Blog

IT documentation can come in various forms and should be an essential part of your business operations.

We recently received a call from a business whose files were encrypted due to a ransomware infection. Upon arriving to the client site, we had asked for the server login information and any IT documentation they would have. The manager had advised us that they did not have this information and was trying to find this for us.

Over the last few years, Ransomware has become one of the larger security threats for small businesses to date.

If you aren’t familiar with what Ransomware is, it’s a malicious piece of software that will search your computer and network drives to encrypt all your files. Once the files are encrypted, you would be provided with a ransom notice asking to pay in BitCoin to have the files decrypted.

If you're a business owner or key decision maker this may be a situation you're familiar with. You receive an email from your account manager/sales rep providing you with a quote for anti-virus renewal, but unless you've properly budgeted this into your expenses the cost may surprise you.

If you previously read our post about the fiasco we had with the Managed Wordpress Pro hosting with GoDaddy, this is more of a follow up on that and out review of the services that Vultr provides for having a Virtual Private Server to host websites.

Today you're really excited that you have finally moved over to Office 365, and can’t wait to start your day with using the new Microsoft Exchange services. You put in your credentials, and notice that you get the dreaded message saying “An encrypted connection to your mail service is not available”.

As a business owner or decision maker in Calgary, do you know if you’re currently getting value out of your managed IT support provider?

While value may be subjective, you still want to receive monetary worth from the services you are paying for.

One of our clients recently purchased the new Managed Wordpress Pro hosting through GoDaddy, and asked us to migrate the site over to the new plan. We talked to our client about this, and pointed out that this was still in beta, and that several issues could be encountered.

A new client in Calgary contacted us for IT support today. They mentioned they couldn’t get a hold of their current provider, and that their files on the server had been encrypted due to ransomware from an email attachment.

We knew immediately what we were walking into when we received this call...and it wasn't good!

Well we can’t start 2018 off by having a security breach, now can we? By now you may have heard of the infamous Meltdown and Spectre flaws in the Intel processors. Some of you may be wondering if this affects you in anyways. If you have any sort of Intel processor in your environment, then yes…you are affected.

One of our prospective clients asked how our support for IT can be more cost effective, yet profitable for us. This was a great question for them to ask, and one that we loved answering.

Over the years and experience working with other IT companies, we witnessed where they accelerated and where they had flaws. When Avalon Technical Services was formed, we had the proper toolsets that gave us everything we needed to have a fully operating business.