Why are small businesses easier to infiltrate? They tend to have fewer safeguards in place than larger enterprises. Small-business owners erroneously believe that because they have fewer clients and therefore less data to compromise, they offer little enticement for cyber thieves. On the contrary, because cyber criminals can penetrate small businesses’ systems more easily, they will hit several small businesses in the same amount of time that it would take them to get past all the security measures of a large enterprise.

Email is still the most common form of communication used in business. Hackers know this and will use email to infiltrate a company’s system. They can do this via tainted attachments or hyperlinks. Other, bolder criminals will call or visit a business pretending to be network administrators or representatives from a security firm. Teach your employees how to recognize when someone is on a phishing expedition. One mistake could ruin your business and your reputation.

Data security is paramount to the success of your business. You are responsible for protecting your clients’ information. If their credit card information gets stolen because a hacker infiltrated your system, even if their credit card companies don’t make them pay for the fraudulent purchases, they will still blame you. Trust is one of the most valuable things you can get from your clients. Once that’s lost, it’s almost impossible to get back. In fact, some clients will never put their trust in you again. And they certainly won’t be referring any of their friends or colleagues to you. So, not only have you lost current business but also future business.

Besides making sure you install firewalls and update security software programs regularly, establish best practices for you and your employees to follow. Use complicated passwords that use numbers, symbols and capital letters. This makes them tougher to guess. Complicated passwords are also tougher to remember, so keep them written down in a small notebook that it’s store away from the computer. Change login passwords about once a month. Also, teach your employees how to recognize suspicious emails. To make it easier for people to remember to follow these best practices, you could post them in the break room and above copiers and fax machines. When it comes to recognizing suspicious callers or visitors, you could run regular drills. You could make them fun by offering a prize to the person who “catches” the most suspicious visitors. Or you could divide your employees into teams, depending on how many you have. Gift cards or branded merchandise could be offered as prizes.

You really can’t take too many precautions when it comes to protecting your company data. Your clients rely on you to keep them protected from cyber criminals, too, so anything you do to protect your business also protects your clients.

Looking for a trusted IT security firm to help you protect your business information and data?  Call us today.

According to Microsoft, despite being server only, clients will be able to access ReFS stored data. The new system has an NTFS base with new architecture and engineering that will accommodate 21^st century “storage technologies and scenarios.”

The NTFS semantics and features that ReFS won’t support are named streams, object IDs, short names, compression, file level encryption (EFS), user data transactions, sparse, hard-links, extended attributes and quotas.

Although ReFS and Storage Spaces can run independently of each other, Microsoft expects a lot of customers to use them in conjunction with each other. When customers use ReFS in conjunction with mirrored Storage Spaces, corruptions will be fixed automatically and transparently. Microsoft has also devised a way to deal with “bit rot,” which happens when parts of the disk develop corruptions over time that tend to go undetected because those parts aren’t often read.

“In order to deal with bit rot, we have added a system task that periodically scrubs all metadata and Integrity Stream data on an ReFS volume residing on a mirrored Storage Space,” said Surendra Verma, a Microsoft development manager on the storage and file system team. “Scrubbing involves reading all the redundant copies and validating their correctness using the ReFS checksums. If checksums mismatch, bad copies are fixed using good ones.”

Microsoft has several goals it hopes to achieve with ReFS such as verify and auto-correct data, optimize for extreme scale and never take the file system offline.

It may be more than a year before ReFS is ready to be used by the average consumer. In the meantime, anyone who is interested in learning more about it can do so on Microsoft’s MSDN blog.

An Act of Congress established Washington’s Birthday – Feb. 22 – as a federal holiday in 1880. In January 1971, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act moved the holiday to the third Monday in February, which led to the renaming of the holiday as Presidents Day in the mid-1980s, thanks to some encouragement from advertisers. Although Lincoln’s birthday, Feb. 12, 1809, was never a federal holiday, it is now incorporated into Presidents Day celebrations, remembrances and advertising. The same advertising pressure that led to the renaming of the Washington’s Birthday holiday also brought an end to businesses, other than the US Postal Service, closing in honor of it.

Retailers focus so much on selling their wares that nobody ever really thinks about the two men the day is meant to honor. Both were considered men of integrity. Integrity is important both in your business and personal relationships. Although the story about George Washington cutting down a cherry tree and then confessing the crime to his father after saying, “I can’t tell a lie, Pa,” has been proven false, it is true that he refused to promote his cousin William Washington to a higher rank because he didn’t want others to view the promotion as favoritism. Long before it became mandatory, Washington served only two terms as president.

Abraham is best known for signing of the Emancipation Proclamation that put an end to slavery, the Gettysburg Address and being the first president to get assassinated. He espoused the beliefs of equality and freedom for all in the Declaration of Independence. When he was a congressman representing the Whig party, he supported things like internal improvements and urbanization.

Presidents Day is not just a day to go shopping. It’s a day to reflect on all the freedoms we enjoy thanks to our first president George Washington and our 16^th president Abraham Lincoln. Without them and their courage to do what they thought was right and best for our nation, where would we all be right now?

(Houston, TX Feb. 17, 2012) The Houston business community relies on technology to communicate with clients, close new sales, order products through distribution chains and report on the financial health of day-to-day operations.

It is CITOC’s focus to deliver the right information technology that blends innovative thinking with meeting the daily requirements for our clients.  Technology plays a crucial role in every business in Houston and CITOC takes ensuring uptime seriously.

The fifth-annual MSP Mentor 100 survey ran from October 2011 through December 2011.  Instead of ranking MSPs merely by total revenue, we calculate an index measurement using such metrics as overall managed services revenue, overall managed services revenue growth, percentage managed services revenue growth, managed services revenue per employee, number of devices managed and other data points comparing fiscal 2011 to fiscal 2010. This index approach ensures small, midsize and large MSPs from around the world are recognized on the MSPmentor 100 of which the Top 200 in North America list was a subset.

CITOC is honored to be recognized as one of the best IT service providers in North America.  The MSP Mentor Top 100 global MSP list annually ranks the top managed IT service providers. Rankings are listed globally and by region.

“CITOC bets on the cloud,” said President and CEO, BJ Farmer.  “The cloud will change the way many businesses in Texas use IT.  It is this innovative approach to provide the right IT solutions that helps businesses decrease costs, improve efficiencies and maximize profitability that matters to us.”

2012 is the first year that the Top 200 in North America list appears as a subset of MSP Mentor’s top 100.

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About the Company:  CITOC is a leader across all IT consulting companies in Houston, Texas, providing services that other IT consulting companies only dream about. We view ourselves as an extension of your business. CITOC has won four awards from the Houston Business Journal in 2011 including Fast Tech 50 award for the 5th time.  In 2011, CITOC was recognized on the Inc. 500/5000 list.

If you’d like a free consultation, visit us at http://www.citoc.com or call 713.490.5000.

One Windows 8 feature that will appeal to everyone is a faster boot up time. Who wouldn’t love to be able to log on to his computer and get to work almost immediately? For people who travel a lot or reboot their computers a lot (think IT professionals), this feature is especially convenient. Windows 7 boots up pretty quickly, so it will be interesting to see how many seconds Windows 8 will shave off of that.

Windows to Go is convenient for business use. Some business owners don’t want to store their companies’ data in the cloud because they find the security of Internet storage more than a little dubious. Windows to Go is for Windows Server 8 only; however, it will benefit businesses because IT professionals will be able to quickly transfer important data and apps from an employee’s desktop to his tablet PC or smart phone.

The Windows 8 Side-by-Side Apps for tablet PCs trumps even Apple’s iPad 2. With the Apple iPad 2, only on app can run at a time. With Windows 8, you can run two. This means you can have a webinar playing on YouTube while you browse the Internet to learn more about the person who’s presenting.

Windows Live SkyDrive integration is something that will benefit individuals rather than businesses. Windows Azure is better equipped to satisfy the security needs of business professionals. Anyone who’s ever used Google Documents has an idea what using SkyDrive is like. You can create, edit and share documents without cluttering your computer’s hard drive because everything is saved in the cloud. The bonus with Windows 8 is that you will be able to access data stored in SkyDrive via your computer’s Metro interface.

The last feature I want to talk about is the Task Manager. With Windows 8, the Task Manager will be more detailed – a great help for people who don’t have advanced computer skills – and easier to use. Users will be able to isolate whatever programs are failing and quickly shut them down. It’s hard to tell how much of an improvement this is going to be over Windows 7, which already plainly lists whatever applications a user has running. Shutting one down is as simple as selecting it and then clicking the “End Task” button.

The date when Microsoft makes its consumer preview of Windows 8 available to the masses is fast approaching. Those who are interested in giving it a try should know that it’s probably going to be better suited for tablet PCs and touch-screen computers than regular laptops and desktops.

Looking for a Microsoft partner to help you?  We are your trusted Microsoft partner and ready to help your business with all your Microsoft support needs.  Call us today.