Professional IT Services that Andromeda Provides for Warrenville, IL Businesses:

Managed IT Services
Warrenville,IL

Andromeda offers a range of IT support plans—anything from month-to-month "time & materials"-based assistance to fixed IT service contracts that permit "no-brainer" conformance to an annual budget. Beyond the functions you would expect from a full-service MSP, you'll have a dedicated C‑CATs team that includes an Account Coordinator directing the same field and remote technicians day-to-day, month-to-month, and even year-to-year to manage your IT network needs.
This isn't simply a glorified Virtual CIO offering. Imagine the cost of hiring your own CIO AND tech team for this same level of customized service and knowledge of your particular (and evolving) network setup!

Cloud Services & Migrations

Typically, the biggest issue you'll face when initiating Cloud IT services is not the services themselves, but rather the proper migration of your existing IT services to the Cloud without loss of functionality, downtime, and scores of other details that could undermine the whole process. Andromeda has a long history of expertise in physical on-premises systems. Don't make the mistake of turning all your current systems over to a "Cloud expert"; we'll save you from a lot of heartache and pain with a virtually seamless Cloud migration from your current setup— whatever it is.

Data Backup & Recovery
Warrenville,IL

It's a crazy world. Literally thousands of people you don't even know attempt to break or steal from systems like yours every day. Good 24/7 monitoring is a first line of defense, of course. But no matter how great and state-of-the-art your defenses are, you'll almost certainly succomb to a successful attack in time. That's why advanced data backup and data recovery need to be tools that you and your IT partner have at the ready from Day 1. Don't be tempted to "shortcut" this element of your network in the name of expediency or to save a few dollars. Ultimately, you'll lose out on both counts with that thinking. You need a complete and integrated solution that addresses every contingency as well as IT professionals who know how to make that happen.

Cyber Security

Not only do we provide multi-tier approaches to your network security, but Andromeda also provides built-for-you solutions for disaster recovery and business continuity devices. We provide, manage and monitor a variety of devices including physical hardware, Cloud-based and hybrid options. Our team actively monitors over 403 servers and 101 physical backup devices in the field. All with 100% local engineers and technicians.

Onsite/Remote Support
Warrenville,IL

Andromeda's team is completely staffed by local technicians near Warrenville,IL. No matter the hour, your issue is resolved quickly and professionally. In fact, 68% of incoming calls are connected to a live technician for immediate response. When a technician isn't available, our average response time is less than 30 minutes. And if that isn't impressive enough, emergency after-hours support response times average less than 10 minutes!

IT Network Management

IT networks are our bread-and-butter. We have provided these services to clients since 1994. Some have continued to rely on us for their evolving network needs since the very beginning. We stand behind our work day to day and year to year because we foster relationships with our client-partners that absolutely demand that of us. It's in our DNA and how we prefer to do business.

AndroPedia Tech Library

As part of our service, it is important to keep our client-partners well informed on IT developments, news, and best practices. Here is just a sampling of typical items from our AndroPedia^SM library archive:

There are likely many kinds of devices and many different elements that makeup the unique network infrastructure at your manufacturing, logistics, transportation or distribution (MLTD) business. You probably have many of the standard devices we see across most of our IT clients – firewalls, routers, access points, switches etc. 

Not to mention any connected devices related to your production, staging or shipping processes.  

In recent years, the MLTD industries have been heavy targets for cybercrime and cybercriminals. This has been largely attributed to the way these businesses use technology and the fact that many businesses in these industries are leaning on older systems and technologies that are specific to their business models.   

Criminals have caught onto this issue and are attacking known weak points, disrupting production, and grinding businesses to a halt.  

One important step you can take to defend against this is to segment your networks and add layers to protect the different networks of your business.  

What does it mean to segment my network?  

Essentially, all this means is separating different groups or functions at your business into different networks so that you can control them individually.  

The most common network segmentation we perform and encounter in the MLTD market is between the operations network (back office) and the production network (on ‘the floor’ of your facility) and the BYOD Network (for guests and staff devices).  

Why do I want to segment my network?

Segmenting your network helps to keep all of the appropriate activities in their appropriate lanes. For instance, you don’t want your employees surfing the web on their cell phones on the same network that your primary business functions on.  

Imagine an employee accidentally clicked a bad link and infected/shut down the whole network – you’d likely want this to happen in an area that didn’t impact the entire business. Instead, if you segment properly, the impact would be restricted to the BYOD or Guest network and your employees couldn’t use WIFI on their personal devices until you got things cleaned up.  

Now, imagine this same example hits your back office. An employee opens an email and unknowingly gets infected with ransomware. That ransomware now spreads throughout the office and all PCs are down. With proper network segmentation, you have an added layer that will help protect your production floor from being infected. With a good <<business continuity plan – Link to that other article on business continuity>> your team can work on resolving the issues in the office but the production network would not be impacted.

The post Importance of Segmenting Your Network in Manufacturing and Logistics appeared first on Andromeda Technology Solutions.

Securing your data and your network is a big job. If you’re looking at trends or the news, you can probably guess that network security is only going to get more important and cumbersome in the future.

Cybersecurity is now a common household term and that’s a good thing. The page has been turned on data security and people regularly recognize that we need to protect ourselves both personally and professionally from cyber crime and related threats.

To illustrate where the cybersecurity and cyber crime industries are moving here are a few stats (full article here):

• Cyber crime damage costs are predicted to hit $6 trillion annually by 2021
• Cybersecurity spending to exceed $1 trillion by 2021
• Global ransomware incidents hit a rate of one attack every 14 seconds in 2019

The threats to data and networks are clearly going nowhere so it is important that you have a plan in place to protect your business (and yourself).

Different software applications and hardware solutions are designed to address specific security concerns. This means that while one solution may give you complete protection from one threat, it may not be suited to protect you from another.

The solution for these weak points is to ‘layer’ your security and design a solution that covers and protects your network to the best of its abilities.

What You Should Expect From A Layered Network Security Solution

A good layered security solution for your network is going to include the following components:

1. Professional Firewall Solution –

Your firewall is designed to help protect your network from external threats. It does this by blocking access to your network while allowing your users to communicate outside of the network. While a firewall is a great way to protect your network from intrusions, it can only protect your system from outside activity. A firewall cannot prevent one of your users from giving unauthorized permissions or access to programs or other users.

2. Professional Antivirus Software –

Antivirus software is a standard security solution designed to detect and block malware, viruses and other bugs from taking action against your network. An antivirus solution typically depends on a predefined catalog of known issues. The software uses this catalog to block those known issues from impacting you. The issue with this is that new viruses, malware, spyware and bugs are produced daily. If your solution is not actively updating and monitoring the internet for new incidents, it won’t be able to protect you from new threats in real time. Antivirus solutions also cannot always block a user from disregarding a warning and downloading a bad file/clicking on a bad link.

3. Email Spam Prevention/Filters –

Spam is more than just an annoying thing filling up your inbox. A majority of viruses and bugs that get through your firewall/antivirus do so by hiding in email messages. Cyber criminals know that if they send enough emails, somebody is going to click a bad link or download a compromised attachment. By filtering out spam, you dramatically decrease the opportunity for someone to accidentally introduce a virus to the network. Again though, spam filters don’t catch everything so they cannot prevent a user from making a mistake.

4. DNS Filtering/Protection –

DNS stands for Domain Name System. This piece of your network controls email delivery and is the component that allows you to browse websites. When configured, a DNS filter can prevent your employees from accessing specific types of sites. For example, a DNS filter can be set up to prevent employees from accessing social media or other blacklisted sites. This security also helps keep malware or other viruses from spreading throughout your network by masking your devices and server. This is one element of your network security that isn’t heavily impacted by regular users but if it is not set up properly and managed properly it can’t protect you from much.

5. Employee Training & Education –

You may have noticed that almost any of the security layers mentioned above have specific strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, each component had a weakness related to human or user error. The fact is that users and honest mistakes are the root cause of the majority of data breaches, viruses, downtime and incidents on your network. That doesn’t mean your employees and coworkers are intentionally breaking protocol or doing things wrong. Most of the time these are honest mistakes like clicking a link in an email, downloading a file with a hidden virus or visiting an infected/malicious site and unknowingly giving cyber criminals usernames & password information.

And That’s Just The Beginning…

These are just five common pieces of a layered network security setup. They all work together to help cover different vulnerabilities and behaviors. There are many other software and hardware solutions that can increase your layered network security and reduce vulnerability. Some of those include:

• Encryption
• Dark Web Monitoring Services
• Dual Authentication
• Password Management
• Data Backups
• Disaster Recovery Planning
• Scheduled & Regular Patches/Updates
• Security Protocols for Remote Devices
• VPN
• Network Security Assessments (at least once a year)

The goal should be to protect your environment to the best of anyone’s ability and to educate/train your staff adequately to mitigate risk.

You will also want to make sure and take any specific compliance requirements or regulations for your industry into account. Most any business that has data needs to maintain certain standards for data protection.

To discuss any of the layers for a layered network security solution listed above or your environment please reach out to our team.

For more information on employee data security training go here.

The post Layered Network Security: 5 Components Every Layered Security Solution Should Have & Why Employee Training Is A Must Have appeared first on Andromeda Technology Solutions.

Do you feel as though you get a lot of spam mail? If so, you should know that you actually get almost a hundred times more than what you think you're getting.

However, most modern email systems (including Google's G-mail) do a spectacular job of filtering, which keeps the vast majority of it from ever reaching your inbox in the first place.

Even so, you probably get an annoying amount of spam, and one of the natural questions that arises from that is some variation of 'why am I getting so much of this junk?' Believe it or not, researchers now have an answer to that very question!

A research team from Stanford University recently partnered with Google to study more than a billion emails filtered by Gmail between April and August of 2020. They found one striking common thread: You are much more likely to receive spam emails if your email address was captured as part of a data breach. In fact, that fact alone makes you five times more likely to be targeted by spam email.

In some ways, that fact isn't terribly surprising. After all, spammers and scammers operate mostly from email lists and those lists have to be generated and compiled from somewhere. It turns out that the 'somewhere' is almost always a database captured during a data breach.

This, though, points to a simple defense. If you change your email address at about the same frequency you buy a new pair of shoes, you'll periodically give yourself a chance to start fresh.

Sure, there are some challenges involved with that, not the least of which is updating your contacts with your latest email address. Also, of course, if you have hundreds of contacts that might be impractical, but if you keep a relatively low profile on the web anyway, then occasional shedding one email skin for another is a very good way to keep spam to a minimum. At the very least, it's something to consider.

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