Radical Support -- E-Newsletter

June 2010
In this issue

■ Message from the COO
■ Get Rid of an Old PC
■ Straight Talk on Business
Intelligence
■ Security Watch List
■ Meet the Staff

Meet the Staff

Allen Truett

When Allen Truett joined the Radical Support team as a Solutions Advisor in February 2010, he brought along many of his long-time Automated PC Technologies (APT) clients and staff.

A life-long resident of Cobb County, Allen received a Bachelor of Science degree from MIT - Marietta Institute of Technology, that is (now called Southern Polytechnic State University). He began his IT career at DeKalb Medical Center and started APT a few years later. Allen specializes in LAN/WAN design, problem solving, and project design and implementation.

Allen enjoys a friendly game of tennis or a round of golf with his clients and friends. Most weekends you can find him on the lake enjoying boating and kayaking.

What would Allen do if he won the lottery? Pay off his house, take flying lessons and give the rest away. Winning the lottery may not be in his future as he has never bought a lottery ticket!

By the time a man realizes that his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong.

- Charles Wadsworth

Message from the COO

A security threat you may not have considered...

There is a security threat lurking in your office. It's not the typical virus; it's not a hacker; it's not even someone who might steal your backup tape (although those are all certainly security threats). Give up? It's your copier and scanner.

In the corner of your office lies a potential wealth of information for identity thieves. For the purpose of this article, we will refer to copiers and scanners together as OCR (Optical Character Recognition) devices. Most OCR devices have at least one hard drive. The information stored on the hard drive varies widely - some machines use the hard drive for operating code. Very often though, the hard drive stores an image of any document that has been scanned or copied. This is necessary to facilitate not only copy printing, but faxing, scanning and e-mail as well. While the stored files are typically encrypted, they are easily decrypted with free programs available on the Internet.

3 PC Ways to Get Rid of an Old PC
by Kim Komando
used with permission from the Microsoft Small Business Center

Are you getting a new PC, or a set of new PCs for your business? If so, the question becomes: What do I do with that old clunker?

Don't just cart it off to the nearest dumpster and help clog up some landfill with electronic waste. There are better, more environmentally-friendly options to consider.

First of all, someone could use your old computer. Or maybe you could trade it in on a new one. At the least, you could pay a small fee to a recycler to take it off your hands.

Let's look at three ways to dispose of an old computer.

Straight Talk On Business Intelligence
used with permission from the Microsoft Small Business Center

You run a small or midsize business. Maybe it's not rocket science...then again, maybe it is. There's nothing small (or even midsize) about the complexity of managing your own business - it's big-time. On any given moment of any given day, you might be working furiously to track the effectiveness of your sales efforts, monitor your inventory, juggle receivables against payables, and reduce inefficiencies in production.

You've got all the data - somewhere. It's in this sales report, that stock list, those account ledgers, these production updates. In other words, it's siloed here and siloed there. Wouldn't it be great if it could all be pulled together, so you could analyze it holistically and make truly informed, real-time decisions?

Security Watch List: How to Safeguard Your Company
The article re-printed courtesy of IBM ForwardView eMagazine

Security breaches continued to make big headlines in 2009. And the outlook for 2010 is that we are likely to see more Internet-based breaches as more activity occurs online via browsers and e-mail. That's largely because the paradigm has shifted in the way we work, behave as consumers and even interact with each other. As more systems and devices become interconnected, we're harnessing new ways of communicating, accessing shared systems and information. But this progress also exposes organizations to risk by creating more entry points for hackers.

According to Daniel Holden, project manager at X-Force, IBM's renowned security research organization, "The simple fact of the matter is there are more and more hosts, more and more people on the Internet every day," Holden explains. "There are more applications put on the Internet every day. It is going to get worse just because of the numbers involved." Holden should know. The X-Force team is one of the best-known commercial security research groups in the world.

Just for Laughs

Radical Support
585 Colonial Park Dr., Suite 201, Roswell, GA 30075 * 770.542.0000
sales@radicalsupport.com * www.radicalsupport.com