Most of can easily agree that our IT universe has been dominated over the past several months by cybersecurity discussions as we daily (sometimes it feels like hourly) see reports of the next cybersecurity event that has occurred in our nation, state, or sometimes with our peers.

We have been having a lot of discussions about how to better protect against ransomware and other threats with the recent attacks that have happened in area school districts.   Recently, I heard a story about a network that was hit with ransomware.  The network admins cleaned up the mess and started to restore their “air-gapped” […]

This week’s Tech Tidbit is shorter on my thoughts and words since the attached link below contains lots of reading on its own. For the start of the new school year the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), part of the US Dept of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Awareness System put out a nice document […]

Over the past few years, we have been recommending the use of switch stacks in all your MDF and IDF locations.   This has been done to aid in simplifying switch management, but it has led to some confusion from time to time when someone is physically working in one of the network closets.

Over the past few weeks, we have had a number of cases where support tickets needed to be opened to resolve issues where end-users were reporting “inability to access the Internet.”  These can be frustrating and stressful for both end-users and the responding techs.

A constant frustration of ours is ensuring “clean” backups.   If you corrupt your data or have a server failure, we need to reliably get that data back.  There are a few types of backups.   Image backups are popular with virtualization.  File system backups have always been the gold standard since the dawn of backups.

Now that we have shifted to predominantly remote workers and remote teaching and learning, we have a number of new challenges as well as increased threats. Challenge #1 – Remote File Access.   The solution is moving files from traditional home directories and traditional common drives to cloud-based shared folders and home directories.

We have been discussing a whole lot of security issues over this past year.  Many of you are already moving forward to address many of our recommendations.   However, some of you are paralyzed in figuring out how to absorb some of the new costs for the new security technologies that your district now absolutely requires […]