company also announced three weeks of Mega Evolution-themed events in the month of September:

• A Mega Pidgeot event that is slated to run from September 1^st through September 7^th
• A Mega Houndoom event that will run from September 11^th through the 17^th
• A Mega-Evolution Timed Research story event that will run from September 22^nd through the 28^th.

So sure, you may have some upgrading to do, but the reward is that you get three supremely cool week-long events. You'll be well positioned to keep right on enjoying the game into the future. What's not to like about that?

Kudos to Niantic for giving their playing base plenty of time to respond to the change, and for making one of the most iconic games in recent history.

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