IT Consultant & Young Entrepreneur from Somerset
Business
Your chance to get better connected in Devon and Somerset
Feb 2nd
Devon and Somerset County Councils together with North Somerset,Plymouth and Torbay Councils are working in partnership to bring faster broadband to the area and are among the first local authorities to have secured money from the government to do this.
The aim is to have:
- Improved broadband (>2mbps) to every business and community across Devon and Somerset by 2015
- Superfast broadband (>24mbps) to at least 85% of the area by 2015, with 100% by 2020
Faster broadband supports our businesses to be more competitive and helps communities’ access services, saving them money, information and learning opportunities.
This is our one big opportunity to shape the future of our digital services, so it’s vital everyone gets involved to help us get connected and up to speed.
We need you!
Our next step is to secure investment from the private sector to install the broadband and to do that we need your help. We need to show there is strong demand for faster broadband and show what current speeds and coverage we have in the area.
To do this we need you to fill in a simple survey and tell us what your current speed is.
This helps us build a picture for our supplier of where the worst areas are and what the demand is for better broadband in those areas. If we don’t know what you want we can’t help you get the right broadband.
Bizarre Exchange Connection Problem
Jan 22nd
For the last few days, one of my clients has been experiencing problems with their Hosted Exchange email account.
The account worked fine on their iPhone and also from OWA, however, when trying to use Outlook 2010 on their Windows Vista Desktop, it would hang for about 15 minutes, before asking for their account password, then a further 5-10 minutes before it would connect to Exchange and update the Inbox.
After speaking to our Exchange admins, we couldn’t figure out the cause, so I decided to grab the machine and run the usual diagnostic checks, I also reinstalled Outlook and ran a virus and malware scan. Unfortunately, none of this resolved the issue.
I was checking all the settings when I noticed within the ‘Connection’ tab the ‘on fast networks, connect using http first’ proxy setting option was not ticked, so checked the box, restarted Outlook and the problem was resolved!
Outlook now connects to the Exchange server instantly, great!
Protect your data
Mar 22nd
Ensuring your data is secure is becoming more and more difficult, as RSA recently announced that it has been the victim of an ‘extremely sophisticated’ hack which managed to breach its security.
Whilst at the end of the September file sharing hit the headlines again. This time it wasn’t a simple “is file sharing bad?” debate,, but instead because data that the UK law firm ACS:Law Solicitors held had been leaked, mainly personal details of individuals provided by UK Internet service providers, and the files they are alleged to have downloaded illegally
This makes us consider how careful organisations need to be with our personal data and data of customers, suppliers and staff. Many companies don’t give it much thought, yet UK businesses hold (and transmit) huge amounts of personal data, bank details and customer records.
There are many things that both individuals and small businesses can do to reduce the risk of their data being lost or stolen, from simply ensuring you have a secure password, not something like secret, or password11 will instantly reduce your risk. It is also important to have a good and up to date Antivirus, such as Eset Smart Security, which will protect you from web and email attacks.
It’s also very easy to add passwords to important word and excel documents - in Office 2007 click the Office button, go to Prepare and then click Encrypt. You can now add a password to the document. If you are using OpenOffice, go to File, then Save As and ensure that Save with password is ticked.
Protecting memory sticks is also very important, so how can you ensure this data is encrypted? – How about a SafeStick? – SafeStick is a CCTM Government Certified file encryption memory stick, which features features military level hardware encryption of all data. – I’ve used a couple of these and they are very good, but if you forget your password, you can forget seeing your data again!
We all must take care of the data we provide to websites, as announced last night Play.com‘s marketing company has had a data breach, meaning “some customer names and email addresses may have been compromised”
Play.com advised users to be “vigilant” with their email, and asked users to forward “anything suspicious” to privacy@play.com for investigation.
So taking simple extra precautions will help to prevent people stealing your data and you protect other people’s data.
