// BLOG
SMB Disaster Recovery Planning Worksheet
August 29, 2011 by Charles Gardner
Quite a bit of the work I do is with small and medium businesses. Far too few businesses in the SMB market have adequate, formal, and tested disaster recovery plans. Too often the plan goes something like this: “Call the IT guy when something breaks, evacuate gear if a hurricane is coming, and panic if anything else happens.”
Thankfully, you can do better. If you have no formal plan, now is an excellent time to get started, and I have published a basic DR planning worksheet for small businesses to use as a starting point.
Grab a copy of the Small Business Disaster Recovery Planning Worksheet and begin working through your specific business needs and concerns.
If you need help in getting started or in reviewing your existing plans, contact me today.
Orlando VMUG for 3rd Quarter
August 1, 2011 by Charles Gardner
The next Orlando VMUG meeting is scheduled for August 25th from 6pm-9pm.
Here are the details:
Date: August 25, 2011
Time: 6pm-9pm
Location:Z88.3
1065 Rainer Drive
Altomonte Springs, FL 32714
Go to the registration page for details and to register for the event.
VMWare Announcement – vSphere 5
July 7, 2011 by Charles Gardner
It looks like next week we will get the official announcement of vSphere 5 as VMWare’s CEO Paul Maritz and CTO Steve Herrod host a live online event titled “Raising the Bar, Part V.”
The event is Tuesday July 12th at noon Eastern time, and you can jump to the registration link here.
Kerio Connect 7.2 Available
June 13, 2011 by Charles Gardner
Kerio Connect 7.2 is now available with several notable improvements.
What’s new in Kerio Connect 7.2?
- Native support for Outlook 2011 for Mac – no client connector required
- Calendar improvements including: Exceptions from recurrent events, Implicit scheduling with the latest CalDAV protocol, and Calendar auto-accept
- Increased mobile device support – Android 2.2 devices, Droid 2, Droid X, iOS 4.2 and 4.3, Windows Phone 7 and more
- HTML domain footers
- New administration features including a Built-in admin account and Password change prevention
- Performance improvements including better Outlook Connector and BlackBerry Connector performance, and Archive compression scheduling
Read more on my Kerio Connect page, or contact me today for licensing and consulting services.
Android: Google Silently Storing WiFi Security Data
April 21, 2011 by Charles Gardner
When I bought a Motorola Xoom I noticed a ‘feature’ that consumers might appreciate but companies should be aware of, namely that Google apparently stores the wireless access point information including SSIDs and passwords from Android devices within the user’s Google account.
After I brought my new Xoom home, I realized it connected to my home wifi without prompting for a passphrase. This prompted me to investigate further. Sure enough, there on this brand new Honeycomb tablet were all the wifi networks I utilize including WPA2 passphrases. This tells me that my Android 2.2 phone has likely been sending this data up to Google all along but that it took seeing it on the new tablet to recognize this fact.
Apparently the setting on the phone to “Back up my data” (under Privacy settings) includes this information even though the description only says “Back up my settings and other application data.” I certainly did not recognize that my settings would include the security information for these wireless environments. It would be far better if Google had broken out the security information as a separate item that could be granularly backed up or not.
In a corporate environment this could be a real problem. I see two issues pop to the surface. First, if an attacker were to break into an employee’s Gmail account, they could potentially extract the keys to access your corporate wireless network as that employee. Second, when you terminate an employee, even if you recover their phone (should it be a company provided asset) they could have continued access to your wireless environment from a personal phone if their first one was synced with a personal Gmail account they continue to possess. Either of these scenarios is quite possible and potentially common, particularly in the SMB space.
Luckily, the defense against both of the above scenarios is the same. Wireless networks should absolutely be segmented, insulated, and monitored. Further, it may be appropriate to provide a second, internet-only wireless network for devices like smartphones to get outbound access while not being able to communicate at all with local IT resources. Finally, the access to the wireless network should have some sort of changing access method, whether that is monthly changes of a general passphrase or individual certificates that can be revoked when appropriate.
In a perfect world the vendor (Google) would provide the relevant security controls to allow users to control this type of behavior, and even better, they would enable them by default. Right now though you need to be aware and watch out for yourself.