Data Archives - NuTech Services LLC

Nov, 2022

Data Sure is Neat, Part 2

How much information does your typical book hold? If you haven’t read it yet, go back and read our last blog about how much data is stored in the Library of Congress, then come back here to learn more about the everyday applications of data and how much we store on a day-to-day basis.

Examining the Bit

Data is made up of bits, or strings of ones and zeros. There are 7 bits in English characters and 8 bits in a byte.

Data is stored in ones and zeros because that’s the way we have been doing it for the past 70 years. We like to use the example of a machine that has seven lights on it to represent data. If the light is on, then it’s a zero, and if it’s off, it’s a one. The combinations of lights translate into various characters, like letters, numbers, and symbols, and when strung together in large arrays, can represent vast quantities of data to be read by a system.

Magnets use this method to store data, and they are the backbone of the present-day hard drive. With spinning platters that look an awful lot like a stack of CDs, the hard drive uses magnets to read and write data to the drive. These devices are sensitive and can detect something as tiny as something billions of times smaller than an eyelash cut into a hundred different pieces. Pretty shocking stuff.

Basically, the hard drive was crucial to the development of data storage, and it remains to this day a common staple in the office environment and even for consumer electronics. Solid state drives, or SSDs, are also quite popular, and they run using electrical charges to tiny transistors. Since they don’t rely on mechanical movements or magnets, they are the preferred choice for mobile devices, tablets, and laptops, and they can run a lot faster than your average desktop computer HDD as a result.

How Much Data is Contained On Your Smartphone?

If the US Library of Congress holds 51 Terabytes, how much does the average smartphone hold?

A typical high-end smartphone has about a quarter or half a terabyte, but if your smartphone has a Micro SD card slot, you could potentially expand its storage by an entire terabyte. That is about a 50th of the Library of Congress, or over a million books. It’s pretty shocking, considering how small those little guys are.

Here are just a couple of ways you can use a 1 Terabyte Micro SD card:

200,000 songs
250 full-length movies in full HD
6.5 million pages of PDF documents
250,000 photos taken with a 12 megapixel camera
Essentially every video game from the 80s and 90s.
Or you could store 10,000 copies of Windows 95 and Microsoft Office 95.

How Much Data Does Humanity Produce?

Humanity has produced 44 zettabytes as of 2020, and this would require 44 billion 1 TB Micro SD cards. This number could double by the end of this year, and by 2025, it could exceed 200 zettabytes. Absolutely mind-blowing.

Considering the fact that more than 62 percent of all people on the planet use social media, send emails, move information from one point to the next, and so on, this isn’t that surprising. With 300 billion emails sent daily and over 500 hours of YouTube content uploaded daily, data generation is not slowing down anytime soon.

Look, Data is Important

We hope that this look at data generation has made you look at your own data in a different light. Yes, new data is created all the time, but you can save a lot of time and energy by protecting the data you already store with data backup and disaster recovery solutions. Failing to do so is like doing the same work twice; there’s no reason for it, so don’t do it.

NuTech Services can be your go-to resource for data backup solutions. To learn more, contact us at 810.230.9455.

Nov, 2022

Data Sure is Neat! Part 1

It isn’t a secret that technology has come so, so far as compared to just a short time ago. Take data, for instance. Let’s dive into why something so incredibly small is so incredibly important (and while we’re at it, how much space today’s data would take up in other formats).

What is Data?

To explain data, let’s go back to how data was stored before we had fancy-schmancy computers and smartphones and the like—in books! The typical novel contains somewhere from 60,000 to 110,000 words, with lengthier epics containing more (as you would expect). To get a sense of exactly how much data this translates to, let’s turn our attention to the typical text message, with its maximum of 160 characters, and anywhere from one to three sentences on average. English-language characters are each 7 bits, with each bit represented by a 1 or a 0. 01000001 stands in for “A,” while 01000010 stands in for “B.”

So, what does this matter? I promise, we’re getting there.

A text message can contain a total of 1120 bits of data, 1120 ones and zeroes. With 8 bits in every byte, this translates to 140 bytes per text message. 1,000,000 bytes make one Megabyte.

The average word to be found in our novel is made up of about five characters, meaning it could contain anywhere between 300,000 to 555,000 characters. Multiplying by seven for the bits that make up each character, and dividing by 8 for the bits in each byte, we have 481,250 bytes, or 0.48125 Megabytes, in our book.

Following this logic, a large book could contain about a half a Megabyte of information…then you also have to consider metadata, the cover, and the other assorted information an ebook would contain, which means it’ll be about one Megabyte in size. This is added to further by any images or illustrations.

How Much Data Can Be Found in a Library?

Okay, so because libraries often hold books that are far larger than the average novel—textbooks, reference books, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and the like—some files will be much, much larger than a Megabyte, while others could very well be much smaller. For simplicity, let’s assume that the average book in our hypothetical library equals one Megabyte.

The typical library generally holds between 5,000 and 500,000 books, although some hold millions. The United States Library of Congress, for instance, has over 51 million books, 25 million manuscripts, and millions of other items in its massive collection. Again, to keep things simple, let’s omit everything but the text in each of the 51 million books and calculate the data stored within.

51 million Megabytes equals about 51 thousand Gigabytes, which then converts to 51 Terabytes. Many PCs contain 1 to 2 Terabyte drives, so the entire book collection of the Library of Congress could be contained on about 25 home computers. Crazy, when you think about it.

Of course, we don’t currently have mobile devices with this kind of capacity, but who knows what the future will hold.

It’s also important to acknowledge that we only calculated based on the text alone. If each book was scanned in as images, you could expect the total per book to be closer to 8 Megabytes, with a need for 408 Terabytes to hold the Library of Congress. That would take far more than a room of workstations to contain.

Stay Tuned for the Data Your Organization Handles

Next time around, we’ll discuss how much data the average human being generates, in addition to what is stored in your business each day. Make sure you check back so you don’t miss it!

Nov, 2022

Network Segmentation is a Smart Move for Business Cybersecurity

When it comes to your network and its security, you cannot give all of your users access to all of your assets. It’s just not a good practice, and doing so can potentially put your resources at risk. Let’s discuss how network segmentation can make a world of difference for the integrity of your network and the data found on it.

Explaining Network Segmentation

Network segmentation can best be described as the practice of segmenting your business’ network into different parts with the intention of protecting its various resources.

To use a practical example, consider how a bank might be set up. The bank isn’t just secured at the front door; it’s also secured at various points within the building, including security cameras and multiple locked doors, safety deposit boxes, and vaults, all of which require different keys to access.

Network segmentation works in the same way, providing multiple different opportunities to partition off various parts of your network for authentication and access control. This helps to handle not just external threats, but internal ones as well. It’s just one major component of a zero-trust architecture model, and it’s an important one.

How Does Network Segmentation Protect Your Business?

Network segmentation works by keeping certain people based on roles and responsibilities away from specific data on your infrastructure, thereby reducing the risk that it can be compromised or stolen. This helps your business against cybercrime and helps to limit employee access to data they have no business accessing.

For example, you wouldn’t want anyone on your sales team to have access to the personal or private data shared with human resources, and you wouldn’t want any regular employee handling payment information from a client or the financial information for your company’s banking. Each department has its own data that is required for it to function, and you don’t want to put yourself in a compromised situation because you let the wrong employee access the wrong kind of information.

If your business’ network is properly segmented, you can limit access to this information based on user role. Your HR department can have access to all of the records they need to do their jobs, and the same goes for accounting, IT, or any other part of your organization. This is especially important for positions like executives and IT administrators, who might have super admin access to the network, thereby granting considerable permissions for the entire network. Imagine if that account got hacked and used against you; you don’t want to think about it.

Let Us Help to Protect Your Network

NuTech Services can help your business handle all of its issues related to network security. To learn more, contact us at 810.230.9455.

Oct, 2022

The Tell-Tale HDD

If Edgar Allan Poe worked in an office, here’s what one of his works would sound like:

True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I have been and am, but why will you say that I am mad? The office had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was my sense of hearing. I heard all things in heaven and on earth and many things in…the other place. So, how then am I mad, especially when I can so healthily and calmly tell you this story?

It’s impossible to say how the idea first entered my brain, but once conceived, I couldn’t get it out of my head. There was no reason for it, there was no feeling behind it. I really liked my boss. He had never wronged me, he had always respected me. I wasn’t even that jealous of his money. I think it was his eye…yes, it was this. Whenever we were working in the office, his gaze would fall upon us and my blood would run cold. After a while, very gradually, I determined that I needed to take my leave of the company, and rid myself of his critical gaze.

To do so, I would take the company’s data along with me to make me more valuable to the next company I found.

Now, this is the point, and why you probably think I’m nuts. Here’s the thing, though…would a crazy person so carefully and cautiously make such a plan as I had? I was the ideal employee for the boss. Every day, after the boss had left, I would copy a bit of the company’s data onto a hard disk drive I kept hidden in my desk. I did this for an entire week, adding a little more data to my drive each time. Every morning, when work began, I would stride in confidently and greet the boss, asking him how his evening was. So, he would need to be very quick to suspect that I was siphoning away some of his data after he left.

On the eighth night, I set up my hard drive to copy more data than ever, and I felt more accomplished than any night prior to this one. There was so much data that I now had to offer a new employer. To think I had managed to collect so much valuable data, little by little, and for the boss to have no idea. I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself. The boss heard me, and he came out of his office quite suddenly. You’d think that I’d be concerned—but no. The office was dark, with most workstations asleep, and the door could only be opened from the inside. I knew that I was hidden from his sight, so I continued my work.

Suddenly, my workstation beeped, and the boss turned to my direction, crying out—”Who’s there?”

I stayed very still at my desk. For a whole hour I didn’t move a muscle, and he didn’t close his door after he returned to his office. He was waiting there, listening, just as I had done each night of the preceding week.

After a moment, he groaned, and I knew he was scared. This wasn’t a groan of pain or grief—oh, no—it was the sound that comes when someone is stifling back deep terror from their soul. I knew it well, because the same feeling would hit me in the late hours of the night, and would make a similar sound myself. I knew how my boss felt, and almost pitied him. Almost. I could hear him muttering to himself, trying to explain away his nerves. He quickly gathered his things, continuing to explain away his nerves to himself, and promptly left—still never discovering me at my workstation.

I waited a long time, listening for the elevator doors, the sound of his car driving away, before I resumed my work. The glow of my display illuminated my hands as I copied file after file to my hard drive. With quiet determination, I took a copy of every file, my hidden hard drive whirring away as data was added to its stores.

Suddenly, I hear it—a rhythmic, quiet clicking, emerging from the drawer containing my hard drive, punctuated by high-pitched squeals. Panicking, I turned off my workstation, killing power to the drive, and swiftly left the office and made my way home. In my haste, the drive was left in the drawer. Returning home, I slept a fitful and restless sleep.

When morning came, I returned to the office filled with confidence, yet tired from my restless night. As such, I was on edge. I sat at my desk, with little patience for the droll chatter that my coworkers were sharing around me. I booted up my workstation, smiling despite myself, knowing that in the desk I sat at laid the proof of my triumph. I smiled, greeting my coworkers politely, keeping up the ruse to avoid any suspicion.

My coworkers suspected nothing, my cheerful demeanor and casual spirit giving them no reason for concern. Before very long, however, I grew more tired and my head began to ache. Meanwhile, I began to hear a quiet screeching which grew louder and louder as the day passed. I continued talking to try and drown out the sound, but it wasn’t long before I realized that the sound wasn’t just in my head.

I felt myself grow pale, although I continued to confer with my teammates to try and drown out the sound. Yet the sound continued to grow. I spoke louder, more animatedly, but the sound still grew louder. I continued to speak, more and more aggressively, but the noise still grew more and more pronounced. How could my coworkers not hear the clicking and squealing coming from my drawer? I kicked my feet against the side of the desk where the hard drive was kept, but the noise was still drowned out by the squealing and clicking. Yet my coworkers still chatted pleasantly and cordially. Could they really not hear it? No, that was impossible. They knew—and not only that, they were mocking my attempts to hide it.

I couldn’t take it any longer. Louder, louder, and louder the clicks and screeches grew, and I could no longer stand to look at their calm faces, hear their trifling conversations. I needed to scream, or I would explode. Louder, and louder, and louder, again and again and again—

“FINE,” I screamed. “I can’t take it anymore! I admit it, I was stealing data! Here, look in my desk—here, here it is—the clicking and squealing of the horrible hard drive I used!”

We understand how scary the thought of an insider threat can be, nevermind the idea that it could be your business’ equipment that fails in such a spectacular fashion. We’re here to help protect you against these circumstances and many, many more. Give us a call at 810.230.9455 to learn more about what we can do for you.

Happy Halloween!

Oct, 2022

A Few Useful Insights into Online Payment Fraud

Financially-focused cyberthreats are no joke, especially considering how digital payments now make up 41.8% of all payments made worldwide. Let’s consider a few statistics that highlight how important it is to ensure that the payment card data your business collects is sufficiently protected.

Digital Payments are Twice as Common as Credit Card Payments

On a global scale, mobile wallets are used at just about double the rate as card payments are today—and while this means that a vast number of people have already embraced the benefits of these modernized payment options, this by no means is to say that it is a flawless system.

In fact, keeping pace with the adoption of digital payments has been the number of data compromises, with the victim’s full name, Social Security number, and date of birth being the most commonly breached personally identifiable information. Others follow closely behind, like the victim’s current home address, medical history, and driver’s license coming next.

According to the Data, the Usual Cybercrime Suspects are On the Rise

With a few exceptions, most forms of cyberattacks and vulnerabilities have either remained constant or have actually decreased in the past few years, save for the big three cyberattack vectors: phishing, ransomware, and malware. Between 2019 and 2021, all three of these attack vectors saw large upticks in their use.

Again, most (not all, but most) other attack vectors either remained somewhat constant or actually decreased in use during the same period of time, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center.

Meanwhile—and this may be the most concerning statistic for your customers—the most commonly stolen information in 2021 was apparently someone’s full name (in 1,803 breaches and exposures), their full Social Security number (in 1,136), and their date of birth (688). That’s the identity theft trifecta right there—and again, it isn’t as though other forms of PII were that far behind.

Data is a Precious Resource—Let Us Help You Protect It

Your business really does live and die by its data, in all its types and forms. We’re here to help you keep it safe so your operations can continue unhindered by issues of any kind. Give us a call to learn more about our managed services and our security services today at 810.230.9455.

Apr, 2022

How to Prepare to Outlast a Data Disaster

When your business experiences a significant disruption, a disaster recovery plan is critical to getting back to normal. Some disasters are the result of external threats, while others come about from internal problems with your company’s operations. Here are some things you should consider when looking into potential disaster recovery solutions to help you get through a data disaster.

Disaster recovery, as far as IT is concerned, focuses on protecting your data and information systems, but it can also refer to the broad overarching strategy you use to keep your organization operational in difficult times. Companies today handle more data than ever before, and customers are much more cognizant of when companies don’t appropriately manage or protect their data, so it’s more important than ever to have a strategy in place to keep it safe and protected. Here are three things you should properly manage for your disaster recovery plan.

Planning is Imperative

First, we want to dispel the misconception that disaster recovery is a big, complicated process and strategy that needs to be handled before you take care of general, everyday business. This is not true; many small businesses can leverage a comprehensive data backup and recovery plan with relative ease, although larger organizations might require more details to be addressed, specifically how systems are to be recovered, as well as applications and working conditions.

It doesn’t matter what type of company you are–there are certain aspects of data recovery that always need to be addressed. For example, you’ll need to know how your backup system works, who is in charge of it, and what the responsible recovery point objective (RPO), or the amount of data you need to back up, is. Furthermore, knowing these details can dramatically reduce the time it takes to get back in business following a disaster to help you meet your specified recovery time objective (RTO).

Test Your DR

One major problem that organizations have with their disaster recovery processes is that they aren’t routinely testing them. Nearly a quarter of businesses have never tested their disaster recovery plan, and considering the dire consequences of a failed data recovery, this should be a major cause for concern. You should test your platform regularly, whether it’s once a month, once a quarter, or even once a year.

Testing your disaster recovery system can interfere with your business’ operations and potentially even cut into productivity, depending on when it takes place. Whenever you test your systems, you’re bound to find something wrong with it, so you’ll find your DR strategy changing over time as you address these issues. If you can appropriately address these issues during the testing phase, you’ll have a better chance when you actually need to seriously use your DR strategy.

The Human Element

While it might seem like your disaster recovery strategy is governed by your IT infrastructure, remember that your IT infrastructure is governed by people. You’ll want your DR strategy to take human behavior into account. For example, if your company’s location is compromised by a disaster, do you have the ability to get your business’ employees access to the data they need to effectively do their jobs?

The COVID-19 pandemic made it that much more apparent, as organizations that did not have contingencies in place to handle the remote operations struggled to adjust to the new normal. Businesses that did not have the capital to implement the appropriate technologies and accommodations for remote employees had significant problems in the early days of the pandemic, many of which could have been prevented if they had ensured continuity through work-from-home strategies and other possibilities in the event your office is inoperable short or long term.

NuTech Services can help your business implement and test a business continuity solution. To learn more, reach out to us at 810.230.9455.

Jan, 2022

Is Cloud Storage as Secure as We Need It To Be?

We frequently encourage our clients to consider the cloud as a viable option for their data storage needs, be they someplace to store a copy of their data backup or even their primary storage option. Having said that, it is important that we clarify that this cloud storage needs to be secure. Let’s explore how to ensure that much is true.

Step one, we need to establish whether or not cloud storage is safe in and of itself. This will ultimately fall to the provider you are effectively entrusting your data to.

Cloud Storage Security Depends on the Cloud Provider

Cutting a long story short, it really is as simple as that. There are plenty of means that your cloud provider has to help ensure the security of your stored data on their infrastructure—because that’s all the cloud really is: an infrastructure that you can use remotely instead of using your own. In this case, you’re simply using someone else’s server to store your data.

Due to this, your data’s security is wholly dependent on the protections that the provider has (or has not) put in place.

Ideally, your provider will have made sure that your data is protected by a variety of safeguards, including encryption, access controls, redundancy, and cloud monitoring, with these features tested regularly to ensure that your data is properly secured. Any quality provider will be doing so to the best of their ability, with their servers locked down and guarded behind their own security features and personnel.

Data Also Needs to Be Available

Of course, data that your business can’t access is (for all intents and purposes) data that doesn’t exist, so you need to be sure that your cloud storage provider can also ensure that you have access to everything you’ve entrusted to them.

There are numerous reasons why this may not be the case, ranging from user error, mechanical failure, or local disaster leading to a service disruption on the provider’s end to a successful cyberattack upon the provider.

However, Most Cloud Security Issues Originate from the Client’s Side

The unfortunate truth is that it is much more likely that any security issues you experience with a reputable cloud storage provider will likely come from an issue present on your end. There are a lot of examples as to how this can happen, including:

The use of shadow IT, in the form of one of your users also storing data on another, unapproved service or platform
Files being inappropriately shared
Insufficient passwords being used to protect access to cloud resources
Accidental data deletion by a user
Insecure and unauthorized devices being used to access cloud resources

In short, the cloud is very secure indeed—the problem is usually the person using it and how it was set up. This makes it critical to your company’s successful and secure use of the cloud that your users understand how to appropriately utilize the cloud in a way that maintains security while also allowing them to be productive.

That’s where we can help. Give us a call at 810.230.9455 today to learn more about how we can help secure your operations, including your use of the cloud.

Nov, 2021

U.S. Government Making an Effort to Stop Exploits

Earlier this year, there was a string of high-profile ransomware attacks leveraged against major companies. Now, the United States has issued an order that dictates guidelines for how to patch various vulnerabilities in affected systems within federal agencies and organizations. It’s a huge move in an effort to stop hackers and other cyberthreats from becoming more serious problems in the future.

The direction was issued by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and it essentially assigned due dates ranging from November 2021 to May 2022. CISA is urging all federal agencies and organizations to resolve certain known and exploited vulnerabilities during this timeline. There are some notable exceptions for national security-related infrastructures, though.

The catalog of known, exploited vulnerabilities is located on CISA’s website. This catalog contains information on each known vulnerability, and all of them (around 300 or so) are all believed to pose some kind of threat to the federal government. The catalog also links to NIST database entries for guidance on how to apply these patches and resolve these vulnerabilities.

This is obviously a huge undertaking and one that could lead to miscommunications, confusion, and more throughout the patching process. This is especially true when you consider that each department is responsible for deploying their own updates and are only accountable to CISA. Even so, CISA is applying pressure on these organizations to meet specific criteria within a timeframe.

This timeline varies, but within 60 days, agencies must review and update their policies on vulnerability management, and these new policies must be made available to CISA upon request. Agencies must also have a policy in place for carrying out the directive issued by CISA. Organizations must identify who is responsible for this, as well as how they plan to track and report on the implementation process.

If you think patch management is difficult for governments, then imagine how difficult it can be for small businesses with more limited spending power and fewer resources at their disposal. SMBs tend to patch vulnerabilities when they have the time and resources to do so rather than when they need to be deployed, which is not the correct approach. For each day you don’t resolve a vulnerability, you are giving hackers countless opportunities to break into your network.

NuTech Services can help your business with patch implementation and update deployment. We can make this process automatic and easy to take advantage of. You’ll find that there are countless benefits to freeing yourself from the worries associated with technology management and maintenance, and trust us when we say you’ll never have to worry about patches or updates again.

To learn more, reach out to us at 810.230.9455.

May, 2021

Understanding the Threat of Geographic Deepfakes

Per our role as cybersecurity professionals, part of our responsibility is to put the developing threats out there in the world into perspective for the clientele that we serve. After all, with so many modern threats seeming to border on science fiction, it is only natural for smaller organizations to assume that their size will protect them from such attacks through simple lack of interest—or even that such threats will never be used practically at any significant scale. Unfortunately, these assumptions are too often mistaken.

For your business to survive, let alone thrive, you need to have prepared for every eventuality. To put the importance into context, let’s examine a threat that many may have shrugged off—deepfake images—and the potential they show in terms of future cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns.

A Refresher on Deepfakes

Deepfakes are images or video clips that have been manipulated by artificial intelligence to show something other than the truth. You may have seen a few lighthearted examples online, where a comedian’s face is replaced by the celebrity they are impersonating, or different actors are inserted into movie scenes. There are even mobile applications now available where you can create simple (albeit glitchy) lip synch videos based on a headshot.

Not all applications of this kind of AI-based image generation are so obvious, however. Just look at the This Person Does Not Exist website, where you can see the results of a generative adversarial network’s work in creating very convincing, imagined faces. Every time you click on that link, the website will display a completely unique and imagined photograph that looks like a real person, but isn’t.

While entertaining, such applications do little to highlight the actual risks presented by deepfakes when put to more extreme uses. Adult-themed deepfakes are already being used to generate pornographic materials of people without their consent, and deepfake technology has also been used to doctor up footage to manipulate political interests. However, another use for deepfakes has risen that has many concerned—geographic deepfakes.

What is a Geographic Deepfake?

Rather than manipulating a person’s face or words, geographic deepfakes are used to manipulate satellite imagery to hide or distort the appearance of the landscape. As this technology grows in popularity and accessibility, it could potentially be used to seriously impact businesses and governments around the globe.

How Serious are Geographic Deepfakes?

Let’s put it into context for a moment by going over how a geographic deepfake could be (and increasingly are being) used.

Let’s say for a moment that you were a military commander, and you were leading your troops through the field. Your objective isn’t far, all you need to do is cross a bridge that spans over a ravine that you’ll see once you crest the next hillside. Except, once you reach the top of the hill, you don’t see the bridge that your satellite imaging assured you would be there. You see the ravine, sure, but there’s no bridge to cross it.

There goes your plan, and such a failure is bound to have wide-reaching ramifications.

This exact scenario was brought up in 2019 by an analyst at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency named Todd Myers—and is in no way a new tactic.

Throughout history, maps have been weaponized as a part of disinformation campaigns and propaganda and have even been manipulated to protect intellectual property. Cartographers would insert fabricated locales and details into their maps to try and catch any copycats out there—after all, if you had invented “Not-Realburg, Michigan,” seeing it on another map is a blatant clue that your work had been copied.

A recent study, compiled and published by the geography department at the University of Washington, explored the topic of deepfake-generated geography in more depth.

What the Study Contains

In their study, the researchers review the long, long history of embellishing maps—reaching back to the Babylonian era in the 5th century B.C.—before focusing on the modern, technology-based contexts of location spoofing and how it can be weaponized, sharing examples produced by the researchers specifically for the study as a proof of concept.

In short, the study does what the research team intended it to do: it highlights the very real capabilities of such technologies, and how easily they could potentially be abused with no single means of identifying when an image has been manipulated.

What’s worse, the inherent trust the public has for such images makes them particularly effective, according to the researchers. While the team was able to engineer a tool to help identify their own fake geographies, these kinds of tools will need constant maintenance to keep up with the improvements that deepfakes will inherently see as time marches on.

What Can Businesses Learn from This?

While these kinds of threats will hopefully have minimal impacts on most businesses for some time yet, it is still valuable to consider how such a technology could be used against a company’s operations. Returning to the example of the missing bridge above, it isn’t hard to imagine how such an event could create serious interruptions and delays to the supply chain. Taking it a step further, someone trying to interfere with your success directly could use such an attack to hide your business from view on a map.

We also can’t neglect the idea that cyberattacks tend to inspire other cyberattacks, so there’s no telling what an imaginative cybercriminal might think to do with such capabilities someday.

For now, the best thing that your business can do is to reinforce your business using the technologies available today. While it would be foolish to completely ignore the development of cyberthreats like deepfakes, there are other attack methods that need to be protected against in the present. NuTech Services can help you in that aspect. Give us a call at 810.230.9455 to discuss what your business needs to make its technology more secure and more productive.

Apr, 2021

How Big of a Threat is the Dark Web Gig Economy?

Contemporary movies are filled with high-stakes cybercrime, where a lovable criminal syndicate breaks into a company’s systems to help wreak havoc on the true villains of the film, all the while exposing the company’s dirty laundry. Naturally, this idea can be frightening for any business, whether or not they have any dirty laundry to air out—after all, nobody wants a ruined reputation—and is unfortunately less and less of a fantasy all the time.

This is directly due to the idea of a hacking gig economy, and how the Dark Web can be used to support it.

What is a Gig Economy?

Before we get too far into the weeds as we discuss the Dark Web, let’s make sure we’re on the same page in terms of the “gig economy.” The gig economy basically describes the prevalence of people working in part-time positions on a temporary basis or as independent contractors, either as a means of supplementing their existing income or as their primary source of it. This environment has been supported in its growth by the capabilities of the Internet—particularly within the younger generations in urban areas.

This new economy has proved beneficial for both the members of the workforce that are a part of it, and the businesses that enlist their services. These businesses have a much larger pool of resources to draw upon without the long-term commitment of a full-time hire, while workers can more easily supplement their increasingly flexible lifestyle with this kind of work.

Of course, a lot of drawbacks have come with this new method of work as well, but that’s something we’ll have to get into later. For now, we just need to focus on the idea that more people are seeking out work opportunities in a less traditional format (as well as businesses increasingly seeking out people to fill these temporary roles) and are using the Internet as a means of doing so.

Unfortunately, this trend also includes cybercriminals, and those businesses who want to take advantage of their illicit services. These parties accomplish this by taking their intentions to the Dark Web.

Understanding the Dark Web

Admittedly, the term “Dark Web” may not be familiar to everyone, so it may be helpful to look at how the Internet is functionally constructed. The Internet of today is made up of three distinct parts:

The Surface Web: The Surface Web is the part of the Internet that most people are familiar with and associate with the Internet in general. Composed of all websites and pages that have been indexed by a search engine (and can therefore be found through these search engines), the surface web is anything that is openly accessible via the Internet.
The Deep Web: The Deep Web includes all the pages that require a login or payment before they can be accessed, along with a user’s data on a website or platform. This data is not indexed, meaning that search engines cannot crawl or index it. This is what makes up most of the Internet today.
The Dark Web: The Dark Web is the portion of the Internet that is inaccessible to a typical browser, only available via the Tor browser. As such, activity here cannot be traced or tracked, making the experience anonymous—and therefore, ideal for cybercriminal activity (amongst many other uses, of course). Due to its anonymity, the Dark Web operates on secrecy and cryptocurrency.

This last point is what allows the Dark Web to give cybercriminals the utility that it does as a means of selling their services to those seeking it out. By anonymizing all browsing and even hiding payments behind the encryption of cryptocurrencies, the Dark Web gives this illicit economy the perfect environment in which to thrive.

Let’s explore how such a transaction could take shape:

Examining a Dark Web Gig

Let’s assume for a moment that you have a serious enemy, whether it’s one of your competitors, an old employee who left on bad terms, or a former client with a serious grudge. What can this enemy of yours do?

If they have the knowledge of how to do so, someone seeking to hurt your company could access the Dark Web and seek out a hacker’s services on one of the many forums that the Dark Web hosts, offering some financial payout in exchange for your website being taken down. Maybe they’d offer a thousand dollars or so, and a hacker with some time could take them up on that offer.

This isn’t a hypothetical situation—Dark Web forums have seen more than eight million users send over 80 million messages seeking out the services of a hacker, with hackers using the forums to promote their own services. Generally speaking, these posts break down as follows:

90 percent of these posts are from those seeking out hacking and cyberattack services
7 percent of these posts are from hackers seeking out jobs
2 percent of these posts are meant to encourage the sale of hacking tools
1 percent of these posts are to encourage people to network with each other

As you might imagine, the number of people actively using these platforms leads to many very specific services available.

The Value of Data on the Dark Web

Of course, we should discuss how much a cybercriminal could potentially make, if only selling data that they have stolen. After hacking a database, a hacker could potentially sell its contents for $20,000—about a rate of $50 for about 1,000 entries.

The Risk This Presents to Your Business

Small-to-medium-sized businesses are under a somewhat ambiguous level of threat from the Dark Web, specifically where data theft and distribution are concerned. To many, the Dark Web remains a sort of computer horror story.

However, as the Dark Web comes more into the public consciousness, its already-considerable risks will only grow… and again, it isn’t as though it isn’t already being used to distribute stolen data, be it sensitive information or access credentials or what have you. There’s a non-zero chance that some of your data is already put up for sale on some Dark Web site.

To minimize this risk moving forward, there are a few safeguards that you need to adopt as a standard procedure:

Security

If there’s a way that someone can use some vulnerability to access a business’ resources, whether they’re hosted online or on your network, they will. Ensuring that everything is reinforced against these threats will help to minimize the chance of their success.

Team Awareness

A big part of avoiding phishing is for your team to be able to see it coming. Training your team members to identify and properly mitigate the threats that they will face—and they will face them at some point—will be crucial to protecting your business.

Due Diligence

Finally, all the best practices that you expect your team to uphold all must remain in play, as hackers actively seek out companies with lacking security to target. Don’t give them the opportunity.

NuTech Services is here to help. Reach out to us at 810.230.9455 to learn more.

Feb, 2021

Why Redundancy is EVERYTHING for Data Backups

With a business’ data being such a priority nowadays, protecting it against all circumstances needs to be appropriately attended to. One fundamental component of this protection is the implementation of a proper backup strategy. Let’s go over the most foundational element of a successful backup, and how we recommend businesses to accomplish it: redundancy.

Redundancy Isn’t Always a Bad Thing

First, we need to address the stigma around the concept of “redundancy” in general. While often associated with waste, redundancy effectively boils down to having more than you need to operate. As a result, redundancy can be seen as either good or bad depending on the circumstances.

For instance, having more supplies and equipment than you need (or can manage) isn’t good, as you likely have spent more than you needed to out of a finite budget, and might experience some challenges in storing these resources. Having excessive funds left in your budget means that you’re underutilizing what you have available. The list could go on and on, in terms of how redundancy could prove to be a detriment.

That being said, there are a few cases where redundancy can—quite literally—be the thing that keeps a business from going under. A redundant data backup is the prime example of this.

What a Redundant Data Backup Looks Like

All in all, a redundant data backup is one that involves multiple copies—just in case something happens to one, you have another copy waiting in the wings to step in.

Let’s consider a scenario, while tweaking a detail here and there to consider why a data backup is so important, particularly those designed to be redundant in nature:

Scenarios

In your business, you have…

A. no means of backing up your data.
B. a small backup device hosted onsite
C. a cloud-based data backup
D. both an onsite backup and one hosted in the cloud

As you go about your operations, you happen to be successfully targeted by ransomware via a clever phishing attack. In each of these scenarios, a different outcome is likely.

In Scenario A, your business is up the creek. Without any data backup, a successful ransomware infection is guaranteed to encrypt some—if not all—of your data, which is effectively the same as it being deleted. This is, of course, assuming you follow best practices and refrain from paying up, as this offers no guarantee that your data will be returned to you.

In Scenario B, there’s a good chance that your backup may be encrypted along with the data it is meant to be backing up. I hope I don’t have to go into detail about why this is a bad thing that should be avoided, especially when it effectively destroys your data, as happened in Scenario A.

In Scenario C, a cloud-based backup is one way to address the situation, as the encrypted data can simply be wiped and the backed-up data replicated back from the cloud.

Scenario D goes a little further, by both ensuring that your data is backed up in the cloud while also providing you with an on-site backup for quick and easy restoration if possible. Ideally, even the cloud provider storing your data has some redundancy in place, keeping your data in multiple locations to mitigate the impact any equipment failures on their end could cause.

This Redundancy is What Makes the 3-2-1 Rule

The 3-2-1 Rule is a concept that we often recommend to businesses, as it is a simple way to ensure that your data will be safe. It boils down to keeping (at least) three copies of your data, including the original, in two types of storage media, one of which being offsite and ideally in the cloud. This strategy is a great way to ensure your business has the access it needs to its essential data, regardless of the circumstances.

While NuTech Services can help you ensure that your backups are redundant. Not only will we help your business survive a data disaster, but we can also help you avoid them in the first place through our comprehensive managed services. To learn more about what we offer, explore the rest of our website and reach out to us at 810.230.9455.

Jan, 2021

Solid State Is the Way to Go

Whenever you ponder the purchase of a new computer, one important specification that you likely consider is its data storage. This was especially the case when you considered a new machine for family use—there are a lot of documents and photos to store, and any kids you have will want to fill it with games and other apps. Nowadays, it’s a little different. Rather than focusing on storage, you’ll want to focus on the computer’s speed. Let’s get into it a little further.

Storage (Typically) Isn’t a Concern Anymore

For most users, the PC or laptop they’ll purchase will have a decent capacity in its storage drives, for a very simple reason: it costs the factory about the same amount to produce hard drives that hold 256GB, as it does to produce 512GB drives. In this situation, providing more storage just makes more sense… especially once you factor in the exponential increase in demand for storage.

The sheer amount of data that the human race produces is staggering. Estimates say that, as of 2020, each human being on Earth is creating 1.7MB each second. Remember the 3.5-inch floppy disks? One of those could hold about 1.4MB. So, crunching the numbers, humanity is filling the equivalent of eight billion of them every second.

So, how is it that storage isn’t the issue? Simple—we’ve moved beyond these kinds of storage solutions.

Modern drives can now hold exponentially more data and run faster and more efficiently to a similar scale. Taking an average new PC off the shelf, its built-in storage capacity would exceed that of around 750,000 floppy disks. Besides, most data storage happening nowadays takes place in the cloud. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and countless web hosts, businesses, and others now collect and store it on the user’s behalf.

To come back to our point, with all of this taken into consideration, the 1TB drive that was built into your PC really is a lot. Unless you’re using it for specific things—photography, video editing, 3D modeling, or gaming—you’re likely not going to need any more.

If a PC is in the office, this is even more the case. All a workstation’s data should really be stored in a centralized location, whether that’s a server on your network, or in the cloud. Your business’ purposes will dictate which is the better option for you—give us a call at 810.230.9455 to work that out with us.

The point remains: capacity shouldn’t be your final metric for determining the PC you’ll use, unless you know for a fact you’re going to need a lot.

Performance Matters

At the end of the day, your hard drive’s efficiency is really the defining factor. Modern PCs have considerable processing power, with 8-to-16 gigs of RAM being pretty standard. This leaves plenty to run office applications and other daily software titles. As a result, the speed of your hard drive could easily cause the biggest bottleneck in your operations.

For our purposes, there are two different kinds of hard drives.

Hard Disk Drive (HDDs)

Also known as mechanical hard drives, HDDs contain an array of shiny, spinning magnetic platters that are used to store your data. Seen as the standard for decades now, they are generally the most affordable option when comparing price by storage capacity. Capable of storing high capacities of data, they are often used in servers or backup devices nowadays.

Solid State Drives (SSDs)

SSDs use electronic data storage to work, and therefore have no moving parts. Reading and writing this data is much faster as a result, an outcome that impacts all a computer’s processes. These drives are expensive, but as prices have decreased they have become a much more reasonable purchase… especially when you consider the performance, reliability, and stability benefits you see from them.

We always recommend that any new workstation purchased should rely on an SSD as its main hard drive. Most desktops can have secondary drives added after the fact, and centralized storage and/or the cloud can also be considered viable solutions.

If you need more assistance in choosing the technology right for your business and its needs, give NuTech Services a call at 810.230.9455. We’ll help you make the best choice.

Nov, 2020

Examining Some Unusual Cybercrime Patterns in 2020

As compared to the past few years, there have been considerably fewer successful data breaches in 2020. While this may sound like exclusively good news, there are a few reasons why this information should be taken with a grain of salt.

To begin, let’s examine the data that we currently have available, courtesy of Statista: in 2019, there were a total of 1,473 data breaches recorded. The first half of 2020 saw 540 breaches reported. Crunching the numbers, these 33 percent fewer breaches have impacted what other sources assert to be 66 percent fewer people.

At First Glance, This Appears to Be a Good Thing

However, there are more considerations to weigh before we can establish this as a positive trend. While we wish that we could simply say that yes, this is a good sign, there is unfortunately more data to consider. For instance:

The Kind of Breach It Was

There are so many more variables to take into account, starting with the type of breach that took place and how severe the breach itself was. Let’s consider a few scenarios.

On the one hand, you might have a dozen or so breaches with a few records lost in each. On the other, you have just one, but that one breach exposes thousands of records, each containing personally identifiable medical data.

Of course, the single breach is far worse—objectively speaking—than the dozen. However, this kind of scenario isn’t likely to be the case, as the data also showed that 66 percent fewer people have been impacted.

How Accurate the Records Are

Of course, we also have to take the accuracy of the data into account, simply reflecting on the delay that naturally occurs between the actual breach, when it is first discovered, and when the public is notified about the breach. Furthermore, it isn’t all that uncommon for new victims to be discovered long after the breach is first revealed. Some companies will attempt some level of damage control and play their numbers down as much as possible, or simply omit the actual number of impacted accounts in their announcements.

As a result, we may not yet be dealing with the actual number of breaches that have occurred in 2020, depending upon how forthcoming breached businesses have been.

What Impact Has Remote Work Had?

Finally, we need to acknowledge the fact that more people than ever before are working from home—outside of the protections that many remote-friendly businesses have implemented. In theory, this would typically lead to an increase in threats, but recent reports have shown threats to be decreasing. While it would be wonderful if this turned out to be the case, it is very possible that a shift in focus away from maintaining security to maintaining operations could be skewing these results. Furthermore, some businesses might not be able to sufficiently monitor their employees’ security as they are working remotely.

Regardless, You Can’t Allow Your Security to Be Shortchanged

Even if these apparently lowered cybercrime statistics are accurate, you shouldn’t take a break from your cybersecurity preparedness. Easing up will only encourage less secure security habits, leading to increased security problems later on.

Of course, you don’t need to work alone as you protect your business. NuTech Services can help you see to your IT needs, working to protect your resources and ensure that work can be accomplished. Find out more about what we can offer by calling 810.230.9455 today.

Sep, 2020

You Need to Be Asking These 4 Questions to Maximize Security

Today’s business has to prioritize its data security. There are endless examples of businesses that haven’t done enough. Some aren’t around anymore. To help you build a strategy, we’ve put together four questions that need to be asked to give you a chance to outwit and overcome the endless threats your company could run into online.

#1: Is security a priority when we build processes?

Your business has a way that it does what it does. Are those processes created with both physical security and cybersecurity in mind? The amount of threats your business is subject to is literally innumerable. Each day new threats are created and used to try and steal money and data from businesses just like yours. When building your business’ processes, the first consideration that isn’t “can I make money this way” has to be about how to secure your business from outside threats.

Some ways you can prioritize security is to train your staff on what threats look like when they come in, ensure that you prioritize access control and proper authentication procedures, and really make sure that your entire staff is educated about the importance in keeping you secure. Making sure that all transferred data is encrypted can also help.

#2: Who has access to my files?

When we talk about access control, we talk about limiting access to data. Not all members of your organization need access to the same data, after all. Doing your best to ensure that some of your most sensitive data is protected not just from people outside your organization, but also inside.

By enabling role-based access and adding in a multi-layered authentication procedure, the security of your organization’s data will be much improved. Another good practice is to keep logs and routinely audit both them and the other protections you put in place.

#3: How can encryption help my business?

Data in transit can be stolen. Data just sitting there in the open can be too. You will want to ensure that all of your most sensitive data is encrypted both when it’s at rest and when it’s being moved from one location to another.

Today the most popular forms of encryption are the Data Encryption Standard (DES) or the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Understanding the particulars of encryption may be complex, but knowing how to use it to better secure your business’ data is not.

#4: Is my security strategy working?

Obviously, the security that you put on your business isn’t plug and play. It needs to be properly configured to meet your business’ specific situation. The best way to get the most comprehensive security resources to protect your business’ network and data is to have knowledgeable consultants help you find the strategies and solutions that are right for you, implement them, and then routinely test them to ensure that they would stand up under pressure.

If you would like to start this conversation, call the IT experts at NuTech Services today at 810.230.9455.

Jul, 2020

Understanding the Benefits of Data Automation

Businesses of all sizes rely on data to operate, which means that this data needs to be collected somehow. Let’s consider how the concept of data automation has assisted these businesses to successfully accomplish more.

What is Data Automation?

In so many words, data automation is the collection and transcription of data using software, rather than the outdated and time-consuming manual processes that were once necessary.

Rather than one of your valuable employees being committed to data entry instead of the other tasks that are better suited to their talents and abilities, data automation utilizes technology to attend to it. As a result, your team can focus on their other responsibilities, while your data is managed more efficiently and accurately.

How Does Data Automation Assist Businesses?

There are many ways that your business could directly benefit from data automation processes. For instance:

Time (and thereby, money) is saved
Your team is free to focus on other responsibilities
Data can be entered more accurately and efficiently

Consider the checkout aisle of the grocery store, and the barcodes that are scanned to identify a shopper’s intended purposes. Think about how long it would take to ring up a cartful of groceries if each item must be manually looked up, and how many mistakes will be made in the process. The modern checkout line is a prime example of the basic benefits of data automation in this way.

Want to Learn More?

Reach out to NuTech Services at 810.230.9455! We can discuss the many ways that technology can be used to boost your business, including through data automation and other solutions. Give us a call today to learn more.

Jun, 2020

Why You Need to Keep an Eye on Your Data

When a company operates primarily via the Internet, there seems to be an inherent trust that their audience naturally has. There’s little-to-no doubt that all promises will be kept and that all data shared with them will be fully secured, but is this confidence appropriately placed? While we can’t speak to the promises these companies make, we can weigh in on some common data security practices.

How a Company Acquires Your Data

For a company to get your data, all they really have to do is ask you for it. Think about what happens each time you make a purchase online, or even create an account—you’re handing over your contact information, and usually pairing it to one of your financial resources.

Obviously, you’re subconsciously entrusting them with this information, assuming that they will keep it sufficiently protected and secure.

Here’s the thing: not all companies are totally deserving of this trust. Quite a few companies will make some extra money by bundling their contact lists and selling them off to other companies. This is considered a common enough practice but is fortunately looked upon more and more negatively as data protection is being prioritized more.

Even if this practice goes away, you still have no control over the company’s data security practices. Consider what information of yours could be exposed if that company was to be breached:

Your name
Your birthday
Your credit card information
Your contact information

These are all forms of personally identifiable information (PII), and this isn’t even a comprehensive list of the data that these companies will collect. Plus, if they were to suffer a data breach, the onus is still on you.

One of the biggest flaws of the Internet today is the questionable privacy of any activity. Anything you do on the Internet adds to a massive data trail that describes you, from the content you’ve streamed, the messages you’ve sent, everything.

As you might imagine, there’s a lot of value to be had from this kind of data.

How to Protect Yourself by Protecting Your Data

Due to this data’s value, you must do everything you can to protect it. Here are a few good ways to start:

Use good passwords: Password hygiene and resiliency is the part of your online security that you have the most control over, so make sure that you aren’t taking any shortcuts that will undercut their effectiveness in protecting your accounts. Passphrases are often considered a more secure, but easier-to-remember, alternative to the password.
Review the Terms of Service: For each account you’ve created, you need to check the fine print to see how they are using the data you provide.
Track your finances: One of the most effective ways to find out if your security has been undermined is to keep an eye on your financial activities. Find a resource you can trust to give you these insights.
Avoid public Wi-Fi whenever possible: Public Wi-Fi signals are a favorite hunting ground for many cyberattacks. Your data plan is a much safer alternative to these.

NuTech Services has the experience and know-how to keep your business safe from many cyberattacks. To learn more about how we can help, reach out to us at 810.230.9455.

Mar, 2020

How Secure is Your Use of Cloud Solutions?

Cloud computing is generally accepted today as a good option for businesses. While we aren’t arguing that this isn’t the case, we wanted to make sure that your cloud use–actual or theoretical–was sufficiently secure. Many will neglect to consider how secure their use of cloud solutions is, which is something that we’d like to fix.

To do so, we’ll be discussing the concept of cloud security, which is pretty much what it sounds like: security concerning the data, infrastructures, and applications that are hosted in the cloud. In many ways, these considerations aren’t all too different than the ones that would be involved with your local IT. When really boiled down, any security you have implemented should meet a few benchmarks:

Assurance that data/solutions are safe
You have a transparent view of your security’s status
Instant alerts to unusual events and issues
These events and issues can be followed back to their source and addressed

Of course, we don’t mean to say that everything is identical between the security of your local infrastructure and a cloud system. We just wanted to establish this as the foundation of any security you implement.

Demystifying Cloud Security

By its nature, cloud computing can be intimidating, especially when you start to consider how it has impacted the business technology landscape. Fortunately, many of the security considerations that cloud now demands aren’t necessarily huge leaps from what your security should be normally. Let’s walk through a few differences between traditional security and what is required in the cloud.

Different Perimeters to Protect

Consider how data can be protected when it is localized. You can effectively prevent a lot of threats just by preventing access to the area where your data is stored. The cloud makes this significantly more difficult by being so very connected.

However, if you know this moving forward, you can adjust your security to meet these needs. One effective way to do so is to make sure that all data to be stored in the cloud is encrypted, and that access to the cloud itself is protected with multi-factor authentication requirements with the appropriate best practices baked in.

More Advanced Threats

Unfortunately, not even cloud providers are immune to attacks. The development of Advanced Persistent Threats (which you may see referred to as APTs) and other means of breaching data make it difficult to be sure that your data is truly safe. While the jury is still out on how these threats can be overcome, you need to accept the responsibility of keeping up with the practices that can help in the meantime.

Software Challenges

As the cloud relies on software to deliver hosted data, there is an assortment of potential variables that need to be addressed. Therefore, the cloud needs to have security controls in place to address these variables as they present themselves. This is the case whether data is being transported at the time, or if it is filed away.

NuTech Services can assist you with your data security needs, as well as assist you with whatever cloud implementation you decide to put into place. To learn more, reach out to us by calling 810.230.9455.

Jan, 2020

Managing Data is Easier with Data Virtualization

Businesses today rely on a lot of data, and of course, this data typically isn’t stored all in one place, or even in the same format. Normally, this would make trying to manage this data far more complicated, but modern organizations have a way to simplify their data management: data virtualization.

What is Data Virtualization?

It isn’t uncommon for today’s businesses to have multiple database management systems, and unfortunately, the different types don’t always play nicely with one another. As the amount of data that businesses leverage swells, it has become more important than ever for businesses to be able to consolidate all of this data into an easily accessible tool, without creating a new copy or moving it from its original source – a process similar to data federation, but one that allows access to different data types.

This process makes it far simpler for data to be put to use, allowing the various solutions that are used throughout the course of business to interact with this data.

The Primary Benefits of Data Virtualization

There are quite a few benefits to using data virtualization in your business, but for our purposes here, the fact that all of your data–stored in a variety of different locations–is interconnected and accessible from a single point is the highlight. Just consider how much more could be accomplished if you and your team could access all of the different data types you may need from one place.

As a result, data virtualization is exceptionally useful for processes involving analytics and Big Data, as both incorporate data that comes from a diverse variety of sources.

Of course, we would be amiss if we didn’t mention some of the other benefits that data virtualization has to offer. Productivity can be boosted through the integration of different data units and structures, management becomes simpler, and it is usually a more affordable option than the alternative of copying and converting all of your data into compatible formats.

Interested in Learning More about Data Virtualization?

Reach out to the pros at NuTech Services. Even if data virtualization doesn’t apply to your specific needs, we can come up with the right solution for you! Give us a call at 810.230.9455 to learn more.

Oct, 2019

There’s Value in Outsourcing Your IT, Part IV

Many businesses are capitalizing on the vast amount of benefits Managed IT services can bring to the table. These service providers are able to assist your business in obtaining, and managing the technology that you rely on. Working with one of these providers can help your business simplify data management practices, as well as make them much more secure. Today we will go over how they are able to do so.

As we have done throughout this series, we will compare the experience that a managed service provider is able to deliver, compared to the alternative.

Cloud Services

Brennan’s business gathers and stores a substantial amount of data, as most businesses do. His business relies heavily on this data, as he runs an organization which depends on client contacts. To store all of this data, Brennan decides to do some research and build his own server. He understands the basics, and begins work. Not only does this take up a large amount of space, it also requires an absurd amount of power to operate. This makes the office unbearably hot. Furthermore, Brennan hooks up connections incorrectly causing equipment failure. This is not covered under warranty, and the initial cost of setting up a server is astronomical.

On the other side of the town, Dale works in the music industry. His business decides to go with managed services. Dale is quickly connected with a trustworthy, dependable cloud service. He is then able to store all of his data and applications in the space provided by this service. It only costs a minimal monthly fee in comparison to the initial cost a server build would require.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Let’s assume both Brennan and Dale are given the same set of circumstances. A flood causes both businesses to be completely under water. How differently will these two business owners handle this disaster?

Brennan, panic stricken, attempts to grab whatever equipment he can salvage. His business relies entirely on the information stored within his computers. He is only able to get a small number of computers operating again, and since all of his data was in-house, nearly all of it is destroyed. Brennan’s business is in some truly dire straits.

Dale immediately begins his backup and disaster recovery plan. His plan has been tested recently, so he is confident that his entire business can operate off-site. All of his data is stored in the cloud, which means it is all accessible anywhere there is internet. Dale’s cloud service also goes the additional mile of storing his data in an additional place. This ensures that there truly is a backup, and the same disaster that causes a backup plan to be utilized does not destroy the backup data.

Data Warehousing

The process of combining seeming less unrelated data into a singular platform is data warehousing. This process helps businesses fuel their analytics as well as their business intelligence platforms. These platforms are turning into some of the most important tools a business owner can utilize, as they provide immense value by providing decision makers a thorough knowledge base.

This processing requires a bit of computing power. In fact, it requires more computing power than Brennan’s entire home-made system is able to muster up. Since Dale utilizes managed services, he has no issues accomplishing his goals. His provider’s flexibility ensures he is able to adjust his infrastructure as needed.

Managed IT Value – Up Next

In the next part of our series, we will be discussing how a managed service provider can assist with IT procurement. NuTech Services is always available to answer any questions you may have, so give us a call at 810.230.9455 today!

Jun, 2019

Tip of the Week: Selecting the Right Data Warehouse for Your Needs

Data is everywhere. Nowadays, effectively everything we do produces data of some kind – especially where your business is concerned. If leveraged properly, your business can make good use of the data it collects throughout its operations. For this week’s tip, we’ll talk about how you can do so with a data warehouse, and discuss how to select the right one.

To begin, let’s figure out exactly what a data warehouse is.

Understanding the Data Warehouse

A Data Warehouse isn’t to be confused with a Data Center, where you might store your server infrastructure. It is a system for analyzing and reporting on large amounts of data. It helps you predict trends and get a full picture of what’s going on with your business.

In order to understand the purpose of a data warehouse, it helps to look to warehouses in the real world. In short, it’s a place to store stuff.

While this may seem simplistic, it is key to the other functions of a data warehouse. By storing all of a business’ data in a central location, that data can all be referenced against each other – regardless of the original source. This means that you can use this data to generate better analytics than you may have gotten otherwise, simply because you are less limited by the data you have access to.

Selecting a Data Warehouse

Of course, not all data warehouses are the same, and the different types offer different utilities. You also have to consider if the data warehouse itself is sufficient. Let’s go over some of the considerations you will have to make during your deliberations.

What kind of data do you need to store?

For our purposes, data can be split into two types: structured and unstructured.

Structured data is data that can easily be organized into a spreadsheet. If your data fits the bill, a relational database would likely be a good fit for your needs.
Unstructured data (or semi-structured data) is data that is presented in less-uniform formats, like geographical data, emails, books, and the like. If you have a lot of this kind of data, you may want to consider utilizing a data lake over a data warehouse.

How immediate does your data need to be?

Your intended use of your data warehouse will have the largest impact on this consideration. Are you looking for business insights, or are you more focused on real-time analytics? If you are looking to find out more about your business, having more data available will give you better answers. If you are using the data warehouse to fuel a predictive analytics platform, you will need less data, as tracking trends can be done with a simple Relational Database Management System (RDMS) and won’t necessarily benefit from access to all of the data your organization stores.

How are the costs structured?

Different data warehouse solutions are priced based on different factors, usually combining the storage used, the size of the warehouse, the number of queries that are run, or the time spent leveraging the solution. Your particular use case will likely influence which solution is most cost-effective for you, whether frequent utilization makes a lower compute cost preferable or a high volume of data makes lower storage costs the logical choice.

Does it work with the tools you use?

Finally, you need to be sure that the solution you are considering is compatible with your business’ other solutions – otherwise, you won’t get the full value from your data warehouse (or create more work for yourself).

NuTech Services can help your business manage its technology needs. To learn more about how we can optimize your business processes, call 810.230.9455.