It’s well-known that publishers are a major component of an author sharing their work with the world, but recent innovations threaten to disrupt the status quo of the industry. Like many industries, the publishing industry has been changed significantly by the introduction of new technologies that afford writers more liberty when producing their work. What can the business owner learn from these changes?
As the smartphone takes over many of our daily tasks, it can be annoying if we have to use a separate device to accomplish what we need to, like making calls on a different phone. Did you know that it’s easy to add a second phone number to your smartphone?
In a recent hack attack, Twitter had 33 million user login credentials stolen. This is unfortunate, but not surprising; an incident like this routinely makes the headlines. Although, what is surprising is what this hack reveals about people’s poor password security habits.
Mobile platforms have given way to entirely new ways to develop and make use of apps. More business professionals than ever before are relying on their smartphones to get work done while out of the office, but the functionality of the on-screen keyboard interface has some of them stumped on how to stay productive. It’s for this reason that developers have created applications designed to listen to users’ voices, and record them in text format.
Sitting at a desk all day is probably the worst thing you can do for your health. The average office worker sits for 9.7 hours each day and after one hour of sitting the production of enzymes that burn fat declines by as much as 90 percent, significantly slowing metabolism. Then there’s ongoing back pain and eye strain. What’s the modern office worker to do?
A data loss incident is considered a major disaster scenario, especially for small and medium-sized businesses. All it takes is one moment to lose your business’s entire data infrastructure. We’ll walk you through a story that should serve as a cautionary tale, one that hopefully teaches you to adhere to data backup and disaster recovery best practices.
Marco Marsala, a hosting provider, posted on a server forum looking for advice on how to deal with a major issue he encountered while trying to delete a few files. He had utilized what’s called the “rm-rf” command with undefined variables, which wound up destroying all data on the system. Like any good hosting provider, he had backups of the files, but, like a dumb-dumb, he had the backups stored on the system that he accidentally wiped. What a mess.
This is actually a similar blunder to one that Pixar experienced, almost deleting Toy Story 2 prior to its release.
As a result of Marsala’s negligence, all of the data that his company had stored was destroyed. This included the data of 1,535 customers, whom he had built and hosted websites for. Without any backups stored off-site, he had no way to recover the data.
As you might expect, the responses that Marsala received from other users of the online forum were quite negative. Many completely dismissed the possibility that his company could recover from such a devastating failure, and others questioned his abilities as a hosting provider. One poster even went as far as recommending that Marsala seek legal counsel, rather than attempt to restore the data, predicting that Marsala was “going out of business.”
The conclusion: Marsala’s best chance of recovering from this major blow was to recruit help from a third-party data recovery firm. Fortunately for him, the company was able to recover his files, but that doesn’t change the fact that his simple mistake was a huge hit to his company’s finances. The company suffered from fees associated with the disaster recovery process, as well as reduced income from the loss of business suffered as a result of his negligence.
The lesson: neglecting to follow best practices got Marsala in some hot water, and his failure basically invited disaster to his doorstep. Following the accepted best practices of data recovery could have easily prevented the situation from escalating as quickly as it did. In fact, Marsala’s reason for distress (user error) is one of the most common reasons to use a backup and disaster recovery solution, a solution that stores your backups off-site on a separate system.
Storing your data off-site allows your organization to avoid the many causes of data loss, including user error, fires, electrical surges, hardware failure, theft, and so much more. This minimizes the risk of these events threatening your business’s operations.
How do you manage your business’s data backups? Are they stored off-site, and do you have a system in place to rapidly deploy them in the event of a major disaster? If you’re uncertain, reach out to Databit at 201-529-8050.
You may feel like you’re familiarized with everything your smartphone can do; yet, there are still some little-known things about smartphones that may surprise you. Take for example these four smartphone facts from List25.
The longer you use Facebook, the more personal content you hand over to the social media empire. Sharing content is what drives the social media experience, but what if you want your content back? Surprisingly, Facebook makes this easy.
Your business’s productivity suite, be it Google Apps for Work or Microsoft Office 365, is a critical component for your success. These services, when implemented in the cloud, can be major game-changers, and it’s thanks to the convenience of mobile data and application access that have led to such vigor in the development of the cloud.
When it comes to cybersecurity, maintenance is key. Whether you choose human-based security or an automated security solution, running into shortcomings is still possible. Human security tends to rely on the word of experts, and anything that doesn’t fit into the guidelines is missed and may therefore get through and wreak havoc. Network security can be a touch overzealous, in a way “crying wolf,” with an excess of false positives that ultimately require human analysis, leading to human frustration.
