Spring Cleaning (Irish Spring soap) and St. Patrick’s Day this month brought the phrase ” The luck of the Irish” to mind.
“The luck of the Irish” phrase is thought to imply that the miners in the late nineteenth century were finding success in finding gold purely based on luck, rather than based on intelligence and skill.
In the computer world, the people that never seem to get exposed to malware, or computer issues often seem to have “the luck of the Irish”.
It is more often that the people (or their IT department) are being diligent in their “spring cleaning”, utilizing up-to-date hardware and software security, along with best practices such as hard to guess passwords, thinking before clicking and regular training on the dangers lurking in the online world.
Spring is an excellent time to check your computer protection. Are all of your computers on the same antimalware/anti-phishing/antivirus/antiwhatever protection?
I recently completed an initial site survey for a small company that’s been around for awhile that had everything from no protection to expired protection to different vendors on each computer along with other issues, such as…
- They didn’t understand what they had, or the required security needs of the data for their (healthcare) profession.
- Computer hard drives should all have been encrypted (some weren’t).
- Some Windows versions were not official, licensed versions (legal issue).
- There was no uniform administrative login for the company (nightmare for IT help).
- Staff that had been gone for many years still had access if they wanted.
- No layered protection such as software or physical firewalls were installed.
This company was not under a managed services contract, which is a service we provide. A small app is installed on your computer that lets us know what’s going on with your computer systems in real time. It checks for updates, alerts us to potential problems before they become major issues, and allows us to login remotely so we can fix problems before they become a security risk.
Unfortunately, everything with this company was break & fix. They would ignore red flags in their systems until something quit working, then they would fix it. And in most instances, it takes more time and money to fix it when it breaks rather than performing regular maintenance on their systems.
With some hard work and skill, may you have “the luck of the Irish” with regards to your technology world. But it requires preparation, training, and diligence to ensure you are safe from the hackers and bad actors.
Have an “Irish Spring” and clean up your protection. Make sure all your systems, training, and other safequards are in place.
If you are interested in learning more about securing your computer systems send an email to jnay@jimnay.com. You can also call or text us at 615-443-4842.
All the best,
Jim Nay
Recent Comments