As most of you all know, we are now about a month into the hurricane season and already have a tropical storm on its way to the coast. According to the federal National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, they predict anywhere from 14-23 named storms, 8-14 should become hurricanes, including 3-7 major hurricanes. With such an active season, business owners should think about their business continuity plans. Here are a series of simple questions to that can help you determine if your data is protected and recoverable.

Click here to fill out a questionaire to see how comfortable you feel about your backups. We will analyze your answers and contact you with options or to congratulate you on putting together a successful backup plan.

CBM Technology.net can help you be proactive and have a successful recovery from any type of disaster from a technology stand point.  A successful recovery, depends on preparedness planning done today.  You have invested a large amount of time, money and resources to make your ventures successful and disaster preparedness has probably been put on the back-burner to face more immediate concerns.   We know understand that so we made it our job to help you become proactive and prepared; here are the different ways how:

Full Risk Assessment & Evaluation:

You may start hearing more and more about SIP trunking as the technology becomes more popular, but many people currently know little about it.  A SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) connection is a service that connects a company's PBX (simply a telephone system) to the public telephone network via the Internet.  The biggest benefit of using SIP trunking is the cost savings of not using analog or PRI systems. We switched to SIP trunking 6 months ago and have had significant savings.

Here are some of the benefits of using SIP Trunking:

For Backup & Disaster Recovery customers, we are stepping up on our normal regular monitoring and maintenance of your onsite and offsite backups.   Since the opening of hurricane season, we have been doing intensive manual checks of your backups, offsite backups & standby servers as an extra assurance that your data & servers are prepared for any disaster.

Here is a schedule of proactive maintenance activities that we perform during off season:

• Daily - Ensure that backups are running successfully
• Daily - Ensure that offsite backups are transferred successfully every night
• Weekly  - Ensure that daily backups are collapsing correctly.
• Weekly - Automatic consistency check between offsite and onsite data
• Monthly - Create a report on how your backups are performing
• Monthly - Ensure that weekly backups are collapsing correctly
• Monthly - Manual tests for file restorations.
• Quarterly - Manual tests of standby servers.

Here is a schedule of proactive actions that we are performing during the hurricane season in addition

• Weekly - Manual tests for file restorations.
• Weekly - Full manual test for consistency between offsite & onsite data
• Monthly - Manual tests of standby servers

Here is a schedule of proactive actions when a tropical storm or hurricane is expected to hit land fall days before at your location:

• Increase the frequency of backups to maximum (every 15 minutes) if you are not on that schedule currently.
• Full tests for file restorations, standby by servers, etc.
• Ensure that offsite data is consistent & verified, if there is anything unusual, we will go on site can create a copy of your backups to an external hard drive.

If you have any questions, please contact us

Microsoft is investigating new public reports of a possible vulnerability in the Windows Help and Support Center function that is delivered with supported editions of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. This vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using a Web browser or clicks a specially crafted link in an e-mail message. Microsoft is aware that proof-of-concept exploit code has been published for the vulnerability. Microsoft is also aware of limited, targeted active attacks that use this exploit code. Based on the samples analyzed, Windows Server 2003 systems are not currently at risk from these attacks. Microsoft is actively monitoring this situation to keep customers informed and to provide customer guidance as necessary.

Upon completion of this investigation, Microsoft will take the appropriate action to help protect our customers. This may include providing a security update through our monthly release process or providing an out-of-cycle security update, depending on customer needs.