In the past several days, two of our customers suffered a potential breach when their users opened Word documents sent as attachments. The infected files slipped right past sophisticated email protection systems.

Fortunately, at both companies, the IT teams got involved early on and averted disaster.

In one case, the attachment came from a trusted third party that was unaware their systems were compromised. Remember, your security is only as good as the security of your third party providers.

If you unexpectedly receive an email message with any attachments other than pdf files, be very skeptical and notify IT immediately. You may save the security of your organization.

The post Avoid Opening Word Attachments – Check with IT First appeared first on Foster Institute.

Technology moves ahead very quickly anyway. Some of your hardware may not support some systems you need to support now without expensive upgrades anyway.

A technology called server virtualization can allow you to migrate servers off of ancient hardware onto new hardware that you already own. That means you may be able to retire old hardware without purchasing any new hardware.

When you are budgeting, remember that an IT Vital Systems Reviews from a qualified independent third party should never come out of the IT budget. Allow IT to spend their budget on products and services to keep your systems up and running. IT Vital Systems Reviews are an investment akin to “insurance against having problems in the future” than an expense.

If your physical servers are old, replace them. If you aren’t using server virtualization, consider moving to that technology since you will have fewer servers to be concerned about upgrading in the future.

The post Yep, Replace Those Ancient Servers appeared first on Foster Institute.