MotherG News & Tips: On Guard – February 2012

MotherG Announces Merger with Decision Systems Plus Inc.

Every single day at MotherG, we are thinking of ways to help our clients in new and better ways. Today we have an exciting announcement!

Problem with the Public Cloud

Our last post addressed the private, public and hybrid clouds. We briefly discussed some of the differences and advantages and disadvantages.

This Thursday Amazon Web Services (a public cloud offering that web sites like HootSuite, Foursquare and Netflix use) experienced an outage. Some of it’s clients were unaffected, but others, such as the web site Reddit, was still down as of this morning.

Defining the Cloud(s)

Sometimes the world of technology moves at a rapid pace (ok, it always moves that way). This can be good, but it also has it’s drawbacks. One drawback is sometimes a word or phrase becomes common language but we don’t really know what it means. But since everyone seems to know what it means, we can’t really ask, can we?

Protecting Your Personal Data

By now you likely have heard of the security breach affecting major U.S. companies such as Citibank, Target and Walgreens. Apparently the security at Epsilon, an online marketing firm, was breached and an unknown number of email addresses were stolen. I personally received an email from Target informing me of the situation and encouraging me to be on the lookout for fraudelent emails. This massive security breach, possibly the biggest ever, has caught an enormous amount of media attention. Can you imagine how the executive team at Citibank, Target and Walgreens felt when they heard the news?

A Backup is Only as Good as the Restore

I know I sound like a broken record, but I heard another horror story about backups this week. A local graphic design firm (read: lots and lots of very important files) was having server issues. Their IT support “guy” (read: not a qualified MSP IT support firm that proactively monitors and manages your network) came in to do some work on it. I’m not privvy to the ins and nots of what happened, but in short, their server was shot and they needed to perform a data restore from their backups.

Tablets and Business

We can all agree that tablets (such as the iPad) are cool. I was at a technology conference when the iPad first came out. A woman whipped one out right before a meeting started and people flocked to her side to see it. It was just so…cool.