Millions of businesses

Thousands of businesses lose millions of dollars worth of data to fire, power outages, theft, equipment failure, and even simple operator mistakes.  Studies show that nearly half the companies that lose their data in a disaster never reopen.  Ninety percent of these data losses occur because of power failures, lightning, user mistakes, and other hardware and software failures. Contact us today about data protection.

Most business owners would be appalled if they knew the risk they are taking by failing to properly back up their data.  It’s more important than ever to protect the data your business depends on with a solid backup strategy.  That’s where we can help. We provide a secure, automatic and inexpensive solution that can make sure your critical data is fully protected.

Important information

Rules that apply to all businesses

– All personal information must be used for limited purposes and not used in any way that is incompatible with those purposes.
– The information must be the minimum that is required to deliver the service.
– The information is accurate.
– The information is secure.
– You should not keep the information for longer than is necessary.
– The information must not be transferred to other countries that do not have adequate data protection laws.

Keeping information secure

Whenever you collect information about an individual you are automatically obligated to ensure that the information remains secure. If you are storing information electronically then you must ensure the systems which you utilize to do this are safe and secure. You should also ensure that once the information is no longer needed to deliver the service to the customer the information is erased or destroyed.

The customer’s rights

If you hold personal information about an individual or business then they has a right to request a copy of all the information you hold about them, you may charge up to £10 to the customer as an administration fee for providing this information. This is known as a ‘Subject Access Request’ and must be made in writing by the customer. The information must be presented to the customer in a clear legible format and delivered with 40 days of making the request.

Privacy Statements

A privacy statement is a written notice that is made available to all users of your service and clearly defines how personal information will be collected, stored, utilized and disposed of.

Risks

Good health and safety practice makes sound business sense. You can:

– Protect your workers from the suffering caused by accidents
– Reduce employee absences and sick leave
– Potentially reduce your insurance premium
– Protect your business against the unforeseeable
– Maintain your organization’s reputation

Security

Securing your business’s data is not easy, and it takes expertise. Here are eight simple things you can do to protect your business data:

– Conduct a security audit
– Make staff aware of the important role they play in security
– Use strong and multiple passwords
– Encrypt your data
– Back up
– Have security policies
– Protect your mobile work force
– Implement a multiple-security-technology solution.

The file transfer protocol (FTP) is one of the most popular and oldest services used with the Internet to date. In particular, the Windows format itself enjoys this simple and reliable method of transferring files over a network as part of IIS (Internet Information Service) 5.0 and beyond (the latest of which is IIS 7.5 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008).

Whether you want to use Windows FTP as a standalone service or combine it with a number of other Windows resources, this classic network tool empowers administrators with a multitude of options that’ll help make file transfer a lot more secure and dependable. Here are several basic yet sound recommendations using options native to Windows operating systems that can be employed to secure FTP operations.

Disable Anonymous Access
Anonymous access is typically enabled by default whenever you first install FTP services to your Windows OS. To put it simply, this option allows most anyone to access your FTP site without needing a user account. Although there are some customer-based businesses that can benefit from this default configuration, most other organizations view this setting as a way for hijackers to easily gain unauthorized access of their FTP site to the point that it’ll be used to house copyrighted material and illegal files for their own personal gain.

Removing the default anonymous access configuration is the very first thing you must do to ensure your FTP security. By doing so, you’ll be able to restrict and control access to your FTP site by only admitting the successful authentications of an approved user account. Meanwhile, your access control list (ACL) handles the configurations of your access controls as described on the FTP home directory using NTFS permissions. To restrict anonymous access, just go the security accounts tab of your FTP site’s properties page and clear the Allow Anonymous Connections box.

Enable Logging
By opting to enable the logging option on your FTP server, you can guarantee that you’ll have precise and accurate logs of which users and IP address have attempted and successfully accessed your site. Regularly maintaining the sound practice of routinely reviewing your records can allow you to identify any security threats or breaches and examine your traffic patterns for posterity’s sake.

To configure your FTP site so that it can enable logging, you should go to the properties page of your site, find the FTP Site tab, and then select the Enable Logging box. Once you do this, the logs will be made in a format of your choice and can be accessed later on for analysis and examination of access controls and/or traffic patterns.

Harden Your ACLS
By using strict ACL restrictions across NTFS permissions, you’ll be able to regulate, control, and safeguard access to your FTP directory. This cannot be emphasized enough; making sure that your FTP directory doesn’t allow most anyone who bothers to access your FTP to have full rights is of the utmost importance to you as an FTP site administrator. Allowing such a circumstance to happen is just asking for trouble, especially since it will be extremely hard for you to control your workgroups this way.

Restricting your workgroups to Read, Write, and List only (i.e., the option where the Execute action is forbidden) is par for the course, but in case of a blind put setting, you should also disallow Read and List and only enable Write access on your directory for optimum security and maximum control over the users accessing your FTP site.

Easy remote host connection was arguably started with the invention of the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and it’s such an effective program that many administrators still use this application for their work development systems to this day. At any rate, for those who aren’t used to the command-line nature of old-school Windows FTP found on Windows 95 or NT, this guide should help quite a bit in enumerating the commands you need to use and what they’re used for.

About FTP
FTP refers to a type of protocol that’s used by a whole collection of computer applications that handle data or file transfer from one PC to another. It’s a term that came from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) back in the early seventies when mainframes and time-sharing were prevalent and personal computing hasn’t become part of the mainstream yet.

The foremost objective of FTP is to guarantee that the file transfer process is as simple and fast as possible regardless of how slow your Internet connection is in order to reduce the problems a user usually faces when it comes to handling the complex sequence of events needed to accomplish this operation. In any case, this article has a lot of practical information and content concerning the FTP command that’s built-in with both MS-DOS (Windows) and Unix.

Windows FTP
Nowadays, FTP clients come in the form of intuitive Windows programs; but if for some reason you’d rather access your FTP server without using such software, the built-in FTP command found in MS-DOS-based Windows operating systems will suffice. This Windows FTP is accessible from the MS-DOS prompt. You just need to type “open ftp.address.domain” in the command line (wherein “domain” is the domain name that usually ends in “.com” or “.net”, and “address” is the name of the server) in order to access this application.

You can also type in IP addresses (e.g., “255.255.255.0”) in order to open your FTP server immediately because they can serve as substitutes to your server’s domain name and address. After connecting successfully to your server, it will prompt you for your username and password; from there, you should have no problem accessing and transferring files between your local computer and remote computer.

FTP Commands
The commands used for console FTP are quite numerous, so we’ll only cover the more significant ones for the sake of brevity. If you want to learn more about FTP commands, feel free to research them on the Internet or test them out on your own. At any rate, depending on which version of FTP you have, the following commands may or may not work for you; in order to check which commands are available on your FTP, just type “help” or “?” to bring forth a list of available commands.

First off, “!” allows you to toggle back and forth between your operating system and FTP. Meanwhile, typing “exit” on the operating system should bring you back to the FTP command line. As already mentioned, “?” or “help” lets you access the help screen as well as a list of available commands. Meanwhile, “abor” refers to abort transfer, “cd” enables you to change directories, “delete” helps you remove a file, “debug” activates and deactivates the debugging mode, “cwd” changes the working directory on a remote system, “cdup” changes the parent directory on a remote system, “binary” enables the binary transfer mode, and “bye” allows you to exit from the FTP command line.