Keep your most vital systems safe – for just $14.95 per month.

Two of the most important systems for any business are its Backup and Anti Virus programs. The problem is when these programs stop working correctly, you usually don’t know. In these cases, you’re left vulnerable to critical data loss – or to virus attack.

Now with our easy and affordable Daily Server Safety Check, our sophisticated monitoring program will check these two vital systems each and every morning, ensuring they’re working correctly – and alerting you when they’re not.

Peace-of-Mind for just 50 Cents per Day

For just 50 cents per day, here’s what you get:

• A start-of-day check of both your backup success and your AV update
• When your backup hasn’t completed properly, or when your AV program hasn’t updated to the latest version, we’ll alert you.
• We send you a short start-of-day report – before you even arrive in your office – showing the exact problems if any are found. You can fix them yourselves – or you can ask us to help.
• If we find no problems, we’ll still send you a short note showing that we have checked these two critical systems and that everything is in order.

Free Trial

Contact us for a free 35-day Daily Server Safety Check trial. It takes just five minutes to set up, and there’s no obligation. Is 50 cents a day worth knowing that your most important data is safe and that your anti-virus systems are right up-to date?

Keep your IT systems healthy – for just $29.95 per month.

Your Server is where all of your business data is stored, so it’s vitally important its health is maintained, for example: disk space is managed, Windows Services are operating as designed and the Exchange Email Server is working as it should.

Falcon Worx’s Daily Server Health Check monitors the most important aspects of your system each and every morning, ensuring everything is working correctly – and alerting you when it’s not.

For just $1 a day, we’ll run a daily check of:

• Drive Space Change
• SNMP devices; printers, photocopiers, etc
• Physical Disk Health
• Hacker Attempts
• Exchange Store Size on Email
• File and Folder Sizes
• WSUS Patch Management Updates
• Event logs

We send you a short start-of-day report – before you even arrive in your office – showing the exact problems if any are found. You can fix them yourselves – or you can ask us to help.

If we find no problems, we’ll still send you a short note showing that we have checked these two critical systems and that everything is in order.

Free Trial

Is $1 a day worth knowing that your systems are healthy and running smoothly? Contact us now to start your free trial! Contact us for a free 35-day Daily Server Health Check trial. It takes just five minutes to set up, and there’s no obligation.

Crucial IT Systems – Maximum Uptime – for just $29.95 per month.

Can you quantify the cost to you (and your customers) if your IT system was down for a whole day?

Falcon Worx’s easy, affordable Real-Time Server & Network Monitoring service checks your server and network function round the clock.

For $1 a day we’ll check:

• Sever health and performance
• Disk space availability/ consumption
• File and folder sizes are within expectations
• Network speed and connectivity
• Web page availability
• Vital Windows Services are working

If we find an issue we’ll report it to you, and you decide what course of action to take.

Our monitoring service provides top quality information, so we can drill down to the root of the problem and work to fix things quickly with minimum disruption to your business.

Free Trial
Contact us for a 35-day free trial of Real-Time Server & Network Monitoring. It takes just ten minutes to set up, and there’s no obligation. Does a dollar day compare well to the cost of a day’s downtime for your staff and your customers?

It’s no secret that the team here at Falcon Worx is a huge fan of Google Apps. We’ve been extensively testing Google Apps over the last year, and our team and our clients absolutely love it. In fact, we’re so confident in Google Apps that as of May 1st, 2010 Falcon Worx will no longer offer our hosted Microsoft Exchange or hosted Microsoft SharePoint accounts.  Instead, we will offer Google Apps Premium accounts exclusively.

There has been constant upgrades to Google Apps that makes the switch  from Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint worth wile and virtually painless.  With a Google Apps Premium account, you will have access to a wide range of productivity and collaboration tools. You and your employees will also have  mobile access along with email, contacts, and shared calendars.

If your business is anything like our company, we’re still attached to the Microsoft Office suite. There are some pretty neat add-ins available for Microsoft Office that allow storage, retrieval, and collaboration in the Google Apps cloud. Our current favorite is OffiSync.  Google has recently acquired DocVerse so we suspect that we’ll be seeing an official Google Apps add-in soon.

We’re also offering free training with every Google Apps implementation to get your team up and running quickly. Not only does a Google Apps account come with substantially more benefits and features,  we’re also very proud to offer this product at a substantial savings to our friends and clients.  As always, please contact us for more information!

Today Google released a long awaited update  for Google Sync that finally allows users to not only push their Google Calendar and Google Contacts to their Exchange  enabled devices, but now their Gmail account as well! It’s the ultimate package we’ve all been waiting for, we can all finally have our Google calendar, contacts, and email delivered seamlessly to our phones. Officially, this update only supports Windows Mobile devices and iPhones. However, theoretically the Gmail push should work with any Exchange enable phone. You can read more about the update on the Google Mobile Blog.

Download:

Adobe Flash Update

Attackers are exploiting this newly discovered security hole by embedding malicious Flash content in PDF files and then sending these infected documents to victims. Once the victim opens the infected PDF file, a data stealing trojan is then loaded onto the victims PC. Adobe announced today that a patch to fix the security vulnerability will be released next week. So what do you protect yourself until then? We’ll tell you how!

Adobe has recommended that users disable flash in Acrobat until the fix is released. Security experts have also recommended that users completely disable Adobe Flash on their systems until the fix is released. Even though attackers have only used PDF files at this point, they’re concerned that this exploit may move to the web. Personally, I think that completely removing Adobe Flash from your system is a little overkill.

As always, don’t open PDF from people you don’t know. Even if the attachment is from a person you know, but something about it seems strange, trust your instincts. Contact the person who sent you the PDF file and ask them about it. The next thing you can do is disable Adobe Flash in Acrobat. You can do this by clicking Edit > Preferences > Multimedia Trust (Legacy) > Highlight Permissions for Adobe Flash > Change Permissions for Selected Multimedia Player > Never > Click OK.

Finally, I can’t stress how import this last step is. Make sure your antivirus software is fully updated! If your anti virus software is up-to-date, you’re going to be

A new distribution of Linux in itself really isn’t exciting news or anything special.  New and totally free distributions of Linux are released to the general public on an extremely frequent basis. The problem with Linux as a desktop operating system is that for the average person even a trivial task like installing a new program can be daunting if not impossible.

Linux isn’t like Windows or OS X, there isn’t a nice graphical installer that runs when you want to add a new piece of software to the machine. Installing a piece of software or installing operating system updates usually requires the end user to use a terminal interface. Some distributions of Linux are more user friendly than others, and some distributions allow self-installers (RPM packages for example) but the simplicity and familiarity  isn’t there for the average user. Another huge problem is the lack of driver support. Once again, some distributions are better than others in this area.

The Google Chrome OS is built around the idea that all programs the end user needs to access will be delivered via the Internet and their web browser. Things like SaaS (Software as a Service) is becoming more common by the day, and here at Falcon Worx we implement SaaS and we also offer it to our clients.  Google believes that with any software available via a web browser, you’ll never need to install a piece of software anyway.

With widespread support from PC manufacturers things like compatible drives shouldn’t be an issue. Google is doing a smart thing by targeting the small and relatively new netbook market as a starting point for their new operating system. Netbooks are designed for well, surfing the internet and not much more. They’re low powered, and don’t have much capacity. So accessing software via a web browser makes perfect sense.

In addition to widespread support from PC manufacturers, I’m sure Google will implement some type of self-installer for software packages that will be easy to use. As a result, software developers will probably release a plethora of software for Chrome OS. I’m sure we’ll  see Chrome OS move to notebooks and then eventually desktops.

How successful will Chrome OS be with consumers? Only time will tell but I suspect it will be fairly popular. PC manufactures are going to be cramming the Google Chrome OS down consumer’s throats because it’s free. Unlike Windows, Chrome OS doesn’t come with a hefty licensing fee for each unit sold.

I’m pretty eager to get my hands on Google Chrome OS, if their operating system is anything like any of their other products I’m sure it will be pretty darn good if not great. Do I think that all software a person or company needs will be available via your web browser? For most companies that answer is no. It’s far too costly and security is always a concern. However, I do believe that SaaS will be more widely implemented for some types of software.

This brings me to my next point, not only should your password be strong but your hints to reset your password should not be easily guessed. If you have your hometown, birth date, and your mother’s maiden name on your Facebook page, an attacker is going to exploit this information for their benefit. You can never be too careful! Last week we posted a link to a great website that assesses password strength.

So now that you have super strong passwords (and super secret password hints!) how in the heck do you manage them all? We’ll tell you how!There are many different ways of keeping track of your passwords, including several different websites that will store them for you. You log in to your account and then enter your master password. You will then be able to view the passwords for various websites that you’ve stored.

Personally, I’m not a fan of this type of system and here’s why. First of all, what kind of security does the website implement? If the servers were compromised, how are the databases structured? Would an attacker be able to extract any valuable data from the databases? The most important issue, how are the backups created, and how are the stored? What kind of physical security do the backups have? If someone were to physically steal the backups, would your data be at risk? Personally, I’d rather not take a chance!

A program that I use is called KeePass. Now is KeePass suitable for controlling access and tracking password usage shared by a group of network administrators? No it isn’t. There’s better software out there if tracking and controlling is your goal. This  software quite simply creates an encrypted database which contains your passwords. KeePass is incredibly easy to use, you can be setup and storing your passwords securely within minutes!

There are versions for Windows, Linux, iPhone, PlamOS, BlackBerry, Android,  PocketPC, and thumb drives. They have a version for just about every platform out there except for Mac. Sorry Mac Fans! The best part about this software? It’s FREE. Yes that’s right, I said FREE. This is a great example of open source with an awesome community of developers with the goal of creating software that benefits everyone! I highly recommend that you give it a try today!

DOWNLOAD:

KeePass