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.

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.

The event is Tuesday July 12th at noon Eastern time, and you can jump to the registration link here.

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.

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.

Connect offers a compelling value for the cost.  Not only is the license very reasonably priced, the installation and maintenance of the system will cost a fraction of deploying a similar Exchange 2010 system.

I have already converted my email system to Connect, including Outlook 2010 and multiple Android clients.  One of the clients I provide network management for has also already dropped their old email platform and moved to Connect.

Contact me today to find out how to get Efficient IT with Kerio Connect.

You can pick up all the presentations from the VMWare Communities.

Here are the details:

Location: Tech Data Corporation

5350 Tech Data Drive

Clearwater, Fl. 33760

Raymund Center Building, Seminar Room #3

Date: Wednesday, May 19, 2010.

Time: 5:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Snacks will be available to all attendees and Door prizes will be awarded at the close of this meeting.

For the full agenda go to the VMWare Communities:

Tampa Bay VMUG Agenda 2010-05-19

The guide is broken into several PDFs covering different topics:

• Introduction
• Host
• Virtual Machines
• vCenter
• vNetwork
• Console OS

Take a look and give VMWare some feedback.

Photo credit dkassner

I am proud to announce that I now offer a custom online backup solution to my clients.

This service utilizes the proven technology of the CrashPlan Pro system and secure, encrypted storage on my equipment within a secure data center.

The real differentiator from other larger services is the personal service you will receive directly from me.  I will work with you to setup an appropriate solution, install it, and monitor it.  If you have any questions or problems, you contact me directly, and it will be resolved.  No 1-800 calls to who knows where with wait queues and frustrating communications problems.  Your data will be safe, and you will have confidence in the solution.

Contact me today to get a quote and get started.