To bring a little levity during the crisis of the virus, the Bryley Team — essential services, so most are together at the office in Clinton, MA with some remoting — decided to have a costume day on Friday, April 3rd. The theme was ‘How About We Think About Any Other Year Besides 2020?’ And the thing actually delivered more than a few smiles and giggles around here. Here are some costume highlights:
Members of the Bryley Systems team were working weekends to meet our commitments, reduce interpersonal contacts, and keeping our clients operational; but everyone at BRYLEY SYSTEMS made it possible!
An office move is a complicated process, with many moving parts and plenty of vendors operating on inter-dependent schedules.
Over a Friday night and Saturday morning, our dedicated team members setup the network equipment and end-user workstations at our clients’ new facility; their efforts allowed the clients’ employees to return to work, with little disruption.
Similarly, the deployment of upgraded equipment depends on a coordinated team effort to prepare, configure, deliver, unbox, deploy, and setup the new equipment, while sanitizing touched surfaces, and then removing, transporting, and preparing the old equipment for recycling.
On a recent Saturday, our team’s mission was to replace over 15 workstations, basically deploying new Windows 10 workstations, while recycling the old equipment.
The team worked together through the morning and most of the afternoon – in a safe and socially-responsible manner (also in an extremely clean environment, as shown by the photo of our Senior Technician, Mike, in our clients’ clean room) – to get the job done. (This client is an essential manufacturer that delivers the world’s finest specialty surgical products.)
This was a true team effort at a difficult time that included everyone at Bryley Systems; our clients were extremely appreciative, and we are proud of what we accomplished!
Among the top headlines in Google News’s Technology section today was criminal hackers use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and its subset, ML (Machine Learning)1. Opening the article, I found a synopsis of a Tech Republic report, “Cybersecurity: Let’s Get Tactical,” in which the authors give ten ways cybercriminals are attacking with AI2 including
The fact is, it’s an arms race. Both malware and criminal sites would be pretty quickly and easily identified on a network by the nature of their activity. So the criminals try to disguise their malware in benign code and their sites in bulletproof hosting schemes. The way they keep the ruse going is through machine learning adapting to changing circumstances.
Frank Walek has been recently hired as an IT Support Technician to operate Bryley Systems’ dispatch center.
Mr. Walek graduated from the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester and has been working in customer service and support for the past ten years. He has worked for non-profit organizations and special education programs, developing a reputation for excellent customer service and always going above and beyond to help others. In 2019, Frank completed a Google certificate program for IT support professionals and is merging his passion of helping others with technical services at Bryley Systems.
In July the World Economic Forum (WEF) delivered a paper1 that argued for putting the muscle of investment into shifting the cybersecurity landscape. WEF/Marsh & McLennan reports2 that among weapons of mass destruction and natural disasters, cyberattacks are seventh in likelihood and eighth in impact as the greatest threats to global prosperity.
January 14, 2020. The day Win7 died. Really it’s the day Microsoft stopped issuing free security updates and support for the nearly 11-year-old OS. No more patches. No more tech support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008/2008 R2.
And gathered among us are some who are denying the inevitable: migrating to Windows 10. A world without patches is no place to secure your business’s data. Windows desktop OS vulnerabilities have almost doubled the past six years. 1 And one-in-three breaches 2 caused globally is due to an unpatched vulnerability. A breach could mean curtains for your business: the average cost of a data breach in 2018 was $3.86 million (each lost or stolen record averaged out to $148). Consider the risks in remaining without security updates.
Lucas Belo has been recently hired as a Technician at Bryley Systems. His key contributions at Bryley include configuration of laptops/desktops to client specifications as well as deployments at client sites.
“I’ve been interested in all things computers since I was a kid” said Lucas. “I am always ready to learn new and more efficient ways to get something done.” As a graduate of Joseph Keefe Technical High School in Framingham, Mr. Belo has hands-on IT training and a genuine enthusiasm for problem solving along with exceptional customer service skills. He is a very sociable person who works well with others and we are pleased that Lucas has joined the Bryley technical team.
UPS Store headquarters issued a letter1 to possible “victims of a phishing incident” that included Rhode Island UPS Store customers. Based on the letter, which hides the particulars, it looks like a criminal convinced an employee or employees in the UPS Store system to provide store email credentials. Once these credentials were had, customers emailing the store were also (or maybe only) sending their documents to the criminal. And possibly any data that had been kept in the email accounts were accessed.
Bryley backs-up your office suite data in the cloud for Office 365, Google’s G-Suite and SalesForce in partnership with Kaseya Powered Services. To better understand what happens in the cloud I spoke with Alex Courson, an authority on Kaseya’s Office 365, G-Suite and SalesForce back-up products.
Don’t Microsoft and Google Back-Up Everything Already?
Q: Do cloud-based office suites assume liability for your data? Is that something that has changed, or do you foresee changing over the years?
“We are all cyborgs,” says Amber Case1, as we allow technology to expand our mental capacities. How much more is this true of our businesses? Having continuous access to information allows a business to thrive. Break that access and employee’s productivity is broken, too. Unbroken access to data is what Bryley delivers to its clients.