IT Horror Stories

We all take our IT systems for granted these days and rely on them almost completely. When we have problems we all try reverting to paper based systems, but we simply don’t have access to the data to be able to carry out a huge percentage of our work. How can your sales team contact their prospects if they don’t have access to the contact details? Your accounts team will just end up doing filing, etc. That being the case perhaps we should lavish a bit of TLC on our core systems to try and prevent downtime, and data loss.
You may have heard in the news over the last few days about the worldwide virus attack that happened back in May and brought our NHS to its knees for a few days. The recent news is actually nothing new at all. I, and no doubt many others, said at the time it was down to poor patching of systems. Yes, you need a good antivirus software, but you need to remember that often someone has to get infected by a new virus before the antivirus providers can secure against it. This is a constant battle between the malware creators and those trying to block it.
The virus outbreak back in May would have not hit the news at all if everyone made sure their systems had the latest Microsoft security updates. Microsoft had created an update (patch) for the vulnerability a couple of months before the virus outbreak occurred. The reason this virus was so effective was once inside an organisation it worked its way around the network looking for PC’s that had not been patched. This is where all the damage occurred.
Fortunately, I can say not a single one of our client’s computers were affected. This may just be luck that nobody clicked the link in an email, or opened the attachment.
Or perhaps we created our own luck:

1. We provide robust email scanning systems for our clients to filter out as much of the rubbish as possible.
2. Our client’s systems all have our monitoring agent on them which forces our antivirus software onto them and tells us as soon as there is a problem.
3. Our agent also does a daily check for any patches that are required, downloads them, installs them and forces the user to reboot the PC. Not just Microsoft, but Adobe, Apple, Google Chrome, Firefox, Java and many more.
4. We also constantly try to educate users to be aware of potentially dangerous content.

These systems, along with our support plans, offer our clients peace of mind and security at an affordable monthly price. At Reach I.T. Management we put the management of your IT systems as our top priority. So if you want to invest in uptime, rather than paying for downtime, then avoid your own Halloween Horrors by contacting us.
Call : 01788 440024
Email : paul@reach-it.co.uk
Or contact us here