Blog – eTandy

Importance of Data for modern Businesses

eTandy — Mon, 31 May 2021 10:44:55 +0000

All business operates with some sort of data that is unique to their organization. Data can be in a form of emails, database or just files. These are a vital part of the business operations and business will not be able to run without them.

Why you need data to be protected?

To operate a business data should be available to employees all the time. Missing data will cost the business in loss revenues and operational down times.Ultimately,the Business will not be able to run without their data.

Why you need data to be made high available?

Making the business data available to users all the time, regardless of environment conditions, system failures, and any other situation is called high availability of data.

What to look for data protection and high availability?

Protecting data is vital, it is also vital to plan for a process of getting those data back to production environment in little time as possible. This will ensure a little down time and more business continuity

Planning for Data Protection

When planning for data protection, it is vital to understand the business requirement of the organization. For Example, how long can the organization survive the operation without the data? can the business process be run with manually ? How to switch back when the data becomes available? This is called Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

Also how much data can the organization afford to lose, without a major impact to the operation? For example, if the organization to lose 1 days’ worth of data, can it survive and recover that data? This is called Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

Most importantly these are not IT related decisions. These parameters had to be decided by the top operational groups of the organization, after analyzing their own business operation. Surely everyone wants to have a zero down time and a zero data lose system, but implementing such a system will be very expensive. Also not all organizations will require such system.

An analyzing of data in a typical organization

We will take a simple business organization as a sample for this. It will have following systems. Assuming they depend heavily on the systems and no manual process exists for each system.

Central user authentication system
Email system for internal and external messaging.
Database to house the ERP, Accounting, manufacturing, store and HR system
Central file repository for user created data
Various application servers

Above systems will be vital part of the business operation. Any system malfunction will affect the total operation of the organization.

Categorizing the criticality of the data in a typical organization

Once the critical data is identified, those can be categorized according to the priority in conjunction with the business operation. Identifying the most critical systems to the business operations and least critical systems to the business operations will help to plan on deploying data protection and later high availability.

Most critical systems to the business operations will need to be up and running faster than the others. They will also be needed to have least amount data loose.

Categorization of critical data will be a group task that should have all the management levels and the divisional presence.

Examples 1:

For a buying office that mainly deals with customers and factories, email system will be the most critical system. Their main mode of communication with customers will be through emails. Orders will come through; changes will be communicated so on through emails. So the email systems will be crucial for their operation.

The users will require very high availability of the email system. Also they will require availability of their older emails for future references. So for this organization, there should be a data protection solution to protect their existing emails to be retrieved later.

Also since their email system is so vital, there should be a mechanism to make it available all the time, without a downtime in email operation.

Ultimately from IT point of view, the emails should be backed up frequently and a high available solution to in place for the email system.

Example 2:

For a large scale manufacturing office that mainly deals with factories, email system will not be the most critical system. But their ERP system will be much critical for the manufacturing process.

So for this organization, there should be a data protection solution to protect their ERP database to be retrieved later.

Also since their ERP system is so vital, there should be a mechanism to make it available all the time, without a downtime in ERP system.

Ultimately from IT point of view, the ERP database should be backed up frequently and a high available solution to in place for the ERP system. But the emails are also important, the emails should be backed up frequently and a high available solution might not be required at this time for the email system.

Planning a data protection solution

Planning for a data protection solution should consider the above mentioned criteria first. Apart from that they should consider the method of the protection to be used. Ex: tapes, disks etc. also the retention time for each media is needed for consideration.

Retention period means how long the data be kept in tapes. This will allow old data to be retrieved on a later data for validation or auditing. Retention period should be decided by the business operations. In addition regulatory requirements mandate a certain retention period for certain business operations.

Planning a Business continuity solution

Planning for a business continuity solution needs to consider the same parameters as the data protection solution. And in additionally on getting the systems running on a predefined time window.

7-Zip File Compression Utility

eTandy — Mon, 31 May 2021 10:41:10 +0000

7-Zip is a freeware file compression tool. If you think Winzip or other paid file compression tools are expensive 7-Zip is a great alternative.

With 7-Zip You can compress and extract: 7z, XZ, BZIP2, GZIP, TAR, ZIP and WIM compressed files and extract: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DEB, DMG, FAT, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MBR, MSI, NSIS, NTFS, RAR, RPM, SquashFS, UDF, VHD, WIM, XAR and Z. That covers about all the major file compression types. 7-Zip also allows you to create password protected zip files using AES-256 encryption (but also remember the length and complexity of the password you use is also important to ensure protection of encrypted data).

Although the user interface of 7-Zip is not very polished don’t underestimate the 7z file compression efficiency, 7-Zip compresses to 7z format 30-70% better than to zip format.

You can download 7-Zip from – http://7-zip.org

We will talk about other great free software in the future. Using the free tools we talk about in this blog you can enjoy the features of paid software without having to spend money. Please say no to software piracy; always look for a free alternative if paid software is too expensive.

SSL and Trust

eTandy — Mon, 31 May 2021 10:38:19 +0000

In a previous post we discussed how SSL was developed & how SSL and certificate authorities (CA) help to protect information that is transferred over the internet. But recently there had been a lot of talk about the trustworthiness of certificate authorities. This discussion was sparked by the discovery of a certificate authority being compromised by hackers. Using this CA hackers manage to issue fake certificates for Google, Yahoo!, Mozilla, WordPress and others. Not long after, another widely used CA was hacked, at present at least four CAs are suspected to have been compromised.

The problem is any trusted root CA or a sub CA can issue a certificate for any website on the internet. If the certificate is requested through standard certificate request process the CA would generally validate the ownership of the site, but if a hacker manages get control of the CA they can issue certificates for any site they wish. Root certificates of all trusted CAs are stored on popular web browsers like IE, Firefox and Chrome. Because of this any certificate, even a fake one, issued by a trusted root CAs is displayed as a trust SSL encrypted website.

Manage Your Passwords

eTandy — Mon, 31 May 2021 10:36:04 +0000

Today you need to remember different passwords using for each account. If you are using only password every year and if it is hacked, you have a very serious problem. Password management is very important because weak passwords or passwords used at different places are becoming a big risk. Hackers are breaking into web sites to get your password and your password is same in different places it is easy for them. (Is your bank account password is the same as your Facebook or game site ) It is impossible for anyone to remember complicated passwords that are different for each web site. The solution is to use a password vault.

This is completely free product, KeePass, is very useful for storing passwords. And a free open source password manager. It has a password generator and a comments section for each entry. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key. So you only have to remember one single master password. It can run from a USB drive and has a load of features and plugins, such as an automatic web login for web sites and uses a high level of encryption. It can be used to save all sorts of passwords such as web sites, FTP Passwords, Online Passwords, ATM codes, software licenses, and even a bike lock code. This list is endless. Of course you will still need to remember a password to open KeePass but that is better than trying to remember many or reusing passwords in different places.

At Tandy Electronics we do care about your data security. So we strongly recommend you to change your initial password for cpanel immediately to a strong password. It is your responsibility to protect your password from on line hackers.

Securing Information Transferred over Internet with SSL

eTandy — Mon, 31 May 2021 10:33:31 +0000

Secure Sockets Layer commonly known as SSL was developed by Netscape Communications Corporation and was publicly release in 1995 for secure transmission of information over the internet. Over the years SSL has gone through several revisions, version 1 was never released to public. Version 2 was release in 1995 and in 1996 a fully redesigned version 3 was released to address security weaknesses of the previous version.

Then the first version of an improved protocol called Transport Layer Security (TLS) was introduced in 1999, the two protocols had significant differences making them incompatible. TLS 1.1 was introduced in 2006 and TLS version 1.2 was introduced in 2008.

SSL (and TLS) is important to online businesses as it helps you to protect confidential information of customers such as user names, passwords and credit card information by encrypting it. Encryption modifies the information in such a way a hacker would find it difficult to read the actual information like the credit card number or password hidden inside the encrypted message.

To implement SSL on your online business site you need to purchase a Certificate from a Certificate Authority (CA). A certificate authority will confirm your identity before issuing a certificate. This certificate can then be used by your website for customers to confirm the identity of your site as well as protect the information they exchange with you. With SSL you can increase the customers trust in your online business which in turn can increase your revenue.

What is Mod_Security

eTandy — Mon, 31 May 2021 10:30:18 +0000

Mod_security is an apache module that helps to protect your website from various attacks. Mod_Security is used to block commonly known exploits by use of regular expressions and rule sets. Mod_Security is enabled on all etandyServers by default. Mod_Security can potentially block common code injection attacks which strengthens the security of the server. If you need to disable mod_security we can show you how, and help you do so.

When coding a dynamic website, sometimes users forget to write code to help prevent hacks by doing things such as validating input. Mod_security can help in some cases those users that run sites that don’t have security checks in their code.

This is a simple SQL injection where visiting this would cause the database to DROP and delete the users table from the database. If you are running Mod_Security on your server it will block this from running. Typically, you would see a 406 error in this case if mod_security is enabled. To read more about 406 errors read our article. You set up rules for Mod_security to check http requests against and determine if a threat is present.

Recognizing Mod_Security is pretty easy. Any website that calls a string forbidden by a mod_security rule will give a 406 error instead of displaying the page. You can also disable mod_security using the tool “set_modsec” for a single domain or entire hosting account. If you’re on a shared server and wish to disable Mod_Security contact our support department and we can take care of it for you. Customers on shared servers do not have access to this tool as it is ran from the command line and this feature is not available on shared servers.

Linux Web Hosting Benefits

eTandy — Sat, 01 Aug 2020 14:36:48 +0000

Why do so many website builders use Linux web hosting? My guess for this preference in operating systems would be: stability. Linux is perhaps the most stable operating system in the world.

There are two of essential foods: peanut butter and jelly, two major political parties: democrat and republican, and two kinds of web hosting which make up practically all web hosting on the planet: Windows based web hosting and Linux web hosting. The Windows operating system’s proprietary API (application programming interface) which is complicated and which is not entirely open for developers to know the ins and outs of. As a result, computers which run Windows as their primary operating system are suspected of being more prone to crashes.

Why is Linux stable? Servers running Linux web hosting just might be more stable because Linux is an open source operating system. The code is open to the public so that anyone can read it and suggest improvements or point out bugs. Over the years, Linux has been developed in various flavors such as Red Hat and Debian. Thousands and thousands of people have contributed their time and effort to making Linux web hosting run faster and to provide simpler, more efficient and bug free code. With an open programming environment, improvements are made on a continual basis and problems are seen relatively quickly and solved with a minimum of difficulty.

When you are starting a web site, one of your chief concerns is stability. Any time that the web site spends offline as a result of technical problems is time that your customers are unable to use your site, and this is bad for your bottom line. Businesses tend to want the most stable operating system for their web sites to minimize the dreaded server crash.

Linux web hosting is typically available at the same price as Windows web hosting. So consider that for the same price you can get an operating system for your site on the world wide web which is:

Another issue the webmasters have to consider when setting up a new online site is whether the operating system they are using will be able to use the full range of software and scripts that they require. Again, Linux web hosting is a winner in this regard. Lots of major web hosting companies offer Linux web hosting and with so many people using it around the world anything that you can do with Windows hosting can also be done with Linux web hosting. Many of the most popular script packages on the web today are available in both Windows and Linux web hosting versions, with the Linux web hosting version generally being more stable and having all of the same features as their Windows cousins. This is of course my opinion and I am sure that there are some who may disagree.

stable
runs popular script packages
considered the best operating system in the world in terms of these criteria by many of the internet’s most well respected independent sources of judgement.

When you ruminate on all of the arguments for Linux web hosting over Windows hosting (there are more as I don’t even mention the whole Apache stuff), the decision would seem to me to be a no brainer: Linux web hosting wins hands down as the operating system that you should choose if you want to have a stable, reliable and full featured site that takes advantage of the latest in web technologies.

Getting your web server with the Linux operating system is particular important for companies which need to set up eCommerce sites. When customers rely on your site for sending in their orders, you need to make sure that you web site is running twenty four hours a day. Linux web hosting with live support might not be a bad idea for mission critical sites.

To learn more about Linux Hosting please visit Tandy Electronics