November 2005
In this issue...

•Welcome
•Disaster Recovery
•Taking the Risk Out
•DoubleCheck
 

As technology has become a core requirement for most businesses, we want to help you learn more about products and services that can help you be more successful. Our newsletter is designed to help you make informed IT decisions for your business.

With the recent hurricanes the importance of business data is fresh on our minds. If you lose your critical data you could lose your business. (Statistics show that 40% of companies that lose their data go out of business within 2 years.) What good is a backup tape stored off-site at home, when home is under water? What good is a backup tape in a safe deposit box, when no one can get to the bank?

Whether you are a healthcare or financial organization that must comply with federal regulations, or just a smart businessperson, we can help you think through a disaster plan that meets your business needs. We can help you plan for a disaster, which could be anything from a human error, causing the loss of important data, to a major incident that causes your business to relocate.

Databranch has two offices, in Elmira and Olean, and can provide businesses with technical services all across the US and Canada through our membership in the Ingram Micro Service Network. Our staff is experienced and has passed tests to prove their knowledge. They follow the quality processes Databranch has refined over many years to ensure successful projects.

We continue to maintain high level partnerships with IT industry leaders, and we have increased our long list of certifications with Cisco IP telephony, Citrix thin client computing, and Apple. Of course, we are still proud to represent H-P, IBM, Microsoft, Symantec, Veritas, SonicWall, and other leading IT companies. Remember, whenever you have an IT concern, Call Databranch !

David Prince, President

What Small Businesses Learned

Whether it is in the form of volcanoes, tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, terrorism or other forces, the only thing we can be sure of is that disasters will occur.

Hurricane Katrina cut a wide swath of destruction through parts of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi during these last 2 weeks and many businesses were forced to activate the emergency backup plans they thought they would never need due to flooding, power outages, and other adverse conditions. Those that did not have any contingency plans just did not survive. They were mostly small to medium sized businesses.

Unlike larger organizations which usually have remote data centers storing all mission-critical data at regular intervals, smaller companies often don't have the resources, experience, or foresight to set up a disaster recovery or business continuance plan until the unimaginable, in the form of a natural disaster, crippling virus, utility interruption or even an act of terrorism, strikes. In earlier times, when we were less dependent on our technology to run our businesses, there was less need to plan ahead for disastrous possibilities. The disaster plan was to pick up the books and run. Today, we don’t have that luxury. We also tend to assume that “it won’t happen to me”.          Read more...

Ever heard a small-business owner say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"? This simple old saying depicts the mentality of thousands of SMBs when it comes to preventing security breaches and assessing vulnerabilities within their networks.

If the servers are running, e-mails are accessible and customers aren't complaining about identity theft -- companies logically assume that their security measures, however informal, are working. This false sense of security is exactly what hackers and identity thieves prey on.

The truth of the matter is that networks of all sizes are vulnerable to attacks and security threats 24/7/365. Spyware, worms and viruses don't discriminate. If there is a way into your network, they will find it and you may, or may not, know about it. Although the short-term impact to your business is obvious, the long-term impact is what really keeps us up at night.

Security breaches and other malicious attacks not only take down the network and compromise your company's data and your customers' privacy, they can ruin your company's reputation. With competition around every corner, and new laws mandating the disclosure of data theft to affected consumers, news like this travels fast. So what should you do?        Read more...