Professional IT Services that Andromeda Provides for Riverside, IL Businesses:

Managed IT Services
Riverside,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
Riverside,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
Riverside,IL

Andromeda's team is completely staffed by local technicians near Riverside,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:

With the average American adult maintaining over 130 different accounts online, the risk of a data breach or data being stolen continues to grow. Between social media, financials, productivity applications, email, business applications, online shopping and countless other accounts online, your “online life” becomes more and more a part of your day to day physical life as time passes.

As more of our lives and data are shared online, criminals are focused on breaking into these databases to steal the valuable info they hold:

• Personal Info such as name, address, dates of birth, social security numbers etc.
• Financial information such as bank info, credit cards etc.
• Social Information on social media accounts

This is a real problem facing consumers globally but the impacts span beyond individual damages and stolen identities (though, those damages are bad enough).

When a criminal steals your password, or the password of a coworker, chances are – they’ve gained access to many pieces of your “online life”.

Here’s an example to illustrate how a third party data breach can lead a criminal back to your business.

Your HR manager helps book travel for employees at the business. He set up a business account at a national hotel chain to book rooms for whatever the business travel needs are. The hotel chain’s database suffers a breach and cybercriminals steal thousands of email/password combos including your HR manager’s credentials.

Your HR manager used the same password he uses for all kinds of sites online when he created the login at the hotel company site. This means that the criminals who have this breached data, now have access to your payroll software, servers and all the other things your HR manager interacts with.

The criminals either use this data themselves or take it to the Dark Web to sell for a few dollars (password/email combinations go for $3-$5 on average on the Dark Web).

Breaches like these happen daily and criminals use the information they steal to do as much damage as they can.

This creates a unique problem for business owners and managers because what can you possibly do to protect yourself from a data breach happening at a hotel chain or some other account online?

Things get even trickier when the average span of time between a data breach and disclosure to the public reaches 15 months. Meaning, criminals have a 15-month head start to get to your business and do damage before your are notified on the 5 o’clock news or your social media feed.

So, how can you defend against this kind of thing?

First, implement a password policy at your business:

1. Strong Passwords Required
2. Change Passwords Regularly (90 days minimum)
3. Dual Authentication
4. Lockout Procedures

Second, roll out a password management tool across your organization.

As mentioned earlier, the average adult in America manages over 130 accounts online. It is no wonder that we have a hard time creating strong and unique passwords for each of those accounts. It would be nearly impossible to remember all of that without writing things down – which isn’t secure.

To bridge the gap between security and memory, implement a password management tool. Look for something that is encrypted, secure and be sure to consider mobile capabilities. We recommend LastPass as a great option to start.

Third, invest in Dark Web Monitoring

Dark Web Monitoring is still a newer service offered to businesses and professionals. This is a monitoring solution designed to scrub different areas of the Dark Web (chatrooms, discussion boards etc.) for data connected to your domain.

If we apply Dark Web Monitoring to the example above with the HR Manager for instance – when the criminals stole data from the hotel chain and went to sell/share it on the Dark Web, the monitoring tool would identify your IT company to have the HR manager change passwords. That way, the criminals have useless data and you are protected well before you learn about the breach 15 months later.

The post How A Third-Party Data Breach Impacts Cybersecurity At Your Business appeared first on Andromeda Technology Solutions.

The solutions, procedures and technologies business owners and staff depend on are continuing their move to the cloud at a steady pace.

Predictions and trends point to over 80% of all enterprise workflow to be managed by the cloud by 2020.

While total adoption of cloud in the workplace is still believed to be 10 or more years away, the benefits to business are clearly driving the adoption of cloud technologies and solutions.

This does not mean that you should perform a cloud migration just because everyone else is doing it. You want to make sure that when you migrate different elements of your business to the cloud, you are doing so in the most secure, compliant and pain-free ways.

That being said, there are some questions you should really ask yourself when planning for or considering your migration.

4 Key Questions About Cloud Migration

1. What are the long term costs for my IT when I migrate to the cloud?

 There are quite a few different aspects of your budget that a cloud migration can impact. The first thing you will want to consider is the overall cost of the project. For example, if you have a server and you are considering the costs of a cloud migration vs. buying new hardware, there are a few things you want to look into.

• What is the physical cost of the hardware including labor for install and setup?
• What is the initial setup and migration cost if you move to the cloud?
• What are your anticipated maintenance costs for a physical server over the next 3-5 years?
• What are the maintenance costs and recurring costs for your cloud environment for the next 3-5 years?
• If you stick with an on-prem solution, how long until you have to replace your new hardware on average?

All of these questions you should ask yourself and your IT vendor/department when considering the cloud. Often, when you take long term maintenance and hardware replacement into consideration, you will end up being more cost effective with a cloud solution. But, this is not always the case.

2. What areas of our business will see benefit from a cloud migration?

The cloud has offered many benefits to business. The cloud environment lends itself to collaboration in many ways. Staff will likely enjoy the ability to access data, software and systems remotely. Departments will notice that different integrations are easier when software is in the cloud as well. Companies like Zapier, IFTTT and even Microsoft with Microsoft Flow are in the business of helping you integrate workflows and get a whole lot more done.

This means more productivity, automating repetitive tasks and hopefully better results for both your employees and clients.

3. Do you have specific security/compliance requirements?

Different industries have specific security requirements and compliance standards for data. This means that you will want to consult with experts in your industry to make sure that the solutions you choose are above board.

For instance, if you chose to migrate your email server to a hosted cloud solution, you still need to make sure that the email service is secure. Solutions like G Suite and Office 365 state in their user agreements that they are responsible for the security of the cloud environment but that YOU are responsible for all of your data.

Meaning – Microsoft or Google makes sure the cloud is secure, YOU make sure that you have backups of your emails and all of your data in case of emergency.

Additionally, if your industry has requirements for sending secure/encrypted emails, you’ll want to make sure that the solution you choose meets said requirements.

This was just an example of how security and compliance can impact your choice of cloud email solution. Depending on what you want to move to the cloud (infrastructure, software, OS etc.), you will want to consult with industry experts to ensure success.

4. Public, Private or Hybrid Cloud Solutions?

On the surface, the concept of public or private cloud solution is straight forward.

A public cloud is owned by a company like Microsoft (Azure) or Amazon (AWS). This company owns the physical space where the ‘cloud’ is hosted. In a public cloud, your business essentially leases space to host your environment. This space is technically shared but can be segmented for security purposes.

This decreases your overall time and material cost for maintenance of the environment. You access services and can manage your account by logging in from your internet browser. These public solutions are best for email solutions, office software, applications, testing environments, development environments and more.

A private cloud is owned and managed by one specific entity (either you or your IT service provider). There are no other businesses sharing your space or stored on the equipment. This is definitely a more secure solution for highly regulated industries.

A benefit with privately hosted cloud environments is that they are more customizable for specific business needs. Additionally, a private cloud is easily scaled to grow with your needs – you will just have to account for any additional hardware or bandwidth needs as you grow.

A hybrid cloud solution is a mixture of any or all solutions including: on-premises solutions, public cloud and/or private cloud.

For some industries, there may be specific elements of the business that must remain on site. In other instances, you may have proprietary software that just isn’t cloud compatible or doesn’t make sense to migrate.

You may also have certain needs that make sense to offload into a public environment where you aren’t responsible for maintenance.

The beauty of cloud migration solutions for business is that they are highly customizable. They help you get more done and stay connected in innovative ways. There is a reason that technology is steadily migrating to the cloud across our professional and personal lives.

If you have any questions about the cloud or want to discuss how the cloud can elevate your business, please give us a call at (815) 836 – 0030 or send an email to Contact@WeNetwork.com. Our team is ready and eager to help you.

The post 4 Key Questions Any Business Owner Should Ask Before Performing A Cloud Migration appeared first on Andromeda Technology Solutions.

Let's take a little time to talk about the vast numbers of smart devices in use around the world.�You probably have several in your home or office. Smart devices need operating systems, just like your phone and your PC. Of course, mobile device operating systems must be much smaller and more compact. After all, they don't really need to do a lot of computing, and they don't need a GUI, so the code tends to be on the lean side.

The odds are excellent that you've never even heard of most of the IoT's operating systems, nor the companies that make them. Take VxWorks by a company called Wind River, for example.� It's the most popular Real Time Operating System (RTOS), used in a wide range of smart devices today.� They don't get a lot of attention or oversight because almost nobody has heard of them.

That's beginning to change, however.� Recently, security researchers disclosed the details of the "Urgent 11", which are 11 vulnerabilities found in VxWorks that can be used by hackers to take control of a variety of devices. These devices range from medical systems to printers, industrial equipment, routers, and more.

The company has been in existence for 32 years. Yet, in that time, only 13 security flaws with a MITRE-assigned CVE have been found in the VxWorks RTOS, because again, nobody's paying attention.

The good news is that when someone finally started paying attention, Wind River responded quickly and resolved all eleven of the security flaws, issuing a patch to correct them.� There's just one rather significant catch, however.

The company is claiming that the vulnerabilities are not unique to Wind River software and that the IPnet stack (where the vulnerabilities were found) was acquired by the company back in 2006.� Prior to Wind River's acquisition of it, it was deployed in a wide range of other RTOS'.

All that to say, while Wind River is acting responsibly, there are an unknown number of other RTOS' out there that are vulnerable. The companies behind them may be doing little or nothing about it.� In many ways, the OS ecosystem of the IoT is still very much a black box, and that's troublesome.

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