Are you concerned about the privacy and security of your data online? We ALL should be! In an era when many of us take our work home, travel for business, and use our personal mobile devices to shop and bank, security is becoming a more important issue – inside the office and out.

wireless security

That’s why it’s critical to know how to protect yourself and your data by following some basic best practices. Whether you’re at work or at home, use this need-to-know information as a guide to increase your security and privacy.

1) It’s not safe to use USB drives to share files and other information. Security experts are reporting that the problem runs deeper than the possibility that the thumb drive is infected with a virus. USB devices can have malware installed to completely take over a personal computer, invisibly alter files installed from the memory stick, or even redirect a user’s Internet traffic. Even worse, it’s possible for the attack code to remain hidden in the firmware even after it appears to have been wiped.

2) Know that public Wi-fi connections aren’t totally secure. Using your laptop, tablet or smartphone at a café, library, in a hotel, or at the airport can leave you vulnerable. Always be cautious about what information you send and the sites you visit.

3) Get savvy about encryption to protect your data. One option is to use a virtual private network (VPN) to encrypt your personal data in wireless hotspots. This is important for anyone who uses public Wi-Fi access, whether or not you’ve paid to use the service.

4) Keep your devices up-to-date with the latest firewall protection and antivirus programs. It’s also very important to make use of the most current operating system patches.

5) Use an email filtering service. Unfortunately, malware and viruses are often sent out through spam, or email from a friend or colleague who may have had an account or computer hacked. An email filtering service hosted by a third party provides another important layer of protection for your machines and data.

6) Set a policy for employees on where, how, and which devices can be used to access company data. Do your employees check their email from a smartphone? That can increase productivity, but you need to have a system in place to secure your data.

Bonus tip: No matter the size of your business, it’s always a good idea to speak with an IT professional to help review your network operating system, set great privacy policies, and streamline your IT system. If you need additional advice or information, please let us know at Oram Corporate Advisors. We look forward to hearing from you!

Technology is always changing. But if there’s one thing that’s certain in IT today, it’s that all of us must take proactive steps to safeguard our data, both at home and in the office. We’re all connected to the Internet – at home, school, work, and in the marketplace.

To increase awareness and prevent theft, fraud and abuse, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in cooperation with the National Cyber Security Alliance and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center is sponsoring National Cyber Security Awareness Month this October.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has provided a list of tips that should be used year-round to protect consumers and organizations from data loss and theft. We’re sharing these tips, along with a few best practices of our own. You can take steps to safeguard yourself, your assets and personal information by doing the following —

Be cautious about links, websites and other information you receive online. Anything that sounds too good to be true, most likely is.
Talk to your family, friends, peers, colleagues and employees at the office about Internet safety. Share tips and news when possible to encourage everyone to protect privacy and data.
Keep your operating system, browser, and other critical software optimized by installing updates.
Set strong passwords, and don’t share them with anyone. Install two-step authentication and password managing programs when needed at home and at the office.
Be sure to password protect all mobile devices, including smartphones, laptops and tablets. Secure anything that is connected to the Internet, including household items.
Install an email management system to filter out spam. You can prevent picking up malware and viruses by avoiding suspect links and attachments that come with suspicious email.
Bonus tip: If you have any questions about how to protect yourself and your office from cyber security threats, be sure to get in touch with us at Oram Corporate Advisors. We’re here to share our tech expertise, and can manage your systems if needed. We look forward to hearing from you!

Bandwidth is important in real time, both while working and using your home Internet connection. But latency – the time it takes to transfer a message or download your content – can also make all the difference in whether your connection crawls or flies.

Slow connection as a snail

Remember the old delays in telephone calls when they were transmitted by satellite? Maybe you don’t. But there are some ways latency issues resemble that old school problem, so it’s a useful illustration. Basically, when Internet protocols are relaying data and acknowledging the reception of packets of information, any delay can slow your system and cause a stutter.

An article recently published in Ars Technica explains the problem this way: “Just as we acknowledge what someone is telling us in conversation (with the occasional nod of the head, “uh huh,” “go on,” and similar utterances), most Internet protocols have a similar system of acknowledgement. They don’t send a continuous never-ending stream of bytes. Instead, they send a series of discrete packets. When you download a big file from a Web server, for example, the server doesn’t simply barrage you with an unending stream of bytes as fast as it can. Instead, it sends a packet of perhaps a few thousand bytes at a time, then waits to hear back that they were received correctly. It doesn’t send the next packet until it has received this acknowledgement.”

The result is almost unworkable attempts at voice and video chats and conversations held on Skype. Or, as Gizmodo reports, a “second extra to load a web page sucks; a second stutter on YouTube is wildly annoying, but a second of latency with Skype make the whole thing practically useless. And that’s nothing to do with bandwidth, whatsoever.”

So what can you do about it? The good people at Ars Technica suggest methods to reconfigure your protocols at the application layer that can help. Pipelining, in which your Web browser can multitask while requesting files from the server, can also be adopted.

For more information on latency and a more detailed explanation of how to work around data delays, read the Ars Technica article here.

But you also can get help to improve your system. Use of traffic shaping algorithms can help you better manage your bandwidth by prioritizing uses. You can also call in the experts to manage your IT system. That’s where we can help.

With scheduled onsite hours or on-call support as needed, ORAM can build, monitor, and manage your entire IT infrastructure, helping you to grow a smarter, faster business. If you’d rather let someone else handle your IT network so that you can stay focused on the business of managing your organization, get in touch with us. Don’t wait another minute!

What’s one of the most common things we hear in IT? For so many of us, the reliability of our Internet connection and network is a top priority. If you’re interested in having a faster connection to maximize productivity in the office, we have a simple solution that might surprise you: There are email management best practices that will automatically increase your speeds. First, here’s a brief overview about how the system generally works. To put it simply, data is transmitted in packets over the Internet. Text files, images and other media aren’t transmitted whole in a single message. Instead, the data is sent in pieces and bounced between routers and servers before it arrives at the gateway of your internal network. That’s why large amounts of data in the system, or just larger files in general, will automatically slow your system as the process works. If the system is handling a high volume of data, you need to streamline the process to speed up upload and download times. For that reason, proper email management is critical to reduce the drag on your bandwidth. You can do this with the following three best practices for your email system: 1) Use a hosted email filtering service. That way, the email management service will take the brunt of the initial messages, and then filter out any spam or junk mail that doesn’t need to take up the bandwidth in your office. If you have an in-house email server, it will also save on data resources for storage. 2) Have a email management system in place to aggressively filter out and scan for malware. Unfortunately, many computer viruses and malware attacks come through email and attachments. Filtering your email is an incredibly effective tool to reduce your risk. A clean system will automatically increase your bandwidth speeds, as uninfected computers and other devices just work better. 3) Put in place an email management system that filters outgoing files sent by employees. We’ve gone over the benefits of filtering inbound data, but managing your outbound traffic will also protect you from liability, protect your proprietary data, and just make your organization seem more professional over all. You can set a company policy and have your email managed for compliance. Easy! If you’d like to learn more about email management, how the process works, and the benefits for your business, please get in touch with us at Oram Corporate Advisors. We can help you set in place the framework to better manage your IT infrastructure and set effective policies. We look forward to hearing from you!