The Michigan IT Experts

Begin By Establishing the Worst-Case Scenario

To begin, it is important to have an idea of what a disaster—any disaster—might look like for your business. Put some thought to it: what is the absolute worst thing that could realistically happen to your business? Might the office be flooded? Maybe some poor workmanship in the electricals sparks a fire, or the old, neglected building next door finally collapses and takes out part of your office, where you just so happened to keep your business’ servers?

Let’s amp up the trouble a bit and assume that whatever disaster struck (flood, fire, or falling building) left your office a total loss and, to make matters worse, took a key manager or other high-level employee with it. In addition to the personal loss, this would likely create some challenges for your business moving forward.

Whatever the Scale, You Need to Be Prepared to Deal with Disasters

Whether the loss is of a single spreadsheet or a key member of your business or your business’ physical location, you need to have the means to bounce back. For this, we always recommend that a business prepare a business continuity plan.

What is a Business Continuity Plan?

You should consider a business continuity plan to be your business’ saving grace in any disaster scenario. Its entire goal is to help ensure your company has a future, that you can resume operations if and when the chips are down.

To do so, your business continuity plan will need to cover a few different aspects of your company. There are your operational aspects, of course, including your technology and your other resources, as well as your human resources to consider.

All things considered, the baseline business continuity plan will cover:

• Data required to facilitate operations
• Technology needed to access that data
• An office location or contingency plan for hosting operations
• A chain of command in the event of a disaster
• A strategy that is accessible to all employees involved in the restoration process

We Can Help You Get Started!

We’ll help you put together a strategy that will ensure that you can make it, regardless of the disaster your business faces, assisting you with the planning process and implementing the technology required to enact it. To get started, give us a call at 810-230-9455.

Let’s go over how you can enable a dark theme for your Windows operating system and its applications.

Keep in mind that this doesn’t affect most of your desktop applications—only those associated with Microsoft and Windows. We do, however, urge you to check the settings for other applications, as dark mode is a common thing for developers to include these days.

Enable Dark Mode for Windows

The blanket setting for dark mode on Windows can be found by following this path: Settings > Personalization > Colors. You should see the option for dark mode under Choose Your App Mode. As previously stated, this doesn’t change all of your apps, so be sure to check the settings for your other commonly used applications to see if it allows for a dark mode.

Enable Dark Mode for Edge

Microsoft Edge, Windows’ default web browser, has a dark mode setting as well. To enable it, click the three-dot menu on the right side of the screen. Select Settings, then navigate to the drop-down menu and select Choose A Theme. From here, select Dark.

Enable Dark Mode for Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office also has a dark option that can be enabled through its settings. Begin by opening any Office application, like Word or PowerPoint, then go to File > Options. Under the General tab, you’ll see the option for Personalize Your Copy of Microsoft Office. You can set the Office Theme setting to Black.

And there you have it! Dark mode is enabled on your Microsoft products. Other applications might require extensions or other add-ons, so be sure to do your research or reach out to us if you are unsure of how legitimate they are.

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Step one, we need to establish whether or not cloud storage is safe in and of itself. This will ultimately fall to the provider you are effectively entrusting your data to.

Cloud Storage Security Depends on the Cloud Provider

Cutting a long story short, it really is as simple as that. There are plenty of means that your cloud provider has to help ensure the security of your stored data on their infrastructure—because that’s all the cloud really is: an infrastructure that you can use remotely instead of using your own. In this case, you’re simply using someone else’s server to store your data.

Due to this, your data’s security is wholly dependent on the protections that the provider has (or has not) put in place.

Ideally, your provider will have made sure that your data is protected by a variety of safeguards, including encryption, access controls, redundancy, and cloud monitoring, with these features tested regularly to ensure that your data is properly secured. Any quality provider will be doing so to the best of their ability, with their servers locked down and guarded behind their own security features and personnel.

Data Also Needs to Be Available

Of course, data that your business can’t access is (for all intents and purposes) data that doesn’t exist, so you need to be sure that your cloud storage provider can also ensure that you have access to everything you’ve entrusted to them. 

There are numerous reasons why this may not be the case, ranging from user error, mechanical failure, or local disaster leading to a service disruption on the provider’s end to a successful cyberattack upon the provider.

However, Most Cloud Security Issues Originate from the Client’s Side

The unfortunate truth is that it is much more likely that any security issues you experience with a reputable cloud storage provider will likely come from an issue present on your end. There are a lot of examples as to how this can happen, including:

• The use of shadow IT, in the form of one of your users also storing data on another, unapproved service or platform
• Files being inappropriately shared
• Insufficient passwords being used to protect access to cloud resources
• Accidental data deletion by a user
• Insecure and unauthorized devices being used to access cloud resources

In short, the cloud is very secure indeed—the problem is usually the person using it and how it was set up. This makes it critical to your company’s successful and secure use of the cloud that your users understand how to appropriately utilize the cloud in a way that maintains security while also allowing them to be productive.

That’s where we can help. Give us a call at 810-230-9455 today to learn more about how we can help secure your operations, including your use of the cloud.