Technology Times “Insider Tips To Make Your Business Run Faster, Easier, And More Profitably”

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Luck Is For Leprechauns! Is Your Business Prepared

For a Data Disaster? What’s The Difference Between Disaster Recovery And Business

Continuity And Why You Should Care

Face it—downtime is depressing, difficult and downright dumb. You can’t afford to lose business, customers and your reputation because of failed computer systems. That’s why it’s so important to pay attention to Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC).

Almost every business depends on secure, reliable computer systems. It doesn’t matter if you’re a retail establishment, an online business or a service provider. You rely on technology in order to perform everyday functions.

The Costs of Downtime

The cost of downtime is significant. In this Internet-connected age, most companies lose money when systems are down. Customers cannot order products, so they go elsewhere for services. It’s also difficult to communicate with people when your e-mail and web sites are inaccessible. Downtime hurts your competitiveness. Eventually your company’s reputation can be damaged.

This is why Business Continuity is so much more important than simple Disaster Recovery practices. You want to prevent downtime instead of recovering from it.

So, what’s the difference?

Disaster Recovery is simply one part of Business Continuity. The word “disaster” indicates a situation where continuity has been broken. If you are recovering from a disaster, your computer systems are down. Your business information systems essentially failed. Typical disruptions include planned, unplanned, intentional and unintentional events. A backhoe can snap a telecom line at a nearby construction site, for example. Malware or viruses might take down your local network.

Business Continuity describes the way you eliminate disruptions. That’s the big difference between DR and BC. When hard drives, servers or networks fail, BC practices ensure that duplicate systems are in place. When downtime occurs, BC systems instantly switch to copies of the same data you have been using all along. Users don’t even notice the switch.

Continued on next page…

“As a business owner, you don’t have time to waste on technical and operational issues. That’s where we shine! Call us and put an end to your IT problems finally and forever!”

Dedicated To Your Success,

David Carattini President & CEO

March 2015 Inside This Issue…

Is Your Business Prepared for a Data Disaster? ......................................... Page 1

Shiny New Gadget: The Withings Activité Pop ....................... Page 2

DDoS Attacks On The Rise For 2015 ........ Page 3

Referral Contest! Win a 50” TV ............. Page 3

Mobile App Of The Month ....................... Page 4

What Is You Disaster Recovery Plan? ...... Page 4

The Truth About E-mail In 2015 ............... Page 4

Endorse This Skill: Jihad ........................... Page 5

Your Chance To Win $20 to:

................................ Page 5

Never Forget A Password Again With A Password Manager ..................... Page 5

Marketing Through Your Customers ....... Page 6

IT Just Works

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Shiny New Gadget

Of The Month:

The Withings

Activité Pop

Lately, it seems the tech world has

been inundated with wearable

devices, from fitness trackers to

smartwatches. They offer a number

of useful features, but they also lack

in elegance. They are often bulky,

ordinary, complicated and —in the

case of smartwatches — have less

than desirable battery life.

This is where the Withings Activité

Pop comes in. It looks like a classy

watch on the outside, but on the

inside it’s a very different story. It’s

an activity tracker, verging on

expressing itself as a smartwatch.

From the smartphone app, you

control everything, from the analog

dials to your activity goals. The

watch face features a secondary dial

that tracks your activity—from 0% to

100%—for the day. It’s simple and

straightforward. It’s water-resistant

up to 30 meters and available in

three colors: azure, sand and shark

gray. It’s currently available at Best

Buy, in-store and online.

Continued from Page 1…

Smart Business Continuity Solutions

These days you have several options to help keep your computers running and your information available 24/7. Storage solutions that contain backed-up, redundant hard drives, like Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Networks (SAN) storage devices, help you recover in failure situations. Servers use these devices as their primary storage as if the drives were physically inside the computer. Should one of the drives fail, your users never see it. Should a server fail, a different server can take over the load so that everything continues. Their data and applications are always available, even if hardware breaks. Similarly, modern networking technologies protect organizations from networking failures. Both these hardware solutions help you maintain business continuity when things break. Notice I said when things break, not if.

However the solutions I mentioned can be quite expensive. With the newest technologies much of the redundancy needed for complete backup and disaster recovery can be handled by a sophisticated unit called a BDR. With a BDR, backups of servers and key workstations are image-based so everything is exactly preserved. This included all of the little tweaks and settings that were made over the months and years to make it just perfect. In the event of a disaster, the BDR can, within a few minutes, act as any server that has been backed up so that there is almost no down time. Further, these units also send a copy to the cloud so the data is protected in 4 secured areas.

Many companies don’t have the latest hardware and software installed, however. It’s important to upgrade your systems in order to take advantage of the new solutions. You need to have a plan for dealing with natural disasters, hackers, viruses, legal threats and new rules governing data protection.

3 Business Continuity Considerations

Here are some key areas to examine:

1. Consider how important computer systems are to your bottom line. Do you rely on an internet connection for payment? If you lost your customer database, would that immediately impact your business?

2. Pay attention to your storage habits. Make sure all critical data is backed up to a central server in your office AND in another physical location. Your best option for simple offsite storage of your files usually is a “cloud” backup solution such as DropBox for Business. However solutions like this only preserve the essence of your company. Down time could be significant while servers are being repaired and then after, the data is restored.

3. Think about installing a BDR unit that will exactly duplicate all of your data, applications, user accounts, and settings so that recovery can be a matter of minutes rather than days.

Ultimately, the data and applications you use to run your business need to be protected. Consider them vital organs to the health of your business.

For a deeper dive on securing and protecting you data, plan attending my webinar, “What Every Business Owner Must Have In Place Now To Guarantee A Fast, Easy And Painless Recovery Of Their Data”, Wednesday March 18th, 2015 starting at 10 AM.

To register go to www.aztechworks.com/bdrwebinar or call 623-444-2395 or email ask@aztechworks.com.

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Business Continuity Tip Of The Month:

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks: Trends Show a Stronger Threat in 2015

What the heck is a DDoS attack and how can it affect my business? Imagine that you own a restaurant which seats 20 people. Imagine also that some teenagers decide to play a prank on you.

Suddenly, 100 teenagers show up at your restaurant at the same time. The pranksters aren't there to buy meals, they're there to block your actual customers from sitting down and buying a meal. Because your customers can't get through the crowd, they are unable to enter your restaurant, and you lose money as your customers instead spend their money at another establishment.

This is analogous to what an attacker does when they initiate a DDoS attack against your company’s internet IP address. If the IP address points to your web or email server for example, then the server may be overwhelmed. Legitimate traffic heading for the server will be unable to contact it, and the site becomes unavailable. Service is denied meaning that your web site will stop responding or email will be stopped. What makes a DoS attach a DDoS attack is the malicious traffic is generated from multiple sources -- often throughout the world -- making the attack much harder to stop.

Most business today depend on internet so imagine if critical internet services like web sites and email or web-based line of business apps were unavailable. Think about the cost to your company. All indications is that 2015 will be a banner year for these attacks both in the strength and power.

There are more devices on the internet than ever (TV’s, fridges, thermostats, etc.). Many have little or no security to prevent malware infections. The result: many of the “smart” devices end up as mindless drones in a hacker group’s botnet.

What to do to prevent the attacks.

1. Purchase a business-class internet security appliance/router/firewall. I see so many small businesses purchase a $50 to $200 router from BestBuy or Stapes thinking that will offer protection for their network. Let me be frank, If you paid less than about $500 for your internet router, you have a piece of junk that offers almost no protection for your business. A security appliance offers both automatic defenses against these types of attacks as well as strong reporting so that DDoS attacks can be detected and mitigated quickly. Someone needs to be monitoring the logs and that’s where partnering with a managed IT firm would come in.

2. Move critical services to the cloud. If you are still running your web, email, or other server that are critical to your business operations, consider moving them to a cloud or co-located environment. Moving to the cloud means servers that are at a data center with multiple internet providers and much more sophisticated equipment than we could ever afford. They are super expert at quickly detecting and thwarting all kinds of attacks.

Did You Know? Editor Bennett Cerf challenged Dr. Seuss to write a book using no more than 50 different words. The result? One of my favorite books: Green Eggs and Ham.

Referral Contest!! Earn CASH and the chance to win a new

50” LED HDTV

Refer a friend to AZ Tech Works Between January 1 and March 31, 2015

for a chance to win a 50” HDTV!

Here’s the scoop: 1) Call, email us, or go on our website with your referral information. 2) We will call to schedule an appointment. 3) We will pay you $25 or donate $25 to your favorite charity for any qualified referral we get an appointment with. We will then enter your name in to the drawing for the TV. 4) When your referral becomes a client (and spends $1000 or more), we will pay you $75 or donate $75 to your charity. Plus we will give your referral $100 off their purchase.

What makes a good referral for us? An organization that has 5 or more PC’s and needs help with their network, backups, technology strategy, email server or is simply interested in having a second opinion on how they are doing things now.

Call or email Dave (623-444-2395 or dave@aztechworks.com) with your referral

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Webinar Wednesday March 18th 10:00 to 10:30 AM

“What Every Business Owner Must Have In Place Now To Guarantee A Fast, Easy And Painless

Recovery Of Their Data”

During this webinar you’ll discover:

The two-step backup system you must have in place to be 100% certain your business is back up and running FAST in the event of a sudden, fatal server crash or disaster.

The shocking misunderstanding most business owners have about their current backup system; if you think just backing up the data is enough, you’ll be shocked to hear this.

How to get back up and running in the shortest time possible. We’ll reveal what most backup providers don’t want you to know about their backup system that could have you down for days – possibly weeks – trying to restore your data.

The only surefire way to know if your data is being backed up without errors or corruption; almost 99% of business owners never perform this simple check

For more information and to register go to:

Get More Free Tips, Tools, and Services At My Web Site: www.aztechworks.com

How many times have you lent something to a friend or family and never got it back? Months or years later you suddenly think, “Did I ever get that back from Paul?”

You Borrow It is a great app that will prevent that awful thought from ever returning by helping you keep track of things you loaned out.

1. Open YOU BORROWED IT, tag the borrower, snap their photo holding the item (optional)

2. Enter a “return” date

3. Get a calendar reminder when borrowed items are due

4. Be totally at ease knowing your stuff is safe and will be returned to you!

You Borrow It costs only $1 and its available for iOS devices (iPhone/iPad), Android, and Windows Phone.

The Truth About E-mail In 2015 Love it, hate it or call it the gold at the end of your rainbow, e-mail is here to stay. Over the past two decades, it’s become

deeply ingrained in our day-to-day business communication. It’s basically a requirement. Despite a number of software advances and changes in the online communication landscape, e-mail is more important than ever.

This was recently confirmed by a study conducted by Pew Research. They found that e-mail is indispensable among those who are Internet-connected at work. These days, that covers a lot of people. In fact, 61% say it plays an integral role in their job. Additionally, 46% say e-mail access keeps them more productive (while another 46% say e-mail has no bearing on their productivity one way or the other). Only 7% say e-mail hurts their productivity.

In 2014, social media analysts warned that e-mail was on its last legs and that it would soon be overtaken by other online services. However, as this study seems to confirm, that is not the case. In fact, in the workplace, it’s very much the opposite. The Pew study found that social media, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, benefited only about 4% of those in a connected workplace.

Even among the millennial generation, and those who regularly use social media networks in their personal lives, it hasn’t been something fully translatable to the professional environment as a productivity factor. This doesn’t discount uses for social media in the workplace—as a marketing or customer outreach tool—but no social media platform has come close to replacing e-mail as the go-to communication tool.

That doesn’t mean Silicon Valley start-ups aren’t trying. They are always at work trying to find that next four-leaf clover in online communication, hoping to develop that so-called “e-mail killer.” So far, nothing has stepped up that can achieve what e-mail can, particularly for businesses.

For many businesses, it comes right back to the fact that e-mail works. It’s a proven platform and it remains the business communication “golden child.” It’s the same reason phones and fax machines aren’t extinct. They serve a purpose and they help us get things done. That doesn’t stop businesses from always looking for ways to streamline that process.

Another reason e-mail works: accessibility. E-mail is used on nearly a universal level. Social media platforms, while many are incredibly popular, can’t touch the truly global reach of e-mail. Have you considered how e-mail impacts your job? Does it keep you productive? Or are you ready to move on to the Next Big Thing?

Mobile App Of

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Your Chance To Win $20 Gift Card

The Grand Prize Winner of last month’s Trivia Challenge Quiz was:

Tammy Kallmes of Aqua Fria Animal Hospital The correct answer was: B) Switzerland

This month’s question:

According to Irish lore, St. Patrick banished all the snakes from Ireland. What other island nation is also devoid of snakes?

A) Cuba B) Madagascar C) New Zealand

D) Jamaica E) Sri Lanka

Call or email me right now with your answer:

Never Forget A Password Again With A Password Manager

We all have a number of passwords for all the online services we use. You name it: banking, online bill payment, e-mail, social networks, shopping and more. You know it’s incredibly easy to lose track of them all — unless you are committing one of the greatest online security offenses by using one password for everything. One of the best — and most secure — ways to handle your passwords is with a password manager.

It’s not uncommon for password managers to get overlooked when it comes to online security. There is a lingering — and false — concern that keeping all of your passwords in one place can potentially open up all your protected accounts to intruders — if they are able to break into the password manager. It’s a legitimate concern, but password managers use very powerful encryption (scrambling) to keep your passwords safe. They are specifically designed to keep you even more secure than you otherwise would be.

Many password managers — including RoboForm, LastPass, KeePass and 1Password — do much more than simply “remember” your passwords. They also

offer password-creation assistance. They will tell you if a password is too weak or just right. Some managers offer the option to generate a secure password for you. Since you don’t need to remember it, it can be more complex. For example my bank account password is 25 characters long! In the case of RoboForm, not only does it do all of the above but also remembers credit card info, tax ID’s, and address info so that form filling on a web page is a breeze. Believe me, we do a ton of ordering and this is a real productivity booster. They are compatible with a number of platforms (including mobile devices) and they are packed with customizable tools to keep you safe.

The Lighter Side…

Endorse This Skill:

Jihad We endorse the skills of our coworkers, friends, acquaintances and other connections on LinkedIn all the time. But what would you do if one of your connections listed “jihad” as one of his skills? Unless you’re in the business of extremism (you’re probably not), you’re likely to slink away quietly and alert LinkedIn admins.

Well, one senior Taliban commander decided to update his LinkedIn profile with this very “skill.” Specifically, he listed “jihad and journalism.” This particular terrorist leader, Ehsanullah Ehsan, even lists himself as “self-employed.”

Unfortunately (or fortunately), when LinkedIn was contacted by the Telegraph for further information, the social media company decided it was best to take the account down.

There has been some chatter as to the legitimacy of the account. The profile’s distinct lack of Taliban propaganda and recruiting information suggested it wasn’t operated by the terrorist leader himself or anyone in a significant leadership position.

Of course, as a terrorist leader and all-around terrible human being, he has more pressing things to worry

Marketing Through Your Customers Word of mouth — the better-than-anything-you-could-pay-for form of

spreading the word about companies and products worth supporting. Your customers do your marketing for you, and you simply continue delivering the high-quality product they’re raving about.

But how do you get your customers to do it?

On May 9, 2013, an article was published by a journalist who’d stopped in Dominique Ansel Bakery in New York City and asked what was new. The staff offered the journalist a taste of a new product that would launch to the public on the day after the article was published. On May 10, 2013, the Cronut™ was born. There were customers waiting outside the little bakery, lined up to sample the delectable baked good they’d read about.

By the end of the week, the line outside the bakery was 100 people long. People stood in line to sample the Cronut™ they’d heard about from their friends. And they didn’t just buy one Cronut™; they bought lots of them—as well as all of the other unique, handmade pastries the shop produces.

The Dominique Ansel Bakery is a small business. They don’t have a big marketing department who dreamed up the Cronut™ as a publicity stunt. They simply embrace the creativity inherent in baking, and word of mouth pulls customers from all over the world into the little shop. It’s organic. It’s natural. It’s the power of word of mouth.

Another great example of a company whose customers are ardent fans is a well-known jewelry store (whose name I can’t share with you). Their policy for purchases of engagement rings is pure genius. A couple selects a ring—say a diamond of one full carat. The jewelry store has a secret upgrade policy, and they supply the client with a stone that’s just a little larger than the one they paid for. When customers take their one-carat ring to an appraiser, they discover that it’s a carat and a quarter. The customer—stunned at having received more than they paid for—returns to the jewelry store, at which point the jeweler thanks them for their business, tells them about the secret upgrade and—here’s the genius part—asks the customer not to tell anyone about the secret upgrade.

But the customer does tell. The customer tells everyone he can think of about the spectacular customer service he received and about the exceptional value the jeweler provided. That customer ropes in hundreds more customers, and the jewelry store doesn’t do anything except make customers happy and wait for new customers to pour in. It’s brilliant.

Whether customers are sharing a Cronut™ with a friend, or whether they’re swearing a coworker to secrecy about the jewelry store’s secret upgrade they swore not to divulge, if you can get your customers talking about you, your company and your brand, then you’re starting a marketing trend that can not only become self-sustaining, but can also bring more customers than you’d ever dreamed of—right to your door.

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Contact us anytime for all of your IT needs!

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Custom System MIKE MICHALOWICZ (pronounced mi-KAL-o-wits) started his first business at the age of 24, moving his young family to the only safe place he could afford—a retirement building. With no experience, no contacts and no savings, he systematically bootstrapped a multimillion-dollar business. Then he did it again. And again. Now he is doing it for other entrepreneurs. Mike is the CEO of Provendus Group, a consulting firm that ignites explosive growth in companies that have plateaued; a former small-business columnist for The Wall Street Journal; MSNBC’s business makeover expert; a keynote speaker on entrepreneurship; and the author of the cult classic book The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. His newest book, The Pumpkin Plan, has already been called “the next E-Myth!” For more information, visit http://

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