Why is there suddenly a heavy demand for Encryption?
Email encryption is on the rise, ExchangeDefender offers two types of encryption.
What is behind the growth in the adoption of email encryption?
Over the past year we’ve seen an explosion in sales of ExchangeDefender Email Encryption – which is a surprise given that we’ve not only had it for years but that we’ve also given it away for free. HIPAA has been around for over 20 years, dozens of other regulations that almost all companies ignore have been gone for just as long – so why now?
In one word: penalties.
Companies have long known that they can’t operate efficiently without email – and that they cannot just move files around “just to get it to them” once they see the penalties. But selling a service to someone that has avoided using or paying for it is never an easy discussion so here are the 3 quick questions that should lead you to an effective pitch in under 1 minute:
1. Who sends you encrypted messages?
2. Who could get hurt if this information went public?
3. What is your exposure? How much negligence insurance do you have?
The more they mumble, the more of those questions they cannot answer, the more details or costs or scope they don’t understand, the more they need it. End your question with this line: How comfortable would you be having this conversation in a legal deposition?
Grow your business: Positioning ExchangeDefender’s Encryption feature.
Elevator pitch: How to position ExchangeDefender Encryption as an answer to all of the above problems
→It is included in your ExchangeDefender Pro subscription and it’s transparent – no software to install, nothing to manage or configure.
→ You’ll be using the same process and same security major banks, health care providers and lawyers use – so you’ll be protected from most critical security exploits.
→ Finally, it’s dead simple to use – all your employees need to do is put [ENCRYPT] in the subject when they are sending the message. Doesn’t matter if it’s on the phone our Outlook or Outlook Web Access, it just works.
Ding. You’re done. It’s virtually impossible not to sell this service – and it’s desperately needed by anyone using email to do business or conduct confidential discussions. One more thing: Because encryption is transparent and on demand in the cloud, it also protects you when the security issue is on the recipients end – because email is never stored on their PC or device, if someone hacks their network they won’t be able to get to the info stored in your encrypted message!
If email is a business necessity then email encryption is it’s insurance policy.
If you discuss business over email, then anything confidential that should be in that email should be a matter of employee communication protocol: If you attach something sensitive to this message, you better encrypt it and CYA. This is the way things go at banks, with lawyers, with accountants, with realtors and at nearly every white collar job: Nobody wants to assume the liability so they’ll all do what it takes to protect the data.
And with high profile hacks and compromises in the news daily, is not having it worth risking the whole company?
XD Service Manager Beta Release
We are very excited to announce the launch of the new XD Service Manager that will allow our partners and their clients a much friendlier way to manage their Exchange services. This is a complete rewrite of the code – frontend and backend – and we’ve taken all the feedback and made the beast much friendlier both for smaller accounts as well as for enterprise clients with tons of users to manage directly. The goal was to entirely remove the IT department and “the PowerShell guy” from the equation and put power user tools at your disposal to quickly and effectively make changes on the mass scale.
But first, the frontend – full rewrite – with new responsive UI and controls. Previous jQuery UI that has been hacked, tweaked and kicked along for years is being replaced by this UI that will work as well on the desktop as it does on any mobile device:
Navigation is in line with typical modern design you’ve seen in many other web applications with ability to filter, scope, search and quickly apply changes to multiple accounts.
Actions are context-based, meaning you will not be refreshing the entire page in order to get search results or do quick changes on multiple accounts. We’ve fully extended the Exchange feature set in the new UI giving you the ability to centrally manage all aspects of your Exchange service without having to go back and forth between different screens or modules (so in that regard, it’s even easier to deal with than an Exchange management console)
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the new service is very end-user friendly. While 90% of the feature requests for the new service manager came from our power users that expressed a lot of frustration with the speed and accessibility of the portal, we needed to recognize the reality of who manages IT in 2018 – it’s no longer the IT guy or the IT department – users want to be able to take control of their public folders, distribution groups, forwarding, password resets and so on – so our design had to take that into account as well:
As you can tell, the new Service Manager is far friendlier and uses the same wizard approach in the end-user mode that they are likely very familiar with. Because we’ve done very strict implementation on the backend (with all the regulations we are now responsible for), it’s virtually impossible for them to make a mistake. Unfortunately for some of our unskilled IT folks this means no more “Password1” or “NoSPAM” or “Princess1!” as a password going forward but everyone will be experiencing far fewer problems as a result of it.
Better reporting as well – you’ll be able to get the full overview of configuration, who uses what, where they are at and so on.
The new Service Manager goes into Beta next week (last week of March 2018) and will run in parallel with the existing Service Manager (on the same site as https://support.ownwebnow.com) as we get more feedback from our entire user base – so don’t worry about this springing up on you as a surprise. You will see the new link on the Dashboard and will have the ability to access the new infrastructure from there. Both will continue to work for at least a month.
This is also the new UI framework for Shockey Monkey: which we have been working on for a year now. The same infrastructure, MVC, UI and upgraded backend are going to be driving ExchangeDefender, SM, XD and all other services which means that you’ll very soon be managing everything from the same look and feel that will be extended to your site as well. What it ultimately means is that the new UI will follow your branding and your color schemes and no matter where in the ExchangeDefender universe your client ends up, they will be dealing directly with your brand.
And we’ll be there in a live chat to provide support and help them out with every service.
Thereby ultimately managing the entire communications, collaboration and business management platform end-to-end. Very exciting times ahead!
-Vlad
CEO, ExchangeDefender
Attachment download: New Service Manager Partner Guide (pdf).
Do’s and Don’ts: Selling your clients on Email Security Solutions
Learn more about the do’s and don’ts when selling security solutions
Let’s face it, most IT solutions in the business process fail because users don’t use them. They don’t use them because they see it as another unnecessary time waster in the process they are already accustomed to and count on everything being yet another thing management will soon forget about because they don’t work the same issues all day long. Sound familiar? All the new, cool, better, smarter ways of doing something will always lose to users unwillingness and inability to change. Until someone loses their job or the company gets sued for negligence. Oops!
So, what should you be talking about with your clients?
1. Don’t talk about backups – talk about long term email archiving and ediscovery.
2. Don’t talk about encryption – talk about safely getting data over without getting hacked.
3. Don’t talk about SPAM – talk about fake senders, fake links
4. Don’t talk about Phishing – talk about identity theft, compromised passwords and bank accounts.
5. Don’t talk about Compliance – talk about setting business standards and avoiding lawsuits.
6. Don’t talk about Web File Sharing – ask how they get important documents to their clients or vendors?
7. Don’t talk about Malware – ask them what they currently do to protect their staff from taking down the whole office.
Your clients have been hearing about SPAM and Virus protection for over a decades now, they view it the same way they view every other software license cost – part of doing business. The problem in 2018 is that it’s no longer just the technology complexity dictating business spending, regulatory bodies and government are getting involved in it too. Nearly every industry is subject to some new regulation, record keeping process, security audit, assessment or other “time waster” that they will have to deal with. So start clipping news articles and send them headlines with the message “We really need to set you up with ExchangeDefender so you don’t end up in the next article” – and I don’t mean it in a sarcastic or fear mongering way at all, nearly a quarter of my office time goes to time travel discussions and things businesses wished they had in place before they got in trouble. Talk to them now.
The Bottom Line:
Businesses you are trying to sell technical solutions to are already dealing with a lot of nightmares related to technology. They don’t want another thing to manage, report, customize, tweak and learn: they want something that reduces all of that work. That something is ExchangeDefender, all-in-one, end-user friendly email solution that removes things they don’t need to look at and makes stuff they are looking for easy to find.
I encourage you to talk to your clients less from a technical solution standpoint and more from the business process implementation. Yes, they may trust you because of your technical expertise but what you need them to understand (and what will ultimately earn you the business) is which business issues are going to be addressed by spending a few dollars a month. If they can identify with the problem, they will pay for it to go away because everyone is always trying to reduce costs and labor is the biggest one of them all. Help make them more productive.
ExchangeDefender Address Book Lockdowns
Effective March 1st, ExchangeDefender will only allow delivery to email addresses that exist in our Service Manager or ExchangeDefender Admin Portal. This is a non-event for 99.999% of our clients (it’s only being mentioned because it’s a refresh of the AUP/TOS policy) and it is intended as a security precaution against threats we’re seeing in the wild and on our honeypot networks.
The Problem
ExchangeDefender as an SMTP proxy will scan and deliver any email targeted at a protected domain. Even though we sanitize each message and do not permit dangerous content through, if the email address does not exist on the clients server, the message will bounce to the sender. Now, imagine that sender doesn’t have an SPF/DMARC, and imagine that the address itself is spoofed – now send that message a few thousand times and an attacker can destroy a mailbox simply by overloading with non-delivery receipts and bounce messages.
Why this happened in the first place
Bad automation. It happens, and when it happens on a scale of ExchangeDefender, it creates an issue. So to minimize complaints, we just stopped actively enforcing address book validation. To those of you protecting servers on networks outside of ExchangeDefender’s control (think Google, Office 365, etc) the management and addition of new addresses will become automatic. Here is a peak at our new support portal. It should make a lot of you very happy.
Figure 1: Service Manager. Instead of having a ton of accounts in the listing, everything is now logically grouped by a Company. This way whenever you go to manage one client you only see the users belonging to that client and any addition or modification will pull pricing, configuration and meta data from that organization’s settings. This should virtually eliminate mistakes, billing issues and configuration problems.
Figure 2: Adding a new mailbox. The process is streamlined, clean and remarkably simple. The reality is that IT departments are no longer in charge of this anyhow, neither are our MSP partners. Businesses want the ability to control memberships, configurations, distribution lists, permissions and everything in between.
Figure 3: Mailbox permissions, settings, etc. There are several screens for this but needless to say we’re looking to expose a lot of the features that can be managed granularly in a way that businesses expect them to. Let’s face it, your average office manager dealing with the new hire isn’t about to fire up remote PowerShell; Strong passwords, additional features, granular control, public folder and distribution group membership templates, etc are all coming soon.
Other really cool stuff is coming very soon as well, we’re pretty excited with what we’re building and delivering… but the focus for us always remains on the security and safe communication – and everything that supports it goes hand in hand.
Client Support – Can’t someone else do it?
On February 1st, ExchangeDefender will officially start providing end user support for all email issues related to our platform. For our many partners and resellers this means that we will, under your name and brand, take and place calls and help your clients solve email problems. At no additional cost, across our entire Pro line of services: ExchangeDefender Pro, Exchange Pro, Compliance, and Encryption.
It just makes sense. Our entire service lifecycle is structured around ITIL, integrates into our partners support infrastructure seamlessly, is covered by our SOC1 and SOC2 audits, comes with advanced reporting, security/id, session and call recording… and a lot more that we cannot publicly disclose. But if you join me:
Wednesday, February 7th, Noon Eastern
Click here for the NDA & Instructions
This is going to be one of the denser webinars we’ve ever put together and the audience includes everyone from management down to helpdesk – what I have on deck is a layout of our service model, our scope, our escalation policies, our compliance protocol, authentication and validation service, etc. Consistency in this service is key so winging it or improvising isn’t an option.
-Vlad
P.S. I encourage you to check this thing out live. If you think this will be a service you offer down the road, this webinar (minus the Q&A) will be required viewing and the software will track attentiveness so if you even mildly care, I’d tune in or make someone at the office watch it.
Upcoming Service Changes
We have some cool new stuff going live before New Years that you need to be aware of. It’s been a very busy season for every elf in the workshop so we’re taking some time off after Christmas, please read below I promise it’s important.
Encryption
This service continues to be our focus as we bring up massive changes to UI across the product line and Compliance stuff in general for one simple reason – it’s in heaviest demand. If you aren’t building a business on it, we should talk. In the meantime, we have a huge facelift to the Encryption Notifications.
Now I don’t know about you but our old encrypted mail notifications looked more like a Nigerian Prince scam than legitimate business notifications. We now have beautiful HTML/txt email notifications for the entire notification chain and of course your colors and your logo will be front and center. After the ExchangeDefender UI upgrade is complete, this branding will be customizable down to the domain-level so that recipients can identify the organization directly instead of the MSP/VAR/reseller. Mobile looks pretty good too.
We have some new stuff happening with reporting, audit and log control that’s coming to the Compliance Officer section of ExchangeDefender launching in early 2018. If you have any feature requests, we’d love to hear them.
P.S. We know, we know, you want to send attachments through portal replies. It’s in the works. In the meantime, Web File Sharing does this stuff safely, securely and with a ton more compliance flexibility.
Fake / Vanity / Service Accounts
If you have fake, vanity, group, service, dog and generally non-person accounts in our support portal, they will be suspended next week.
We’ve announced this change several times this year and it’s going live next Wednesday. The reason is long and boring but it showed up in our numerous audits that looked at the our change control, service order and change mechanisms… and long story short, we nearly flunked it because you cannot have unidentified personnel change control of service records. Ooops.
Now I know, I know, I hear you… “But Vlad, business case scenario, my techs all need to see the upda..” – I know. And we have already solved that problem. If you have an engineering team that works as a group and all of them need to get updates when one person makes a change or request, we have a policy driven system in place to handle notifications. If you go to your company and edit company details you will see the following at the bottom:
Put any email, distribution list, PF address, etc there and every update, order, notification or (insert reason for having a vanity account) will be copied automatically. You can also check the box if you don’t want admin-level updates being sent to the group account. If you do, you will see a new checkbox on every ticket update (Admin CC) that will allow you to manually forward ticket updates for that specific ticket to your group.
Chat
While I have you on that page disabling vanity accounts (click on your profile and write down your PIN somewhere), we are going a step further in terms of support. As I mentioned on many webinars this year, our product and our service is going to get a lot more chatty and user-oriented. No, we’re not going direct or trying to cut you out of the food chain but the reality is that in order for us (and you) to be more valuable to our clients we need to communicate faster to our users when there are issues. Hence the changes to support, additional services for support handling, more features for notifications and upgrades to all the UIs and so on. One new addition that is already live is our public chat – it’s available on every page at ExchangeDefender.com in the lower right hand corner.
Tapping this button will launch a live chat and my entire company (myself included) is available on it and can be pulled in on demand. If you use your email address AND your PIN, my staff will be able to help you as if you were logged into the support system and opening a ticket. They won’t make service changes for you (see above about SOC1 & SOC2 audits) but everything else will be the same as opening a ticket.
Google Suite / Gmail Compliance Archiving..
Finally, yes we’re now providing Compliance Archiving for people on the Google business mail platform. We’ve tested and certified on the Google G Suite Business Solution ($10 and up, it should also work with the $5 one)
Reoccuring Invoices
Finally, a bit of a bugfix (with some additional functionality) that should help with billing. Many of you use our Shockey Monkey platform to manage accounts, users and to do reoccuring billing. After the system upgrade to PHP7 our infrastructure for reoccuring invoicing didn’t allow for changes to reoccuring invoices (oops) so we’ve had to go back and not just fix the issue but add more flexibility to it. Here is the new look:
The new Last Time Generated field allows you to reset the clock so to speak and rerun any invoices you may have skipped. This is very much a temporary fix but we’ve had a lot of good feedback from folks that aren’t on top of their billing that this new feature helps solve those problems so it’s staying. Lot’s of new stuff on the SM front in 2018.
2017
We hope you had a great one. For us, it’s been a rather arduous rebuilding year that has seen us make massive upgrades to our infrastructure, redesign of our data centers, upgrades to backoffice stuff, dropping a lot of vendors that weren’t up to the challenge and while I wouldn’t wish this kind of workload on any of you, I’m really in love with what we’ve been able to do this year and all the opportunities it now opens for us and for our partners. While losing some flexibility has certainly cost us some business, it has brought a lot of predictability and stability across the board. While outright replacing a lot of gear and subsystems was really painful, everything that we’ve redone has reduced our problems and issues to a nil. And while all of this has been rough at times, sticking with the process, standards, audits and the way we run the business has brought a new level of resilience and optimism that I haven’t seen here in a long time. I don’t recommend it, but the results are incredible.
With that, I’m confident that everything we have in the works now will make everyone we serve far better off in 2018. Next few years are going to be amazing as we bridge that gap between the old world of email, compliance and encryption with the new world of on-demand service and realtime communications.
New Corporate Encryption
It has been a while since we’ve upgraded the ExchangeDefender UI but as you’ve seen with our other products and services, we’ve got something big coming over the next quarter: redo of all of our web interfaces to be more responsive and more useful. We’re starting with Encryption simply because it’s our most popular service. Allow me to unpack this upgrade as it’s a lot more comprehensive than it seems.
First thing you’ll notice is that ExchangeDefender will begin integration with 2FA/OTP for an additional layer of security. Two factor authentication, one time / disposable passwords, security tokens and so forth allow the users to login and use the service only if they have their password as well as a company issues OTP device. If your users tend to use the same password on multiple sites or like weak passwords that they never change please give us a call and let us set you up with a device.
On the exact opposite spectrum of concern, there are recipients of encrypted messages that generally don’t want to provide their email, name, etc or fill out long forms. For sites that interact with third party recipients (Encryption, Web File Sharing, Local Cloud, etc) we’ll now allow social media authentication as a login.
Inside the product itself you will find a fully functional email client with a responsive interface that quickly loads data without page refresh or long delays.
Since we have so many clients that actually live inside these interfaces and do bulk of their work there, we even have a lighter mode that hides a lot of the navigation and branding and helps you preserve some screen real estate.
We’ve made massive improvements to the functionality of the product as well. With so many of our encryption clients (and corporate clients) demanding a more functional email experience we’ve decided to eliminate Outlook and Gmail from the equation entirely. With the new encryption product you’ll be able to send emails, attachments, respond, forward messages and print from the site directly.
All these features are coming next week but we’re far from over: our Enterprise Encryption is getting a massive facelift as well. You’ll soon be able to create a full Compliance and Policy manager role that will be able to inspect and report on what is going through the encryption system. You’ll also be able to create specific encryption policies that will help route messages within the organization for manager approval, HR screening (man-in-the-middle role), content traps and much more very soon.
We hope you like it.. because it’s coming to the entire ExchangeDefender / Shockey Monkey universe. Our more ambitious goal is to build an entire application suite where organizations can more effectively manage their mail flow securely but also turn it into an actionable and accountable platform that doesn’t obsess with “inbox zero” and anxiety over email overload. The future looks bright.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO
ExchangeDefender
Remaining Relevant In Email Security
Sometimes perspective matters. Allow me to offer you mine as the CEO of ExchangeDefender.
Last week we held a huge webinar to announce the biggest addition to our business in over a decade. One that will see our business grow exponentially over the next few years. The response from the people that have attended the webinar has been fantastic. But if we’re being honest, we had more partners apologize for not being able to attend the webinar and ask for the recording than we had in attendance for the webinar. As always, we provide a direct link to it a few days after the event but this time we did something different.
Recognizing that our partners are swamped and busy running their business, we went a few extra steps. We called every single attendee that came to the webinar. Less than 5% answered the phone or returned the voicemail. We shot a quick 5 minute video to summarize the content of the webinar for people that are too busy. We created flyers.
Today I wrote up a bullet list summary of our webinar, again for everyone’s convenience, but I buried the big announcement as a single line bullet point half the way through the writeup and asked the marketing department to use half the newsletter to highlight our marketing and advertising efforts.
Why?
I have no doubt our new support service will be a smash hit. In fact, we’ve already been overwhelmed with the response to it. Not only will it make partners that offer these services instantly more profitable (because we’re doing the work) but it will open up a marketplace for partners that didn’t have an expertise in email security, compliance, encryption and other “real business concerns” a venue to provide the service now that someone else is going to stand behind it. I’m not worried about us, we’re doing great.
I am, however, worried about many of you. I totally understand not being able to get to a webinar, an hour is too much to ask. But if you can’t answer the phone or return a voicemail.. what are you doing to give yourself a chance to grow a business? If you’re too busy to answer the phone or see what the vendor you already work with can do to make you more effective and profitable, how are you going to implement and promote those solutions that are designed to help you? If you’re too busy with work to actually improve your work and to make it profitable, then how do you grow? How do you improve your odds to survive and thrive in an environment where big players are working tirelessly to eliminate and displace you? How do you learn about delivering the new services clients need and how do you talk to them before someone else reaches them?
We owe our business to our partners. Loyalty is a pretty big thing for me personally because I’m here thanks to the thousands of people that chose to trust us. Our business responsibility is to have your best interest in mind.
And with that, I wanted to highlight marketing. The IT world is changing and the concerns businesses face with their technology are going beyond uptime and reliability. I have assembled a great team at ExchangeDefender not just to help you deliver these services but to educate you and to help you promote that service to the business community you serve. Helping you double profits on our services next year is a short term goal. Making sure you remain relevant, profitable and successful 3-5 years from now – that’s where my mind is at.
-Vlad
P.S. I don’t mean to criticize anyone; I understand the time is scarce and you have a million webinars, phone calls, emails, voicemails and social media notifications. You know best how to spend your time and the last thing on my mind is trying to offend or guilt you about not attending the webinar – if you read this that way I apologize and I hope you give it another shot. Truth is, we track this stuff: partners that show up for our webinars, that take the time to consider the solutions and work with us to implement them do 23x better financially a year out (from Aug 2016 to Aug 2017) than those that don’t show up or answer the phone. Those are the numbers I know and the numbers I can track. I want that kind of success for all my partners. I have no doubt we’ll be killing it with support next year – but I feel like my responsibility to you, to all of our partners, is to help you grow. And I can do that much better through marketing efforts than we are doing right now. Hence the highlight.
ExchangeDefender Bounce Whitelisting & Quarantine Access
We’ve never invested as much as we have in 2017 when it comes to infrastructure and now that those massive upgrades are nearing completion, you’ll start seeing an avalanche of new features and services we’ve been working on all year starting to show up. I wanted to write this blog post to address one that is the largest piece of annoyance for our clients and that is whitelisting bounce emails and domains.
A little bit of background: Every time you see a bounce*@ email address is the last time you will see that address. These disposable, script generated addresses are only valid for a short period of time and are used by the mailing list companies to track bouncebacks and replies to their campaigns. On is generated for every single email sent out and if you look closely at them they usually have a random string or your email encoded in the user part of the email address. Whitelisting them, as so many people often try, is to put it simply: pointless. Naturally when the next email comes in from “the same sender” it’s going to have a completely different from address and the old whitelist entry will not fire. This tends to get really annoying really fast for clients that don’t understand what is going on behind the scenes.
To make things easier and assure delivery in the future, ExchangeDefender will now detect when you’re attempting to whitelist a bounce/disposable address and offer to whitelist the entire domain for you. We’ve stripped out the product branding so you can forward this to your clients or include in your own documentation/newsletter. When they click on a Trust link in an email report they will see this prompt:
And if they go through our online portal and attempt to whitelist a temporary bounce email, they will see this:
Is that all? Well, not quite. You see, most of these bounce lists are coming from legitimate sources such as Constant Contact, MailChimp, SalesForce, etc. Later this fall we will be releasing a new “Newsletter” feature but in the meantime our new managed whitelist (enterprise-wide) will make sure these bounce messages getting caught in SPAM folders due to their contents (but from legitimate sources) are no longer something your clients have to worry about fishing out. So yay, less work for everyone involved!
One more thing
While we’re on the “less work” train, infections and filename/filetype policy violations will no longer involve going through our team to release messages. You can now release infected or policy violating attachments/messages on your own through the Domain login at https://admin.exchangedefender.com. (psst. You can even let your clients / CIO types access this since it’s a domain-level feature, not an MSP-level feature)
Proceed with caution though, delegating access to this content is still a terrible idea though and please make sure you have adequate sandbox/antivirus/anti-rootkit software installed anywhere you download these. For every legitimate release request we get there are dozens of “No, my client does a lot of business with UPS and they definitely need that .exe that UPS emailed them.”
We hope these new features make you more productive and safer online. We’re really excited about everything else we have coming up!
Some tips on getting ready for a disaster with ExchangeDefender
I held a quick webinar to get all of our partners and clients in the way of Hurricane Irma up to speed and all the contingencies you need to make in advance of the storm. In Florida and Texas we unfortunately get plenty of time to practice and live roll with disasters but if you have new staff, this is something you need to be doing with your clients continuously. If you don’t feel like watching a 12 minute video, here is a brief writeup.
First of all: We’ll be here. 24/7. If you’re in the path of the storm you will likely face severe outages, downtime, lack of reception, eventual lack of battery power and network congestion in a disaster area. Here are things to keep in mind and get on top of as far as we are concerned.
In the event our support portal ever goes offline, the secondary infrastructure in Los Angeles will pick up the load at:
https://support2.ownwebnow.com
In the event of an outage, we probably aren’t the only vendor you need to stay on top of. So if you do social media, you can track our activity and advisories here:
www.fb.com/ExchangeDefender
www.twitter.com/xdnoc
In the event that the net goes down, and it usually does, make sure you can get in touch with us. Our numbers are 877-546-0316 or 407-465-6800
In the event that you lose network connectivity or your LTE/4G suddenly becomes Edge/GPRS, you will likely be calling us for support and network changes. We’ll need your PIN to make any account or configuration changes to make sure you and your techs have that ready now. If you haven’t seen your pin in a while or if you’d like to reset it, it’s at support.ownwebnow.com under your contact preferences.
In the event that your power goes down, Exchange/ActiveSync will chew through your battery quickly. Make sure you setup your ExchangeDefender LiveArchive IMAP/SMTP now. Make sure you test the IMAP-SSL/SMTP-SSL part in the event that your mobile carrier blocks 587. We have a few LiveArchive frontends so if you’ve only ever heard of https://livearchive.exchangedefender.com you’ll want to login into the admin portal and find out which LiveArchive client access server you should be using. Do yourself a favor and set your LiveArchive-To-Go account, it’s free and it can sit on your phone dormant, just flip it on when you need it. Not only will it use far less bandwidth than Exchange/EAS, it will make your battery last a lot longer.
Finally, print out the client auth dump. This will give you all the credentials you’ll need to provide to your clients to get them back to work if their servers or networks go offline. Trust me, you want to do this now. I have fielded countless panicked calls from IT people charging their cell phone in the trunk of their car trying to get credentials reset and configured for their clients – plan this now.
Some other ideas and suggestions:
1. Any important data that you imagine you’ll need on the go: Encrypt it and take it with you on physical media. For really important stuff like insurance, routing, VPN, etc make sure it’s printed out and you have all the relevant phone numbers.
2. Take pictures of all the gear you’re leaving behind and do a video walkthrough of the setup. Trust me, you’ll forget to take a picture of something.
3. I’d like to repeat #1: Print a hard copy of contact points, client info, anything you will need to obtain assuming both computers and networks are unavailable or batteries drained.
4. Agree on a cloud based chat system to keep in touch with your staff. This is essential.
5. Publish and announce an offside advisory site. As you start restoring services, you need to keep your clients in the loop – nothing worse than recovering from a disaster and simultaneously having to listen to someone whine or nag for an ETA that is just slowing you down. Make sure you have a Twitter or Facebook account to point them to for an update. You probably don’t want to call a thousand people back. Expect their phones to be off too because they probably have power issues as well.
6. I cannot stress this enough: Reconsider your name server infrastructure. If your DNS is provided by the same company, or if all your name servers are on the same network, subnet, etc and it goes down you are dead.
7. Setup a cloud failover crash site. If you own your own mail server, setup mailboxes just in case – if you’re going to be down for days you’ll probably want to use email in the meantime. If you’re wrong worst case scenario is you’re out a month worth of email hosting.
8. Fly someone far away. I heard Utah is beautiful and relatively hurricane-proof.
9. This one is personal: setup a remote VPN server. If all your routes, trusted networks and servers are offline you’ll have a hard time getting to the infrastructure you’re expected to manage – your clients may come back online before you do. Stand up an openvpn cloud instance with a static IP address for the time being and trust it across your network.
10. This is a bummer, and almost illegal for me to say as a Floridian, but as this is a category 5 storm it’s a really good idea to stay sober. You may be needed at a moments notice, if things get really bad you’ll really want to be aware of your surroundings and have full capacity to handle multiple outages and issues at once. Many of you are IT solution providers and someone is paying you to think about #1 – #9 I mentioned here… I’ve seen things explode well before the hurricane comes in and days after the storm passes.
Stay safe. Plan and prepare accordingly but rest assured that we’re here for you. And some of us are in Utah too. 🙂
P.S. Yes, our logo is a hurricane. Yes, we noticed 🙂