You never know when exactly you’ll find out you need to have a Disaster Recovery Plan in place. Last Friday, the Portland area experienced significant rainfall amounts, which caused widespread flooding and damage. Although rain in the Pacific Northwest is rather common, receiving it all at once is not nearly as common.

You hear a constant whirring or beeping sound when you walk past the server room that may be just annoying. Or it might indicate that something is failing. Or maybe you’re feeling the pain of having been told that it’s time to upgrade the server again in order to continue running your Sage software, and you ask yourself: “Didn’t we just upgrade that server a few years ago?” There is a chance you have been tempted to move everything to the Cloud, or maybe you’re being forced to because of changes to the work environment. Now is as good a time as any to make the switch for your Sage 100 software. But how do you know where to begin - or whether this solution even makes sense for you?

Join us for our Bennett/Porter IT and Hosted Services free webinar series! We’ll focus on services and features that will enhance your work productivity, prepare you for the unexpected, and ensure your data is protected. With many employees working remote, businesses have had to change the way important company data is managed. This series will cover common scenarios and what you can do to ensure every base is covered.

If you’ve considered the option of working from home or been given the option to do so, here are a few ways to accomplish that.

Using a VPN

You may have heard of VPNs but didn’t know what it meant. Without getting too technical, a VPN allows you to use a computer to connect to your office, with encryption, without physically being there. There are tools that need to be in place to accomplish this. Typically, you’ll need some or all of the following items:

Are you still using Windows 7 on your work computer? Do you have servers in your office that have Microsoft Server 2008 installed on them? If so, then there are a few important things you need to know regarding these and similar Microsoft products.

On January 14, 2020, Microsoft will end support for many popular operating systems and software platforms used by businesses today. The most important of these are Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, and Microsoft Exchange 2010. Support for Office 2010 will end in October of 2020.

As we pointed out in our blog post earlier this month, while backups are essential for the health of your business, there are many details which often remain overlooked in a basic backup plan. These oversights can render any strategy useless just when you need it the most…even if there are backup files available somewhere.

Having the right backup solution can save your company from losing important data, having to pay a ransom to retrieve it, or potentially costing your business the valuable secrets that keep it competitive. At the very least, nobody wants to re-key all of their accounting data if something goes wrong after, say, a long period-end process. These are all real consequences that have brought clients to us for help and a plan.

Still, it’s difficult to know how to begin developing a backup plan without some guidance. Here are some key questions we ask when helping customers design a new backup strategy…or evaluate the effectiveness of a current one:

When it comes to technology, everyone seems to want the latest and greatest. This desire applies to the software we use just as much as the hardware we install that software on. However, it’s not always the best idea to update your software as soon as new versions become available. Updates are usually great, because they allow vendors like Microsoft and Apple to patch security holes, fix buggy issues, and rollout new features. Nevertheless, a few recent cases have demonstrated that taking some time to manage your computer or phone’s update schedule, rather than immediately installing every update that pops up, can save you some headaches!