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What should you do?
As of April 8, 2014 Microsoft will no longer offer the following services for Office 2003:
· Assisted support
· Online content updates
· Software updates from Microsoft Update
· Security updates to help protect your PC from harmful viruses, spyware, and other malicious software, which can steal your personal information.
Your Office 2003 will continue to run, but you will be are greater risk for....
“After April 8, 2014, Microsoft will no longer provide security updates or technical support for Windows XP. Security updates patch vulnerabilities that may be exploited by malware and help keep users and their data safer. PCs running Windows XP after April 8, 2014, should not be considered to be protected, and it is important that you migrate to a current supported operating system – such as... so you can receive regular security updates to protect their computer from malicious attacks.” This does not mean that instantly on April 9th your PC in not secure, but I can assure you as the days and weeks pass there will be... that put you at risk. There will be no patches available to secure your computer and it is likely you will never even know what new risks exist on your Windows XP computer.
If your system breaks, how much information are you willing to lose when your system is recovered? If you only back up once per day your RPO is essentially eight hours. If at the end of the day you finish work and your system crashes and all data is lost, you have then lost the full eight hours of work. If data is lost half way through the day, your effective Recovery Point at that point is four hours, but don’t confuse that with your objective which is set at eight hours.
RPO can and should be calculated differently for different systems you use. Your Exchange Mail Server and SQL Servers should probably have an RPO of 15 minutes to one hour. DNS servers and a static website can do fine with a 24 hour RPO since they rarely change.
If your system breaks, how long do you want to be down? How soon do you need your system back up and running? Whether it is a week, a day, an hour or one minute, whatever time you establish, that is your RTO or Recovery Time Objective. Think about what your business needs and you can come up with one component of disaster recovery/business continuity planning, your RTO. Next up, you need to start thinking about your Recovery Point Objective.
Know what you are backing up and know what you need to back-up.They are not always the same thing.During the course of writing this series of blogs on backup and disaster recovery I thought I would throw in an anecdotal [...]
The shutdown of cloud backup provider Nirvanix does not surprise me as it appeared to me to be somewhat ill conceived. While Backup Exec is good for conventional backup to tape and other media, is not so well suited for [...]
Kathleen Sebelius at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing Wednesday said she is responsible for the problems with Healthcare.gov. Will she extend her ownership to the violations of privacy regulations? Will she own the pathetic demonstration that political expediency means more to HHS than the commitment to applicants’ privacy? Will HHS be a little more forgiving the next time another organization gets investigated for a HIPAA breach or will Tavenner and Sebelius be HIPAAcritical?
I was going to write this, but Dave Cunningham, Alvaka's Business Technology Officer, beat me to it. So here it is in all it's timeliness. Please be advised that Alvaka Networks is notifying its clients and partners of a [...]
Here is a good mrc Cup of Joe Blog about time wasting tasks in IT. I was asked to submit a suggestion for the article. It is a quick read on six things you can do to stop wasting time [...]
We are into the final preparations for Alvaka Networks third
annual track day. The date is getting
close on Friday November 8th, 2013.
This is a client appreciation day. We invite clients, prospects and numerous associated
businesses out to Auto Club Speedway for a private IT expo, lunch, fast driving
on the track and other fun activities.
