A Business Owner’s Guide to Network Security

Network Security

Network security is a problem with many companies IT infrastructure. This problem has led to the theft of client information, trade secrets and even put companies out of business. This is because most people within a company that are responsible in making the IT decision making process actually do not even know what they are deciding on. It is this lack of education that has provoked me to write this article. Threats to a network come from many places. They can come from internal within the staff, external through email, external through the internet and office theft.

The staff within a company should be held to an iron clad computer usage policy. Most companies we visit have no usage policy in place. This is a very inexpensive first line of defense and a neccessity if the need to terminate an individual over their computer violations. You can download a sample computer usage policy by clicking here and tayloring it to your needs.

Email is another important consideration. Do not open emails from people you do now know. Be sure to utilize an email scanner that will scan your emails for viruses. We have so many times that people open up any email that comes across their inbox and causes them to sustain costly service calls to clean up the infected computers. So, through end user education we can help aleviate some of the issues caused by email use and it's security implications.

Freedom to surf the internet is a big problem as well. A lot of companies have no type of internet content filtering within their organization. Employee's are free to surf the internet wherever they choose with no type of monitoring resulting in lost time and money in productivity as well as exposure to internet threats and potentially great legal liabilities.

Office theft internal or external is a problem. Companies need to protect their valuable data and when people are using the computers in their business they have to have access to important documents in order to perform their job. However, this access to information can be detrminental if the person downloads sensitive documents to a USB drive, email's client lists to a competitor and many other scenarios.

Contact our office to schedule a free security assesment of your network where we will provide you with information that will help you get a proper computer usage policy in place, an email protection plan, a content filtering solution as well as a computer network monitoring solution to allow you comprehensive reports of what your staff is doing and trends of how they are spending their time when using company resources. Please email info@ntelligentnetworks.com or call 863-802-9675 to schedule your security assesment today. You can also view this information at http://www.ntelligentnetworks.com/security.aspx



Anthony Newman, CEO
www.ntelligentnetworks.com

Anthony Newman has been in the computer industry for over 15 years and has written many articles on IT infrastructure and business development.

Please read, it could save your life!

http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/ticker/article.aspx?Feed=MY&Date=20091110&ID=10688365&Symbol=MSFT



Anthony Newman, CEO

www.ntelligentnetworks.com

Upgrade your memory. It will save you later.

I see this over and over when people complain about their computer/s slowing down. They purchase there computer with a limited amount of software then as they progress through year 1, year 2 etc. they notice that things are running slower and slower. While there are many things that contribute to this I would like to identify on several problems that hopefully the end user can relate to, not enough RAM! As you upgrade your computer from XP to Vista to Windows 7 there is a false assumption by many that there computer is going to run better/faster. Well, maybe so but please read th fine print! As the age of the computer progresses it is very wise to consider the recommended memory requirements for the total of all of the programs you are running. If you are still on a 32 bit platform you are limited to 4GB, however, RAM is cheap! Install as much memory as you can in your computer so when it is time to upgrade your workstation you will not be nickled and dimed by service calls and memory upgrades you could have done to begin with.

Anthony Newman, CEO
http://www.ntelligentnetworks.com

Anthony Newman has been in the computer industry for over 15 years and has written many articles on IT infrastructure and business development.

Reduce your amount of spam drastically

Hello Everyone,

Every day I have people complaining about spam. Either there is too much spam or if the settings are too high they are missing important emails. Email hosting has been part of my business for over 9 years,. I enjoy it and have learned a lot during this time. I wanted to share a couple of simple ways to help reduce the amount of spam you get in your mailbox.

#1 Create an alternate email address at hotmail or gmail. When ever filling out forms, etc, use that email account to collect the information. Most of the time your email address information is shared with other companies and this will contribute to clogged up inboxes.

This is my first recommendation. I hope to share many more.

http://www.ntelligentnetworks.com