Invisik Corp.Newsletter Oct.2010

September 2010

The Monthly Newsletter of Invisik Corporation

How To Be 100% Certain Your Business Will Be Back Up and Running If Disaster Strikes

Client HotSpot Of The Month: Brownsworth Incorporated

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12 Little Known Facts About Data Backup

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Greetings from Invisik…

September

sadly heralds the end of summer vacation. Your kids are back to school, and you are back to work. Here’s to a productive fall season for all of us! And if you are looking to complete a network project by year’s end, now is the time to contact us to begin planning.

Fall also marks the launch of our new Referral Program. Check page 4 for how you can enter our Halloween Drawing for a chance to win a new HP MINI 2102 N450 netbook. These little guys are great for back-toschool, traveling, or whatever else the season inspires you to do.

Congratulations are due to Sarah Anderson, Office Administrator of Fifth Street Towers in lovely Downtown Minneapolis. She is the winner of August’s Invisik Trivia Bowl with the correct answer of 1859. Who will be this month’s big winner and claim the prize of a Burger King gift card? It could be you if you are the first to call (612) 298-3000 or email trivia@invisik.com with the correct answer.

And this month’s Client HotSpot spotlight shines on BROWNSWORTH INCORPORATED. You will not want to miss their story on page 3. If you would like to be a featured client in an upcoming issue, please email Andry Jurcich at andryj@invisik.com for details.

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Invisik Trivia Bowl The phrase, “Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally” is often used to help students remember what?

A. The Great Lakes B. The Order of Operations in Long Division C. The Order of Math Operations D. The Planets Did you know? The Autumnal Equinox (September 22nd) is the day when there is exactly 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness at the equator. …for IT Ingenuity

Good networking, Matt Jurcich, President Invisik Corporation

Tel: 612.298.3000 Email: support@invisik.com Web: www.invisik.com

How To Be 100% Certain Your Business Will Be Back Up and Running If Disaster Strikes Have you ever lost an hour or two of work on your computer because it crashed? Now imagine if you lost days or weeks of work—or imagine losing your client database, financial records, and all of the work files your company has ever produced or compiled. Imagine what would happen if your network went down for days where you could not access e-mail or the information on your PC. How frustrating would that be?

Most small businesses minimize the importance of disaster recovery planning because they are already swamped with more immediate day-to-day issues demanding their attention. If their network is working fine today, it goes to the bottom of the pile of things to worry about. In most cases, no one is watching to make sure the backups are working, the virus protection is up-to-date, or that the network is healthy.

This is like saying you are too busy driving your car on the highway to put on your seatbelt. Taking that simple preventative step does not really show its true value until you get into a head-on collision; at that point, you are either extremely relieved that you had it on, or you are incredibly sorry that you did not.

The same holds true with your data backup.

Obviously the information on the disk is far more valuable than the disk itself. If your company depends on having access to the information stored on your server or PC, then it is time to get serious about protecting it from damage or loss.

Not convinced? Consider this: data-erasing disasters are not just earthquakes, floods, or tornadoes. They also take the form of office fires and broken water pipes. If a fire started in your building, the parts that were not burned beyond recovery would probably be destroyed by the firemen’s efforts. Even more common is software corruption, hardware failures and human error.

A disaster recovery plan does not have to be complicated, time-consuming or expensive. Start by asking yourself the following questions: 1. Do you back up your company’s data daily to both an onsite and offsite location?

2. Are you absolutely certain that your backup copy is valid, complete and not corrupt? How do you know for sure?

3. If disaster strikes, HOW would you get your data back, and what would you do while you were down?

4. Do you have copies of all the software licenses and discs in a safe, accessible location should you have to rebuild your server?

5. Would you and your employees have a way to access your network remotely if you could not get to the office?

6. Do you store important passwords in a secure place that company officers can access if you are unavailable?

7. Do you have a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) device in place to keep your network and other critical data operations running during a power outage?

8. If your phones are down, where will you forward your business calls so you do not lose business?

9. If a more common disaster occurs, such as server hardware failure, do you have an onsite way to get back up and running the same day?

This is NOT a complete list, but it is a good start to get you thinking in the right direction. For better peace of mind, contact us to have a Backup and Disaster Recovery Audit performed on your network. Mention this article, and we can schedule to perform it at no cost to you (a $350 value). We will come onsite to review your backup procedure and uncover any problems or failures. If we find anything troubling, we will let you know and make recommendations. Don’t wait for a disaster to strike to find out your backups aren’t working. Call (612) 298-3000 or email support@invisik.com. ♦ Page 2

Client HotSpot: Brownsworth Incorporated Company Name: Brownsworth Incorporated Headquarters: 161 Chesire Lane, Suite 200

Executives: Steven L. Utne, President

Plymouth, MN 55441

Telephone: 763-745-0604

Fax: 763-745-0578

Creating Effective Workplaces In 1971, Brownsworth Incorporated originally started as a company that performed office furniture maintenance services for corporate clients. When systems furniture became popular, Brownsworth began doing installation of these products for their current clients and furniture dealers. Today, Brownsworth is 75 employees strong, and provides comprehensive furniture management and installation for the commercial market. This turnkey process includes space planning, installation, warehousing and project management for large and mid sized corporate offices.

Fully owned by Forbinde Hold, Inc., Brownsworth serves diverse commercial markets including office, hospitality, healthcare, institutional, and retail. Each segment has its unique needs from a simple repair of a piece of furniture to a multi-facility installation.

Brownsworth strives to provide exceptional service to all their customers at a reasonable cost. Their years of experience in the business has saved their clients millions of dollars in re-utilized inventory alone.

Brownsworth’s comprehensive furniture management and installation process relies heavily on their IT network. Brownsworth has developed a proprietary system that provides scheduling, project management and client inventory management. Their service representatives access their schedules from any remote location and are dispatched directly to the job. Clients can check on the status of their job at their convenience through the project management system. Through the inventory system, clients can monitor and track their excess inventory stored at their location or in Brownsworth’s warehouse.

Bruce Koehn, General Manager Michelle Hayden, CFO Website: www.brownsworth.com

For nearly 10 years, Brownsworth has worked with Invisik to manage and maintain their IT network and infrastructure.

“Invisik is our IT department,” says Michelle Hayden, CFO of Brownsworth Incorporated. “In addition to routine technical assistance, they have been deeply involved with our strategic planning in the IT area.”

Such strategic planning includes the implementation of Brownsworth’s Backup and Disaster Recover (BDR) service to help the company avoid unpredictable and unnecessary downtime. Because their proprietary system for scheduling and tracking projects is an invaluable tool for both the company and its clients, proper backup and easy recovery in the event of a disaster is critical to Brownsworth.

The BDR service is fully monitored and managed 24x7 by Invisik’s network operations center including automated tests to verify the integrity of the data.

With an onsite network unit (also called a BDR unit) that functions as a local storage device, the unit doubles as a stand-by server in the event of a server failure, and can restore Brownsworth’s IT operations in as quickly as 2 hours. With the offsite data storage option, should a catastrophe or natural disasters occur onsite, within two day or less, the BDR service can deploy to Brownsworth a fully functional server with the most current data.

Hayden explains, “Our prior system of manual backup relied on company personnel to change and transport tapes. This BDR service provides a safe and automatic off site backup which takes the human error factor out of the equation.” ♦ Page 3

Enter our fall drawing to win a new HP MINI 2102 N450 netbook on Halloween! Refer your business colleagues to us from now until October 29th, and you will be entered into our Halloween drawing. Each referral you send will count as an entry into the drawing, so the more you refer, the higher your chances of winning.

In order to qualify as a referral, our only requirement is your colleagues must be the owner or the person in charge of IT for a company with 5 or more PCs and a server.

In return, we will offer them two FREE hours of guaranteed, no-strings-attached tech support for them to use anyway they want—that’s a $300 value for FREE!

 YES! Please contact the people below and let them know that I referred them to receive 2 FREE Hours of guaranteed, no-stringsattached, tech support with Invisik Corporation.

Your Name: Title: Company: Your Referrals: Name & Title: Company: Phone: E-mail address: Name & Title: Company: E-mail address: Name & Title: Company: Phone: E-mail address:

Halloween Drawing!

Phone:

Please fax or mail this form to be entered in our

Halloween Drawing!

Fax to: (612) 243-1477 Mail to: Invisik Corporation, 7240 Grand Avenue S, Richfield, MN 55423 Deadline: October 29, 2010.

Win A New Netbook In Our

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Protect Your Kids Online For Under $30 Nearly 90% of 8-16 year olds have seen inappropriate images online. Most of them stumble upon it as a result of conducting research for their homework.

With frightening numbers of pornography, child predators, and other harmful online risks, protecting your children’s online activity is a MUST.

3. Prevents Proxy Sites From Working. Other content filters work by making a “blacklist” of sites you choose to not allow. If you try to type in a blacklisted website address, you would not get very far. However, now there is a sneaky way around these filters called a “Proxy Server.”

With the following 4 features, Net Nanny Parental Controls software by ContentWatch ($29.99 at www.netnanny.com) helps you do just that. It works on both PCs and Macs, and also has a mobile version to protect their Smart Phones.

Proxy Server web addresses are usually content neutral, so users can go there without flagging the blacklist system. Once in, your kids can navigate to their original blacklisted site. Net Nanny prevents this sneaky work-around by blocking both proxy server entries and the inappropriate website itself.

1. Blocks “Mature” Games. The software scans the online game for its ESRB ratings (like movie ratings, but for computer games). If the game is not kidfriendly, Net Nanny will block it.

2. Filters Facebook. Net Nanny can provide parents with a report on who their kids’ “friends” are, what pictures and videos they are looking at, and their Facebook Instant Message conversations.

4. Keeps Parents Informed. Whenever your kids are trying to gain access to something you have blocked, Net Nanny will send you an e-mail notification.

If You Use Tape Backup, Your Business May Be At Risk FREE Report Reveals 12 Little Known Facts About Data Backup If you use a tape backup or an external hard drive to protect your company’s critical data, you are actually putting yourself at enormous risk for downtime. Tape backups, external hard drives, and other media-driven backup solutions are designed to do only one thing: backup the data itself. So what about all the other stuff on the computers you use every day to run your business, such as e-mail, software programs, and the way the network is configured?

When your server goes down, and all you have is the data, you have to rebuild your entire infrastructure in order to get back up and running. Depending upon what caused your server to go down in the first place (hardware failure, software corruption, fire, flood, theft), it could take a week or more to order new hardware, order new software, re-configure the

network, and then re-load the data—all the while costing you time and money in downtime.

To prevent server downtime from affecting your business operations, your backup solution should have a virtualization component. Virtualization means that another server can “take over” if your original equipment goes down. It works by taking an exact picture of your current server—including data, software, and configuration— and allows you to get up and running within 48 hours or less of major disasters. or within 30 minutes of basic hardware or software failure. Having the right back-up solution can literally save your business.

To learn more about how you can protect your business data from disaster, download the FREE report from www.invisik.com, or contact us to explore your options. Call 612-298-3000 or email support@invisik.com.♦

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5 Ways To Keep Your Laptop Running— Without Plugging It In On the road, in the airport, in class, at a client’s site, or simply at home on the couch: these are places where you may not be able to conveniently plug-in your laptop. Keep your laptop running as long as possible without having to search for an outlet with these 5 tips: 1) Keep your screen dim. A laptop’s backlight requires a lot of power. Reduce the brightness to conserve battery life.

2) Turn off unused hardware. Your Bluetooth and your Wi-FI receiver can both be turned off if not in use. Unplug your external mouse or other device. And mute the PC's sound system. Not only will it save power, it avoids annoying everyone else around you.

3) Don’t multitask. Run as few programs as you can. Stick to one application (word processor, browser, or whatever) if possible. (If you are online, keep your antivirus and firewall on in the background at all times!)

4) Avoid multimedia. Save your photo editing and video watching for when you have AC power. These tasks suck up

immense battery life. To listen to music, use an iPod or similar device.

5) Sleep, standby or hibernate. Sleep mode (a.k.a. “standby”) keeps your PC on. It still uses power, just less than normal. Hibernate uses no power initially, but a lot of battery life to start back up.

More helpful tips inside including… o o o o

Be 100% Certain Your Business Can Survive A Disaster Protect Your Kids When They’re Online For Under $30 This Month’s Client HotSpot: Brownsworth Incorporated FREE REPORT Reveals 12 Little Known Facts About Data Backup

PLUS enter our

HALLOWEEN

DRAWING for your chance to win a HP MINI 2102 N450 Netbook!