We have been using Egnyte for over nine years, before wide-spread cloud adoption was a thing. Egnyte has continued to invest in their platform and in our opinion, it is the strongest cloud sharing service available. When compared to SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Drive, and others, there is no real comparison. A few of our reasons are below.
User adoption:
Egnyte is so easy to learn and pick up that almost anyone in the organization can do it with minimal training. Where training is needed, helpful guides and resources are available and take just minutes, not hours or days, to learn.
Flexibility of access methods:
We can deploy Egnyte in just about any configuration that makes sense – cloud only, hybrid, or local. You can have the benefits of a cloud solution with the speed and security benefits of local storage. No other solution, SharePoint included, can boast this with as much simplicity and value as Egnyte can.
No cumbersome VPN services, no compromise on security. No problem.
Platform:
You get more than just file sharing. You also get backup, revisioning, and collaboration tools; as well as multi-point integrations with industry leading products such as Microsoft 365.
Secure sharing:
Egnyte allows you to securely share both inside and outside your organization, ensuring compliance and PII remains protected while offering an intuitive way to share and engage your team, clients, and vendors.
Search:
Gain contextual search for all things stored in Egnyte allowing you to quickly and deeply understand your data. The engine is turnkey and ready to go from day one. No training data sets, integration work, or complex scripting required to get started. With simple reports, alerts, and triggered workflows, you don’t need a team of engineers to operate it either.
Compliance:
Help drive good compliance practices by limiting and being able to report on who has access to your data, both inside and outside the organization. With full audit logs, access trails, and deep user permissions, layer on Egnyte Protect for the most automated and comprehensive experience.
Egnyte is a power tool, delivering value day after day with an intuitive method of working. As a partner, PremierePC can offer you full support, direct billing, and ongoing assistance with management. Learn More…
Do you believe IT equipment should have a maintenance plan, or should the owner just wait until it breaks?
Yes and no, it really depends on the type of gear and if its mission critical or not. Let’s review a few types of hardware and answer with more specifics.
Servers:
Absolutely. Obtain NBD service directly from the manufacturer when purchasing., opt for the longest term they have available., 5 years is the average lifespan of mid to high end servers. For entry level servers, a 3 year term is more reasonable.
Network gear:
Most routers and switches will come with a 1-year warranty. Meraki for example will offer hardware replacement as long as you maintain your security services. For small business gear, the cost of warranty exceeds the risk. For higher end switches in the thousands, this makes more sense.
Workstations / Laptops:
We advise that all new systems be ordered with the 3 year NBD depot warranty option for any business user. Having techs come to you vs you having to shop your unit off waiting weeks is always smarter. The average laptop or desktop will last about 3 years when choosing mid to high end gear.
Monitors and Accessories:
We skip these options as we have seen very few monitor failures due to manufacture defects over the last decade. If there is a problem, it will usually manifest in the first year. Stay away from the cheap brands and pay a little more for quality to avoid any issues.
What do business owners look for in an IT provider?
Within the IT support industry there are no real standards in terms of what or how a company provides IT services. There are differing models such as break-fix, contracts, or hybrid offerings.
With 20+ years in the IT support space, we feel that the Managed Services approach works best for both client and provider alike.
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) exist to collect and manage an array of services and solutions for their clients. Within that designation, there can be a focus on vertical or niche industries.
What we have observed over the last two decades is that clients with an MSP are much better prepared for changes, have a higher security posture, and have better performing networks. To this end, that is our approach. Think of an MSP as your IT controller.
Questions you should ask a potential IT provider should include:
Most of all, find a provider you can trust, one that will act on your company’s best interests. As an example, our firm does not add margin to hardware or software sales. We are not here to upsell gear, instead we focus on our service relationship.
Dark Web Monitoring | A Message from Matthew Rydzfski
View our Dark Web Video on Youtube
What Is A Phishing Attack? What Can I Do To Protect My Data?
Phishing emails, texts and phone calls try to trick you into visiting a malicious website, handing over a password, or downloading a file. This works in email attacks because people often spend the whole day at work clicking on links and downloading files as part of their jobs. Hackers know this and try to take advantage of your habit to click without thinking.
Number one defense: PAUSE BEFORE CLICKING
Beat phishing by calling the sender and locking down your personal and business information. Deploy MFA to your user base to help protect data, even if they do click.
Employee oversight due to lack of training is the number one way hackers gain access to your company’s data. Regular security training is imperative to mitigate these threats. Learn more…
Download our phishing handout here.
Email Security, Compalince and Encryption
Are you only relying on your email platform’s baked in spam filtering? You could be leaving yourself open to a range of threats.
What is email filtering?
Most major email providers use built in settings to move emails to “junk” or “spam.” These settings work great for unwanted advertising. However, they are not as effective in blocking incoming phishing emails that are designed to steal your personal information. These settings also do not prevent users from visiting websites known to contain malware.
How does it work?
Email filtering analyzes incoming emails for common trigger words, problematic content or design of the email, previously flagged IP addresses or senders, etc. Emails from unknown senders containing links or attached documents may also set off these phishing filters.
Phishing filters will typically move flagged emails to an additional inbox and place them “on hold” until you release, block, or allow it.
Releasing an email sends it to your normal inbox to be opened. In the future you will have to continue approving emails from the sender. If an email is blocked, then the email is rejected and the sender will be now be blocked from sending you future emails.
What are other ways to protect my network?
How can PremierePC help?
Learn more about our email security and compliance offerings and overarching cybersecurity support.
All services sold by the user by the month, no long-term commitments or up-front fees. Services are limited to managed service plan clients.
Q and A : Cyber Attacks
We encounter this all the time and would like to offer some concrete suggestions.
First, contact a local IT firm that either specializes in cybersecurity instead of a local break-fix shop. Usually, you will be searching for Managed Service Providers. MSP’s are better suited to both understand and have the tools readily available to best assist you.
With any compromise, there are two immediate goals. Identify the ingress point and sever access. This process includes looking at your network equipment, servers, and computing endpoints.
Once the entry point has been determined and blocked, it’s time to complete a network forensics review. During this time, each machine is run through several virus and malware scans. In addition, we utilize a threat hunting service that can detect current and past malware footholds.
An often-overlooked part of the process is reviewing the firewall and server configuration to ensure no external access is permitted to internal systems. Eight out of ten times the main ingress point is a firewall rule allowing access to an internal server or other computing resource.
A common error is getting a compromised server cleaned, then putting it back into service too soon. Checking the network level rules before placing servers back in operation is a best practice to avoid more downtime or re-infection.
Ensure that all of your computing devices have next generation anti-virus solutions. Have an enterprise class router with active security services. Always use a VPN to access internal systems from outside instead of Remote Desktop Connections or other similar software, especially when dealing with PII or your own financial data.
Double check your backup policy and data retention rules. Test your backup with a fire drill at least quarterly. Use a company, like us, that offers fully managed backup with human monitors.
With a few simple steps, you can improve your security posture, mitigate your risks, and recover faster from an attack.
Secure File Sharing and Content Collaboration with Egnyte
We have been using Egnyte for over nine years, before wide-spread cloud adoption was a thing. Egnyte has continued to invest in their platform and in our opinion, it is the strongest cloud sharing service available. When compared to SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Drive, and others, there is no real comparison. A few of our reasons are below.
User adoption:
Egnyte is so easy to learn and pick up that almost anyone in the organization can do it with minimal training. Where training is needed, helpful guides and resources are available and take just minutes, not hours or days, to learn.
Flexibility of access methods:
We can deploy Egnyte in just about any configuration that makes sense – cloud only, hybrid, or local. You can have the benefits of a cloud solution with the speed and security benefits of local storage. No other solution, SharePoint included, can boast this with as much simplicity and value as Egnyte can.
No cumbersome VPN services, no compromise on security. No problem.
Platform:
You get more than just file sharing. You also get backup, revisioning, and collaboration tools; as well as multi-point integrations with industry leading products such as Microsoft 365.
Secure sharing:
Egnyte allows you to securely share both inside and outside your organization, ensuring compliance and PII remains protected while offering an intuitive way to share and engage your team, clients, and vendors.
Search:
Gain contextual search for all things stored in Egnyte allowing you to quickly and deeply understand your data. The engine is turnkey and ready to go from day one. No training data sets, integration work, or complex scripting required to get started. With simple reports, alerts, and triggered workflows, you don’t need a team of engineers to operate it either.
Compliance:
Help drive good compliance practices by limiting and being able to report on who has access to your data, both inside and outside the organization. With full audit logs, access trails, and deep user permissions, layer on Egnyte Protect for the most automated and comprehensive experience.
Monitor CyberSecurity Breaches: They Are Happening.
Reusing passwords, or a similar version of the same password, means if one of these accounts is hacked, all of them are hacked. This will happen in a matter of seconds.
Now what?
PremierePC offers a wide variety of cybersecurity solutions to help mitigate and plan for attacks. They will happen. Will you be ready?
Dark Web Monitoring (DWM)
A Zero-Touch Solution. No need to share access to your server, domain, or DNS settings.
How can we protect against human error?
Regular security training and awareness allows employees to know what to look for, and how to stop phishing attacks from successfully gaining entry into your network. This is a very effective defense against cybercrime.
This solution is INCLUDED with our Dark Web ID solution. No additional costs to layer on a proactive security awareness program.
Ready to know what the bad guys know?
Access your free scan now
**Submitting your contact information in this form does not put your information at risk. We will simply use your provided information to compare to information we find on the dark web by searching typical hacker sites, over 500 distinct Internet relay chatroom channels, 600,000 private websites, and 600 twitter feeds. We will then set up a brief meeting with you to review your results.
Q and A : Protecting important info
As with any intelligent Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) planning, a layered approach is always best.
The first step is to identify what is important. You nay have an idea, but test this out be simulating a loss. Turn off your server or shared resources and see what you truly can’t live without.
Once you have a firm idea of what you need, we can focus on how to secure it.
We utilize several tools.
Utilizing cloud services is a great start, but they are not immune to data loss. A common misconception about Google and Office 365 is that your data is backed up. It’s not. It is far less likely to be lost due to hardware failures like local data, not to mention human error. Do you backup your cloud email service?
Where possible, use intelligent file sharing solutions. We offer such a service that acts as your file share, revision platform, and can help drive compliance.
We also provide our clients with access to a human managed backup platform where we can store server images, system states, and file level backups. When something does go wrong, we are quickly able to get them back up and running.
Q and A : Issues with web developer
We think it’s regrettable that certain firms or professionals would behave like this, but we have seen it occur far too often.
Since 2006, our team has been actively helping clients manage their domains as part of the IT stack for this very reason. Your domain is a critical part of your identity and overall IT infrastructure as it directly relates not only to your website, but your email.
A web host should never NEED to own your domain or even register it for you. Having a central IT controller like PremierePC in the mix can help as we manage the domain, and then any vendors who need access to records or changes.
With this in mind, let’s focus on the problem listed. First, attempt to gain access to the website control panel or hosting account. This is the root level of access and will be your best bet to re-gain control. If that is not possible, then a local admin account to the CMS or FTP account could be used.
If the provider is unwilling to provide access to services that you pay for then legal action may be needed. While this process is going on, if possible, securing your domain before brining any legal challenges will be a wise move.
In closing, keep your domains registered yourself and where possible purchase your own hosting and have your web team build your site there. Use a trusted third party like PremierePC to help manage and control these items and act as your trusted advisor and consultant to ensure no changes are being made that will have adverse consequences. Most importantly, your domain never NEED to move to your web host for them to host a website, we firmly believe that whoever provides and manages your email platform should be in charge of the domain and DNS.
You can learn more about our domain and managed DNS program using the links below.
https://www.premierepc.net/business-hosting/domains/
https://www.premierepc.net/business-hosting/managed-dns/