The single most important aspect of any IT maintenance regime is ensuring that we have regular backups of our data, and that those backups would work in the case of disaster. Ideally a backup should not require the involvement of the single greatest point of failure, us, unfortunately we humans tend to be the weak link.
What do you do with the details of the contacts that you meet? In business when we meet new people we seem to invariably exchange business cards. That's great, as we end up with a card giving details of how to contact the person that we've just met. But what do we do with those details? Do we retain the business cards or store them on the computer somehow? For small businesses it seems to be an enduring problem, which people solve in a wide variety of ways. Many realise that the 'best' answer involves some form of database and so the simplest database of all, Microsoft Excel, gets roped into the solution.
In my last post I talked about securing a simple workgroup network aimed more at sharing an internet connection than sharing data. In this post I'll discuss securing a more sophisticated network which is the next step up.
One of the big features of Windows Vista, certainly one that has attracted a lot of attention, is user account control. For those of you that don't know, its intended to protect the system from the user by asking the user for permission to run software that might compromise the security of the computer.