Bryley Systems Picks Macs

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Last month, I had an opportunity to volunteer at the Community Harvest Project located in Harvard; an event hosted by the Corridor 9 Chamber of Commerce.
Harnessed in canvas bags and supervised by farm staff, we rhythmically picked the trees clean in about an hour, then carefully sorted and packaged the apples for delivery to the Worcester County Food Bank.

Thirty seven volunteers picked a total of 4,500 pounds of Macintosh apples, 2,000 pounds were Grade A quality and packaged for distribution, and the rest were separated into bins for cider and pies.

It was truly an amazing morning. I picked apples as a chamber member, personally thanked the volunteers as a WCFB board member and 2,500 families received a bag of delicious, freshly picked apples.

Infographic: Tips for detecting a phishing email

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Phishing emails are getting more complex all the time.  As the stakes rise, cyber criminals are employing increasingly subtle techniques and messaging.  Gone are the days when you simply had to turn down preposterous offers from royalty who had miraculously decided to become your unlikely benefactor.

The phishing email of today is designed to look as legitimate as possible.  It will try to distract you from clues that give away its true intent by creating a sense of urgency.  Typically they front as legitimate emails from familiar sources, sometimes even appearing to come from within your own organization.

Fortunately, once you know what to look for, these emails will be as easy to spot as those starting “I am a prince from [insert  random country name here], and I wish to bathe you in riches…”

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The Compliance Effect

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The Managed Security Service Providers journal, MSSP Insider, interviewed Bryley president Gavin Livingstone about General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 1 compliance.

“Our manufacturing clients were especially observant and working toward [regulatory] compliance,” said Gavin. The interview was prompted by a survey by Scale Venture Partners, Cybersecurity Perspectives 2019 2 . In the report, 2018 data breaches like at Exactis, exposures like at Cambridge Analytica, and regulations like GDPR triggered businesses to improve cybersecurity and increase investment in their security solutions. As a result fifty-five percent of the surveyed executives increased their investment in new solutions, forty-nine percent increased their measurement and reporting around data privacy, and forty-eight percent increased investment in data privacy personnel.

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The Day the Cloud Went Down

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7:33 AM, August 31, 2019, a power failure hit Amazon Web Services (AWS) US-East-1 datacenter in North Virginia. As expected, the datacenter’s backup generators kicked in.

Then at about 9 AM the generators started failing

The result was 7.5% of Amazon’s data storage units were unavailable for several hours. Some of the affected websites and services included Reddit, Styleseat, Fortnite, Sendhub … and many smaller sites and services. Power was restored, and around noon most of the drives were functioning. But the outage rendered some data unrecoverable. For those that had not backed up their data, the power failure was a disaster.

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windows-logo

Your Windows 10 Transition

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Using Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008/R2 after January 14, 2020 puts your systems at risk of vulnerabilities and cyberattacks. When over 200,000 computers were infected by WannaCry in 2017, it was the result of a Windows vulnerability. If a WannaCry-type attack occurs that affects Windows 7 after January 14, 2020, your Windows 7 installations will only have had access to the patch if you are paying for Extended Security Updates. 1

One in three breaches is due to unpatched vulnerabilities. For an organization, the average cost of a data breach is $3.86 million — the average cost for each lost or stolen record is $148. This makes data breaches worse for most businesses than floods, fire, and transit strikes combined. 2 Data breaches end businesses.

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The Mysteries of Microsoft’s Model for Windows

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“All they had to do was come up with a way to charge ten bucks a month and now no one steals music,” I overheard a college student say. He was talking about how Apple transformed from selling software (mp3s via iTunes) to renting access to songs, aka Software as a Service (SaaS). Apple Music now has the most paid music subscribers in the US and based on this success, “announced new subscription offerings for magazines, TV shows and video games”. 1

Per Forbes, 84% of new software is being delivered as SaaS. 2 This selling model built Netflix memberships (20 million renters at the height of its DVD service compared to over 150 million SaaS subscribers today 3 ), Dollar Shave Club razors, Stitch Fix and Amazon’s Subscribe and Save. Subscriptions moved Adobe’s market cap more than 87% since 2012 to $108 billion. 4

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Bryley Systems Ranks #3 as a Top IT Service Provider – WBJ 2019

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Bryley Systems is excited to announce that we have been ranked as one of the top 3 on the Worcester Business Journal’s 2019 list of Top IT Service Providers. We are proud to be recognized for our commitment to our clients, as well as our staff, and wish to thank everyone for making this possible.

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technology patches

Crunching the Patching Numbers

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There were 16,516 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs)1 published in 2018. The time needed to analyze the relative importance of these to your organization would be something like 16,516 alerts times fifteen minutes to read and assess each one, which works out to about 500 days of work. If you decide that your organization is affected by twenty percent of these, that’s 3,304 vulnerabilities times an average of about an hour to patch each one — that will take about 40 days. And how many devices do you have that need this patch deployment? 2

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Our New Sign

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Bryley Systems was awarded a $3,500 grant from the Town of Clinton’s Downtown Commercial Improvements Program. This Program, which is funded jointly by the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development, makes funds available to business and property owners who wish to make improvements to their property. With funds from this grant, Paul Tucker of Sign Logic, transformed the Bryley logo into a visually interesting sign, complimenting the company’s historic building at 200 Union Street.

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The Curious Case of Windows 7 Legacy Apps

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“Support for Windows 7 is Coming to an End. … January 14, 2020 …” nagged a Windows 7 screen last week.

Like any other piece of technology, Operating System software gets obsolete. The obsolescence comes in the form of vulnerabilities to hackers, who get rich knowing how to look for and exploit these weaknesses in the code, compromising the contents of your computer and network.

Obsolescence also comes from more powerful hardware at a relative lower cost that enables the OS to do more with less code. Greater efficiencies in hardware and software mean some businesses will accomplish the same work as other businesses in less time.

And among the more compelling features of Windows 10 is that developers’s apps can scale to work across platforms, so desktops, laptops, phones and tablets function with the same software without the formerly prohibitive development costs of coding from scratch for each device. The result is more robust and cost-efficient software that, for example, can control processes remotely.

But this does not mean you are without legitimate reasons for maintaining Windows 7 software that works for you. The law requires you to have access to the data created with that software: “judges … have potent sanctions options available … when [businesses treat electronic data] preservation … with ignorance, indifference”

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/bad-behavior-in-ediscovery-is-still-30811/

So it is important to maintain your organization’s data created in legacy software. You or an IT partner will need to develop strategies for addressing your organization’s dependence on legacy software. This is sometimes a technical process requiring the involvement of third-party specialists. For instance, some legacy software was built to utilize 16-bit chip architecture. Windows 10’s 64-bit version does not support 16-bit programming. Still Microsoft has made a way to get you the benefits of 64-bit Windows 10, and still allow you to run 16-bit and 32-bit software through virtual machine environments. These virtual machines will probably get you enough access to meet compliance issues, but interface changes may render the legacy apps limited in function. Overcoming these types of challenges might not be appropriate to handle on your own.

If your organization has multiple Windows 7 licenses, the upgrade path can be costly, and not just for the multiple new OS product keys. There may be costs related to replacing your legacy software beyond the cost of the software itself. It is important to consider implementation costs, including possible downtime and employee training. Be sure to work with your IT department or partner to ensure that these considerations are included in your upgrade plan.

An IT partner like Bryley can help come up with a plan to meet your specific upgrade needs, so your business functions productively through the end of Windows 7 and the use of legacy apps, to arrive at solutions that will work for the coming years. Bryley can be reached at 978.562.6077 Option 2. With 32 years of experience, Bryley’s professionals have a broad knowledge of business software and can guide you with your business’s Windows 10 transition.