Symmetric IT's Tech Blog

For all the advantages, there are some perceived disadvantages with outsourcing your IT. We try to highlight some of these disadvantages and address them in terms of how a professional IT company should alleviate those fears or disadvantages:

1. Lack Of Timely Support

This is a common fear - IT systems and computers in general tend to crash at the worst possible time or at completely random times. A business owner may contemplate whether he would have adequate support during such times because obviously there there would not be IT support onsite at all times.

To address this the IT company would have to have an iron clad support system in place. They would know the business workflows and the hardware that supports it intimately. This would allow them to have a support system in place that can respond to day to day issues as well as out of band critical support incidents (think server crashes). They will have well documented service level agreement with well defined support targets and near instant response times. An escalation procedure would also be in place to ensure that no fault will go unattended.

Remote support has also come a long way in recent times. Instant support can be given on any device, be it a desktop, server or even a smart phone. The support technician will have access to the device in such a way that it is almost indistinguishable from being there in person. The remote support handshake is also seamless with unattended access being possible.

To summarize, the tools available today allow for timely and near instant support but it needs to be structured within a well defined service level agreement.

2. Loss Of Company Internal Knowledge

When a SMB has onsite IT staff there is the perception that the knowledge regarding internal procedures, systems and workflows is better "retained" and therefore kept within the company as an asset. When a SMB outsources their IT this knowledge is thought of as being transferred to the IT company and lost to the owner.

In reality the IT company will internalize this information and knowledge, improve upon it and finally document all aspects of it. There will also be a formal documented handover procedure in the case that a different technician takes over responsibility for the IT. This keeps all business IT knowledge as a known documented quantity at all times.

Quite often if IT is not outsourced an employee can easily leave a company and take along all gained internal knowledge of the company without ever handing it over to his/her successor. This in effect takes the business owner back to square one in terms of training a new employee.

3. Loss Of Company Intellectual Property

A SMB may have the fear that once IT is outsourced, intellectual property of the company may not be well guarded and is now in the hands of a 3rd party.

To address this the IT company will have policies and procedures in place to ensure the highest level of privacy and to ensure that only authorized persons have access to company data. There will also be non-disclosure agreements in cases where necessary.

The IT company's main concern is not the data's contents but the safekeeping of it at all times.

4. Lack Of Service

Having internal IT staff may give the perception of better service since they are seen as part of the team. The IT company has to meet steep requirements in both service and interaction with the client to exceed all expectations of internal staff.

The IT company will need to employ only the most qualified consultants that posses both the required technical skills as well as interpersonal and communication skills. This is especially important in the IT field where there is often an asymmetrical relationship between client and consultant in terms of knowledge. The qualified consultant needs to be able to clearly communicate the intricacies of IT problems as well as solve them in a timely and professional manner.

About Symmetric IT

Symmetric IT is an agile IT support company that can supply you with all the services and skills mentioned in this article. We provide computer and IT Support in Auckland backed by experience and structured service level agreements. Contact us at support(at)symmetric.co.nz

There are quite a few ransomware prevention strategies, prevention techniques and software available.

• They vary from trying to identify ransomware by definitions or heuristics in an antivirus style; or preventing an executable from running in specific directories.
•  There are software that monitor common locations for encrypted files and attempt to stop the ransomware from further encrypting files.
• Application white-listing is also an option (only run software that is on an approved list).
  

There are surrounding safety settings that can also be employed, i.e, disabling RDP and locking down outlook with safe attachments etc.

None of the above methods really provide peace of mind - they tend to interfere with day to workings and rely on frequent updates. They also suffer from false positives and potential exploits (devils advocate note: here is an interesting read about a generic approach to ransomware detection that unfortunately is not available on the windows platform: Towards Generic Ransomware Detection )

As with most conclusions about ransomware it comes down to backups. This is what Symmetric IT also recommends. A backup strategy that involves rotated backups and multiple storage places is always the best. Best case scenario if you get hit by ransomware is that you more than you simply restore your backup not more than a few hours old. Worst case scenario is you restore a backup from a fall back backup which may be a week old. So worst case scenario will never compare with losing all your data.

Your primary backup location should be protected. Windows 10 has this functionality finally built in now but Macrium does this as well ( MIG ). This takes care of your primary  backups and safe-guards it from unauthorized access. Then include a secondary backup for rotation, i.e, daily or weekly, whatever suits your workflow. This is fall back 1.

Fall back 2 should be an online method that has versioning, this is important as it will allow you to revert back to a previous unencrypted version of your data.

Fall back 3 should be another local backup that is stored not on location. This covers all other worst case scenarios.

This would leave you protected against any ransomware attack. If you are using Macrium Reflect as a backup tool then you can use your image backup to perform Rapid Delta Restores which means that you're erasing ALL tracks of the ransomware and going back to a clean state instead of just replacing the affected files.

Contact Symmetric IT if you need IT Support or structured backups that can withstand any disaster.

For a lot of us this may be quite a distressing image:

Especially when you know you're close to the wifi router and should be getting a better signal. Thankfully there are some easy troubleshooting options that can boost or improve your wifi signal. Generally speaking there are 3 things that influence your wifi:

1. Position
2. Interference
3. Hardware
   

POSITION

Wifi signals radiate outwards which means that the optimal place for a wifi router is central to a room. The router should not be tucked away in a corner somewhere, ideally in an open space not confined by walls or furniture. Wifi is reflected by metal so keep it away from metal cabinets. Concrete is also a wifi signal's enemy, wood allows for better propagation.

You will need to experiment with the placement of the router to determine the best location. Android phones have useful apps that monitor and graph wifi signal strength in real time so you can easily determine whether a new position has gained you some signal strength,

INTERFERENCE

Wifi signals are very susceptible to interference so any that you can avoid or reduce will instantly improve the coverage. Interference can come from other wifi routers or  other household devices such as cordless home phones. These phones share the same frequency band (2.4GHz) so the wifi router competes with your phone system. To determine if it is in fact interfering you can simply unplug the phones and test again.

The other source can be neighboring wifi routers. Obviously they operate in the same frequency, the only thing that separates your wifi from theirs is the channel within the frequency band. There are 11 channels but only 3 of these can realistically be used. Channel 1, 6 and 11 are the only non-overlapping channels. So if your neighbor is using channel 1 then you should use 6 or 11. If your area is saturated with wifi access points then you will need to compromise by selecting the channel that is less common between all the detectable access points, based on signal strength or proximity to you.

Thankfully this is quite easy with the right software. WifiInfoView is a handy program that show you a list of detected wifi access points and their accompanying attributes such as signal strength and channel:

Sort the access points list by Signal Quality or Channel, from there you can survey the surrounding access points and their potential to interfere with yours. Make a note of the channels of the top 3 or 4 access points and adjust your channel to one that is not used or least used (choosing between 1, 6 or 11).

HARDWARE

The actual router or access point that you're using will provide some options to troubleshoot your weak wifi as well. Always ensure that you're using the best encryption you can (WPA2). This is both good for security and for speed.

You can also experiment with different frequency bands. The default is normally 2.4GHz but you can also choose to use the 5GHz spectrum. The 5GHz spectrum's main advantage is the fact that is not nearly as crowded as the 2.4GHz spectrum. It can also support higher speeds. The downside is that its reach is not as far as 2.4GHz. So if you have a situation with too many surrounding interfering access points you can switch to 5GHz which even though it may not reach as far can give you a better overall connection due to less interference.

Lastly not all access points are created equal so it's well worth upgrading to a different router or access point that may provide a better signal or is more compatible with your devices.

An odd one, the client PC(Windows 10 Creators Update) presented mainly with Outlook connecting very slowly to exchange, thereafter it was almost unusable. It would hang on trying to send and email and updating the folders were slow to non-existent.

It appeared that some https websites were very slow to respond as well, sometimes not loading at all. The smartscreen filter also was non functional ("Smartscreen filter can't be reached now")

Try the following DNS change in group policy. Run gpedit.msc, under Computer configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Network -> DNS Client: Set "Turn off smart multi-homed name resolution" to Enabled.

Note1: You may need to untick IPV6 under network adapters in case this fix does not work. Note, some testing is still needed to isolate this as the root cause.

Note2: The assumption is that the usual suspects have been eliminated, ie, Office repair/reinstall, network reset, file integrity checks [sfc /scannow], virus/malware checks, new office profile, new windows profile etc

A quick overview with some considerations:

https://www.slideshare.net/Karlvv1/delta-incremental-file-based-backups