How we spent New Year 2022

While the world was busy welcoming the new year, Protected Harbor ensured that our customers were still up and running, regardless of date and time. Shortly after midnight on January 1st, 2022, our monitoring system raised an unusual condition, as emails suddenly stopped being transmitted for a client and instead started to build up. A build-up of outbound emails triggered the Application Outage Avoidance alert. Our team started the new year off doing what we love: helping businesses stay protected and productive.

What happened?

The email server was experiencing an error, stopping outbound emails from being delivered.

The Manager on duty, Fasif VP, immediately responded and found the problem was something we hadn’t experienced before. Fasif followed Protected Harbor protocols by restarting services, troubleshooting, and rebooting cluster nodes. Regardless of what he did, emails were still not being sent. Nick Solimando, our Director of Technology, was dispatched to investigate.

Nick confirmed Fasif’s concern. We had never encountered this error before. Nick walked through the standard procedure, reviewing the steps Fasif had taken to confirm the issue. Nick could not find a solution despite bypassing our reputation filter and moving emails from one node to another. Upon further investigation, Nick found other people over the internet are experiencing the same issue, indicating that there was a problem in the programming code of the server. His experience and intuition led him to disable the internal email filter, and emails began to flow again.

Eventually, he found a REDDIT thread – Exchange 2019 Anti-Malware – Bad Update? : sysadmin (reddit.com) covering the issue. One thing about the people at Protected Harbor, they are eager to learn. Technology is constantly changing, and our team needs to stay up to date. We are never egotistical enough to believe we know it all and enjoy working with the IT support and MSP community to stay on top of new trends and issues.

From beginning to end, the event took 40 minutes. Our customers were unaware of this event, nor did we receive a single support call or ticket regarding missing emails.

It’s just another day at Protected Harbor – where we solve problems others cannot.

Protected Harbor celebrated this new year by standing true to its name, protecting and delivering the customers at any cost, no matter the day and time. Customer satisfaction is the utmost priority, and this is what we strive to do.

“This is an example of events that customers are unaware of occurring but are the hallmark of the difference between other MSPs and us.  As CEO of a technical architecture company, there are the events I am most proud of.”     -Richard Luna, CEO, Protected Harbor

Closing thoughts and future plans!

We’ve all heard the saying, “Know thy customer.” It’s a simple concept that’s been around for ages. But it is also one of the most critical factors in creating a successful brand. If you know your customers—their struggles, their needs, and what they expect from you—you’ll be able to create a brand that resonates with them.

Having complete control and management of all our internal technology is our core philosophy to deliver better customer uptime, experience, durability, and responsiveness.
We refer to ourselves as the Anti-MSP since we take an opposite approach to most Managed Service Providers (MSPs). The majority of MSPs are now just reselling cloud services; they have no control over, or understanding of, the technology they are managing.
A more extreme example of this was the Office 365 attacks from 2021 when thousands of company emails were compromised due to the MSP that managed the accounts.
As the ANTI-MSP, your responsibilities are more significant.  We must respond 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, including on New Year’s Day 2022, since we control and manage our technology.

We plan to protect the customers and deliver at all costs in the future. The customer is interested in how we can help them with their IT needs, not what we offer. We need to articulate that value proposition and then deliver on it.

The good thing is that the new year brings a fresh start, and we are all ready to start something new. Switch from a reseller MSP to the experts who understand your needs. We at Protected Harbor are excited about the industry’s future and are looking forward to delighting our customers with unmatched services and solutions. Let’s get started with the new year 2022! Learn how we do this.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Data Center Risk Assessments

Data Center Risk Assessment is designed to provide IT executives and staff a deep evaluation of all of the risks associated with delivering IT service. We need monitoring system to monitor everything on datacenter for better performance.

Risk assessments include following:

Datacenter Heat monitoring

Datacenter have racks of high specification servers and those will produce high level of heat. This means server room must be equipped with cooling system with humidity sensors for monitoring. If the cooling system fail, high temperature will cause system failure and that will cause our clients.

Electricity

All electrical equipment’s needs power, UPS will help us to protect Servers and networking devices from power failure but Cooling system will not work when power lost, that will cause high temperature in server room and that will cause server failure. To avoid this we must need to use automatic backup generator so it will help cooling system work all the time while we face any power lost.

Door access

Unauthorized entry to datacenter is major concern, we must need to monitor who all entering to our datacenter. Biometric operated door will help us protect unauthorized entry.

Operations Review

We will make sure all the necessary items are monitoring and will make sure all devices are updated. We will conduct maintenance for all devices in our datacenter to provide 100% uptime for our clients. A high quality maintenance program keeps equipment in like new condition and maximize reliability performance.

Capacity management Review

Capacity management determines whether your infrastructure and services are capable of meeting your targets for capacity and performance for growth. We will assess your space, power and cooling capacity management processes.

Change Management

A robust change management system should be put in place for any activity.  The change management system should include a format review process based on well-defined and capture all activities that can occur at the datacenter. Basically any activity with real potential for impact on the data center must be formally scheduled and then approved by accountable persons.

What are the Security Threats of Work from Home?

With COVID-19 changing the way we work, employees using personal devices at home expose themselves to greater security risks.  Rest assured hackers and malware programs are working overtime to exploit gaps and security oversights.

So what should employers do to ensure their systems remain free of hacks, ransomware attacks, and viruses?

Some employees may think their home is secure and private, however, they most likely will still be less secure than any corporate infrastructures.  Employees’ home offices probably don’t have hardware firewalls in place, multifactor authentications, or VPN’s.   These should all be considered and implemented by someone who is well versed in IT.

One of the most prevalent problems facing employees working at home is email scams.  Yes, they have been around forever but are problematic and sophisticated.  Today’s “scammers” are getting smarter and some phishing scams are created to take advantage of the current work from home scenarios.  These scams can include names of company personnel and may send users to a fake login portal or ask workers to forward login information.

In today’s climate, companies are faced with making things up as they go along because often, they don’t have the time or resources to dedicate to the growing number of work from home offices.  It would be prudent to educate employees on current cyber-crimes and offer training to ensure best practices are adhered to. Multifactor authentication is a key component to prevent attacks.

It is important to provide the necessary steps to in keeping your systems secure and this should never come at the cost of security.  Remote work policies should be monitored and updated often.  Security is never complete because the latest generation of cyber-criminals are bolder and can adapt to endless scenarios.

This is where a company like Protected Harbor can help.  Protected Harbor helps businesses across the US address their current IT needs by building custom, cost-effective solutions.  Our unique technology experts evaluate current systems, determine the needs then design cost-effective solutions. On average, we are able to save clients up to 30% on IT costs while increasing their security, productivity, and durability.  We work with many internal IT departments, freeing them up to concentrate on daily workloads while we do the heavy lifting.  www.protectedharbor.com

Why Virtualization Should Be Considered?

Changing your IT environment to one that is Virtual allows you to instantly access nearly endless system resources that make for all-around optimal performance for your business. Virtualization also gets rid of potentially hazardous server rooms, cables, and bulky hardware; reducing overall IT costs as well as management expenditures.

First, let’s take a look at what Virtualization actually is.  Virtualization is the process of migrating physical systems into a virtual environment. Essentially, it is the creation of a virtual device, resource, or operating system. By providing a virtual view of your systems, this allows you to turn one server into a host for a group of servers that all share the same resources.

By concentrating your storage and systems on servers and installing virtual machines (VMs) to end-users, costs of your systems/infrastructure will be reduced while, management, security, uptime and control, will all be optimized and faster.

Often, many think of virtualization as the actual cloud, however, the cloud is just a piece of virtualization.  The most vital function of virtualization is the ability to run multiple operating systems and or applications on a single server.  In doing this, productivity can be achieved by fewer servers.  Overall, application performance will typically improve as a result of technology that balances resources and delivers what the end-user needs.

Virtualization is a solution for many organizations, however, it’s not for every business.  So how do you determine if this application is right for your environment?

1. If your company relies on multiple servers and is using laptops and networks, virtualizing the environment will immediately reduce capital costs since there will no longer be the need to pay upfront for hardware.
2. Virtual environments enable you to run multiple operating systems on the same hardware, hence increasing the flexibility of your infrastructure. Many businesses spend a ton of money on an extra room to store large server racks, wires and pay IT personnel to maintain everything. In this scenario, virtualization will help reduce hardware costs while freeing up room space that can be utilized for other things.
3. Infrastructure environments that are virtualized allow for rapid and simple scaling – up or down. If your server needs more processing or memory, resources can be easily added.  The days of needing to physically add CPUs or RAM would be over because this concept is done with physical servers.
4. Most maintenance tasks can be managed easily off-site and don’t require sending techs on site (another cost-saving feature). Also, the maintenance tasks can also be set up to run themselves across a variety of scenarios.

Why would you NOT virtualize?

If you run a very small business or a simple server scenario you might not need virtualization.  While virtualization will save you money, there are set up costs involved. Perhaps you are not prepared for those expenditures at your current juncture.  There is no point in virtualizing your systems if you can’t afford the tools and management systems required to support the technology.

Another reason would be if your software license does not allow you to run on virtual machines. It is always best to avoid anything that could breach your software license agreement, so be sure to check this before moving forward with virtualizing.

Protected Harbor delivers end to end IT solutions ranging from custom-designed systems, data center management, disaster recovery, ransomware protection, cloud services and more.  On average, we save clients up to 30% on IT costs while increasing their productivity, durability and sustainability.  Let our unique technology experts evaluate your current systems and design cost-effective, secure options.

If you are looking to learn more about virtualization solutions, contact Protected Harbor.  www.protectedharbor.com  845-573-1098

Ashar Success Stories

WHAT IS CONTEXTUAL TECHNOLOGY?

Many of you who’ve heard me speak about our services hear me use the term “Contextual Technology”. I stress to my team that we provide a Contextual Technology environment for our clients.

But what is Contextual Technology?

In short, it means technology from the end-users point of view. The dictionary definition of Contextual is; of, pertaining to, or depending on the context. When applied to technology, the context is how useful the technology is to the end-user, and use does not mean the latest bleeding-edge technology. No, it means technology that significantly improves user productivity and business performance.  Given the new technology we bring to bear, is the user able to work less and do more, or is the user confused by new menus, functions or screens and has no idea how to work?

Contextual information technology starts with an understanding of the end-user and understanding the end-user starts with communication.

Good communication is the bedrock or foundation of a good relationship and understanding how much technology the end-user needs or wants, communication makes it possible to understand the end-users’ technology “context”.

Business Issue

Our communication process starts with the initial contact. When we first meet a prospect, we always ask “What is the business issue?”, “What are your technical challenges?”, “What would you like technology to do for the organization?”, and “What would you like to accomplish with technology?”. These questions are key to establishing the prospect’s “context”. These questions also allow us to define the solution plan that will accomplish the prospect’s goals.

Some prospects have significant challenges. Take the following example. Recently, a prospect who became a client was using a 25+-year-old software configuration. The client’s main software, the core of their operation, is a product that uses Foxbase. Key reports were written in Microsoft Access for the client. The access was interconnected to the Foxbase data. As a technology company, our initial reaction was why would anyone be using 25+ software? To the 70+-year-old client, this configuration worked and was very efficient. The client had evaluated other software packages and found none that were as efficient as the current combination.

Contextual Factors

We started with communication, understanding that the goals for this client were first, to upgrade their technology environment without impacting the productivity of their entire workforce, and second, to protect them from hacker attacks (as the old software had security holes). That was their context.

We addressed their context by redesigning their six-server configuration into two, and eliminating permission and security holes that were created by years of poor understanding by other IT “professionals”. Now they are a happy client. Initially protected from malware and ransomware and we monitor their technology keeping it safe. Second, they now operate in a modern, managed network cluster, but the core of the operation has not changed, and NO employee retraining was required.

In the end, we protected the client by understanding the client’s context forming a mutually beneficial relationship that will last years, that is the Protected Harbor Way!