Directive Blogs

You are running a business. You don't want downtime, you want your email to be as reliable as the sunrise. Google Apps has been adjusting their service level agreements over the years to accommodate to the high demands of the millions of businesses that use their productivity software each day.

Before we talk about that though, I wanted to share an announcement Google recently had. In 2010, the Gmail email service, which provides both free consumer and business email services globally, was available 99.984% of the time. That means about seven minutes of downtime per month on average was experienced in 2010. According to Google, the seven minute average comes from a lot of tiny delays that normally consisted of a few seconds a shot. Most users experienced no issues, and in the rare case they did, a few seconds of delay is pretty easy to miss.

I'm sure nobody has missed out on any of the storms happening here in New York. Even our lights have been flickering. Mother nature can be cruel to your IT; a well-placed bolt of lightning can do plenty of damage. Of course, we always recommend quality UPS systems to our clients to protect their most valuable tech, and good surge protectors for everything else (not power strips, mind you, they aren't the same). Regardless, whether there's a risk of the power going out or not, it's important to save often and keep your files backed up. Here's a few tips after the jump.

A lot of businesses have been taking advantage of Wi-Fi wireless networking to increase mobility around the office for staff. Most businesses seem to understand that their Wi-Fi network needs to be password protected to keep outsiders from getting in, but most businesses often make the mistake in using WEP security on their wireless network instead of a more secure solution.

The WEP algorithm can be hacked in minutes by a savvy user with a notebook, not only giving them access to your internet access, but to your network and files. Read on to learn a better way to secure your wireless network.

Let’s take a break from all of this technical mumbo-jumbo and talk about something that is much more important: health. You could have an arsenal of the world’s coolest gadgets and technology in front of you, but if you aren’t practicing good health habits, they won’t do you a lot of good for very long. Normally when we think of injuries, we think of doing something that pushes our body’s limits. Injuries can occur just from practicing poor habits during those 8-hour daily work marathons many of us run each day. I’ll go over a few simple ways you can optimize the ergonomics of your work environment to improve comfort and prevent physical stress associated with bad habits often found in the workplace.

We’re not trying to be negative here. We're not trying to scare you and make you run out and buy a backup device (We’ll save those horror stories for another time). Today we’re going to talk about why hard drives fail. It doesn’t matter what manufacturer your drive comes from, what connection interface it has, who you bought your computer from, and believe it or not, it has nothing to do with the day your warranty runs out (no sir, that’s just a Murphy’s Law coincidence). All hard drives are built in pretty much the same fashion.