Latest News

We’re proud to welcome Douglas County to our family of clients. We’ve partnered with their IT Department to provide pro-active maintenance and monitoring on their systems.

Here’s what Juan Sanchez, the IT Director at the County said about working with Key methods:

“Working with Key Methods has given me the time to ‘focus’ on projects instead of tasks. I actually have time now to work on long term goals for the county instead of playing fire fighter all the time. Knowing my servers and workstations are constantly being monitored has given me the peace of mind that we’ll be proactive in responding to a potential problem instead of dropping everything to deal with emergencies as soon as they happen.”

Visit http://www.douglascountywa.net to learn more about Douglas County.

We’re proud to welcome Fibonacci Smile to our family of clients. Located right down the hall from our Wenatchee office in the Riverfront Center, Fibonacci is one of the premier dental offices in the Valley. They specialize in cosmetic and general dentistry.

Visit http://www.fibonaccismile.com/ for more information.

While most small businesses require technology to grow, they are also likely to have tight budgets and be unable to invest in “pie in the sky” IT projects with no guaranteed returns. That’s why it’s important to lay down a technology investment strategy that aligns with the specific goals of your organization.

Begin by looking at your business strategy over the next two to three years and determine in which areas you plan to grow, change, or improve. It will be easier to identify technologies that can help your business if you have a clear picture of where you’re heading and what steps you must take to get there.

Once you’ve set down your business strategy, you should appoint a member of your organization to track IT trends and advancements in the marketplace. With the explosion of possible technologies available to you, it can be helpful to have someone on your team who is on top of the current products and trends.

Sit down with this person and list the key technology areas they should be monitoring based on your business needs. For example, these areas could include business applications, data warehousing, Web services, or wireless technologies. By creating this list you can begin to assess which technologies are likely to impact your business. Do any of the technologies you’ve listed present growth opportunities or offer significant improvements in performance or customer service? Are other players in your industry using these technologies to enhance their businesses, and if so, how?

This list of technologies and opportunities is a way for you to narrow down your technology requirements and come up with a well-thought-out investment plan.

Once you have some technology projects in mind, talk to a trusted IT advisor and run a cost/benefit analysis. Look carefully at your technology budget over the next few years, taking into account the cost of maintaining and supporting the IT you already have.

Create a short list of IT investments that you can not only afford, but will also help you achieve your stated business goals. Prioritize these investments according to the benefits they will give your business and then start to look at factors such as the time it will take to implement and test the new technologies, the staff required to support them, and any necessary training.
The project that offers the greatest benefit may also be the one that requires the most time, money, and staff. Investing in one large project may mean you don’t have the resources to invest in others, so you will want to do a risk analysis of any significant project you consider undertaking.

Technology projects are notorious for running over time and budget, so make sure to plan for possible overruns. It’s better to have a realistic idea of the costs you could be facing. If the project runs on budget it will be a pleasant surprise!

Finally, continue to update your IT investment plan and monitor new technology developments. The last thing you want is an aged IT strategy that misses out on the current opportunities in the marketplace. Keep in constant communication with your trusted IT advisor, and once you embark on a project, update your investment plan with new deadlines or cost estimates.

By Scarlet Pruitt

You know you need to ensure your business is prepared for a disaster. You know technology can fail. You know that a fire, hurricane, flood or something else can happen to interrupt your business operations. But are you actually ready for disaster, whether it’s man made or natural?

Companies avoid planning for disaster. It’s human nature. But when you think about what it would cost your small or mid-sized business to be without power or IT systems for 24 hours, it’s just good business sense to plan for the worst. To keep your business up and running if disaster strikes, you’ll need to avoid the following common mistakes.

1. Put it off until tomorrow.
With the amount of day-to-day “fire fighting” that most growing businesses do, it’s easy to procrastinate on tackling less urgent projects like disaster recovery and security planning. A recent study conducted by IBM of more than 1,200 mid-size companies confirms this. Nearly 70 percent say that IT disaster recovery capabilities are essential, but less than 25 percent are confident that what they have today is complete. The good news is that today’s affordable and feature-rich software, server and storage technologies mean that businesses can start small, establish a base level of disaster recovery, and build on it over time.

2. Only big companies can afford it.
Not true. Business continuity planning is not a luxury that only mega-businesses can afford. Without any business continuity structure in place, a small or mid-size business risks losing revenue it really can’t afford to lose. One area often overlooked is continuous data access. Without it, you can’t serve your customers or partners. Backup storage within your primary place of business is a good place to start. But if there’s a power outage, you can still ensure continuous availability as long as you have replicated information in an offsite location-ideally far away from where you do business. Today’s new hosting models and cost-effective offsite backup and recovery mean that peace of mind is available for companies of any size.

3. It’s an IT problem.
Protecting your data and getting your systems online again is crucial, but don’t forget about the people who use those systems. When a tornado touches down or a blackout shuts down the city, your employees need to know what to do. Make sure your plans address employee communications, working remotely, and prioritizing the employees that need access to your core business systems first.

4. Plan only for natural disasters.
People often picture big, headline-making events like floods or hurricanes when they think of disaster recovery. But a complete business continuity plan also anticipates malicious disasters and productivity killers like spam, computer viruses or data theft.
A regional manufacturer found itself inundated with spam and e-mail viruses that took each employee an average of 20 minutes a day to remove. With only minor modifications to its e-mail servers and firewalls, the manufacturer took advantage of an e-mail filtering solution hosted offsite. Now spam and virus e-mail no longer reach the company’s network, giving the company back an estimated 2,500 hours of labor per year.

5. You have to do it yourself.
Only if you want to. You can start by carrying out a basic risk assessment and appointing an employee to write a simple, commonsense policy. Go to a website likethe Small Business Administration’s for tips on disaster preparedness (www.sba.gov ). But if you find this whole subject too overwhelming or time-consuming, get help. Bring in a local services provider to help you develop and implement a plan and any processes or IT capabilities you need. Stop for a minute and think about your business from the 50,000 foot view. How would you fare in a disaster? A business continuity plan is like life insurance; you hope you never have to use it, but if you do, it’s invaluable.

Viruses have been around almost from the beginning of corporate networks. That’s why most companies have antivirus programs installed to protect their networks and workstations. Because email is a common vehicle for viruses, companies also deploy email filters to protect that avenue of attack. These are important tactics in an overall corporate defense strategy for protecting networks and systems. However, as attacks become more sophisticated, corporate Internet portals cannot be overlooked. Infected websites are becoming more common. Google recently scoured world URLs and found over a million websites engaged in malicious downloads. Although current Anti-virus (AV) and email filters are important, they may not be enough to protect corporate networks from harm. Adding another layer of AV protection via a comprehensive Web filter that includes antivirus is more important than ever:

• Websites can become infected without the owner ever knowing because so many applications can be used to operate just one Web portal. Updating these applications is sometimes overlooked and this omission offers hackers free reign to insert damaging code.
• While traditional corporate AV can stop viruses, it can miss malware, which can be just as damaging. Adding another layer of protection that recognizes and blocks malware agents is an important part of a comprehensive security approach.
• Websites that sell space to third-party advertisers may be unknowingly hosting damaging widgets. This ambiguity of ownership can lead to security holes that hackers can exploit easily.
• Social networking sites that let users post almost any material they want offer fertile ground to hackers seeking to embed damaging HTML. Merely visiting such pages can allow viruses or malware in and traditional AV defense won’t block it.

These attacks that result from simply visiting an infected site are called “drive-by downloads”. The only way to achieve total protection from these and other hazardous threats is to deploy a web filter that blocks viruses and malware before they can get near your networks.

Multi layered Protection is Your Best Bet One way to strengthen network security is to deploy a web filter, such as a web filtering appliance that adds another layer of protection with onboard antivirus and anti-malware protection. These offer real-time virus and malware blocking as part of an overall four-factored defense.

A Firewall, web filter, desktop anti-virus, server anti-virus, all need to do parts of this protection. Antivirus is complicated problem that sometimes takes a complex solution. If you need help wading through the options give us a call.