How You Can Prepare Your Business For Disaster

For most people, when we hear a phrase like, “disaster preparedness,” we think of drills or evacuation strategies. We might also make a mental note to review emergency exit locations with employees or have a plan of action if something were to take place, but that is all.

Disaster preparedness in business actually involves much much more than just understanding where to go in the event of an emergency, especially since disasters are not always physical. Many of you know that disasters can also be, and most likely are, virtual too! They can come in the form of an online attack or outage or even network failures. Businesses that fail to fully prepare themselves for potential disasters could face negative consequences when it comes to the day-to-day operations of their business.

To alleviate your business’s risks of consequences from a disaster it is essential to take steps now to develop a preparedness plan for your business that will help your organization withstand the unexpected. When creating your preparedness plan, you should consider the following points:

Financial Management – Evaluate all of your organization’s financial responsibilities, such as payroll and regular bills, because these obligations won’t vanish even if you’re consumed in a disaster. Having all account and billing information in a safe, accessible place will help you stay on top of your finances even if a disaster were to occur.

Communication Strategies – Your business contains external parties such as partners, clients, customers, etc., and also internal parties like your employees. All parties will likely need to be knowledgeable on all information regarding the plan of action if a disaster were to have an effect on your business. Whether it is via company website, email, blog, phone, etc., a point person should be chosen to be responsible to communicate what to do in the effect of a disaster to all parties involved.

Data Backup – Your business’s data is one of its most valuable assets! You should backup your data every day! You can do so through a number of ways, for more information visit our ExchangeDefender CloudShare page. CloudShare allows you to pick folders to sync between your systems with documents always securely stored in the cloud and available to you whenever you need them, where ever you want them.

Cloud-Based Software – Moving some or all of your software to cloud-based versions of the same programs is another alternative to data backup, since these solutions automatically store data in secure, offsite locations and make it accessible to you from virtually anywhere.

Technology updates – Maintaining updated technology will inevitably help your business avoid virtual disaster, since updates generally include security patches that guard your network from the latest digital threats.

Take advantage of LiveArchive!

ExchangeDefender protects businesses and organizations of all sizes, everyday – no matter what! This is what made has made ExchangeDefender’s LiveArchive an unquestionable leader in business continuity for all companies with redundant Internet connections, large maintenance windows and an all-Microsoft network infrastructure.

As I mentioned above, preparedness and business continuity are all about planning how to keep the business up and running in the face of any of those things that can put a road block up or stop operations altogether. When LiveArchive is needed it can be enabled and the client is back in business! 

LiveArchive uses ExchangeDefender’s secure standby servers, up to a year’s worth of inbound and outbound email is available and accessible through Outlook Web Access at all times. Neither you nor your client has to actively manage this service in any way – the LiveArchive service is always enabled to ensure that no matter what, whether the power goes out in the office or anything else happens, users will always be able to access critical email and stay productive and continue working. It’s always on, powered by Exchange 2010 across two data centers, archives sent and received mail, and there is no need for software installation. LiveArchive and the ability for users to resume work right where they left off no matter what happens – is included with every ExchangeDefender account. LiveArchive goes to work when an outage or disaster happens – you can depend on LiveArchive!

For more guidance on readying your business for disaster, visit www.exchangedefender.com/livearchive.php, where you can access more information on what your options are during an outage or disaster.  And as always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact us!

Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com

Join us for CloudShare launch

If you have a few minutes this Friday I hope you take them to watch us launch ExchangeDefender CloudShare. It’s a brand new product that is being introduced to all ExchangeDefender users free of charge to help them store and move files through the cloud. It’s another critical expansion of the ExchangeDefender platform as we continue to provide a layer of business security on communication that goes beyond just email.

Please register for the event today:

Friday, July 13th at noon EST

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/635677224

While many ExchangeDefender partners have already seen the product under the NDA, the real content of this webinar is the business model behind the solution. We have carefully tested and designed the product to address the key concerns clients have with their file storage, document management and security. Truth is, you can get tons of different cloud storage products – yet none of them are designed with the reporting, management and audit controls that the business needs. When IT people have debates about “the cloud” the conversation about security is first and foremost and the uncomfortable truth that comes out of it is that you’re not any more “secure” storing files locally on an Internet connected server/PC/appliance than you are on a remote network. In both scenarios it’s not the ambiguity of security that is the question – it’s the fact that nothing out there provides simple and easy to read reporting about who is accessing your files, when and where.

In that regard, ExchangeDefender CloudShare is different. And we’re going to teach you how to sell your solution better by addressing the real problem businesses have with “trust” – namely that without proof it’s not really trust but blind faith.

Join us and see how we’re helping our partners move ahead of the cloud.

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
vlad@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x500

ExchangeDefender Triple Launch

Next Wednesday, May 30th, ExchangeDefender will be hosting a huge launch of three new features being added to the core of our ExchangeDefender offering. The details of the new features are private at this moment which is why we are requesting more than usual discretion about the feature set, implementation, pricing and availability.

Please take a moment to register:

Wednesday, May 30th, 2012

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/483060168

Two of the new features will be available in United States only (you can purchase, license and implement them worldwide but you might not want to). These features are new to ExchangeDefender and take us in a new direction so it is important to have our partners attend and understand how these offerings will impact the bottom line and expand market opportunities available with ExchangeDefender.

Important:

1) Unlike all of our other webinars, this one will not be recorded.

2) Unlike all of our other webinars, general attendance is not permitted, you must be a partner that is currently reselling our services.

3) Unlike all of our other webinars, information discussed will be provided under an NDA only.

If you register, Chelsea Richards will be contacting you tomorrow with the NDA paperwork that is required for the attendance to this webinar. You can sign it and fax it or take a picture and email it to us or even mail it in.

I look forward to meeting with you all and I hope you’re excited about this next step in the ExchangeDefender evolution. All the new stuff has been in heavy demand by our partners and I believe it will fuel a huge growth cycle for our partners. We’re extending all areas of our business – from the previously announced Managed Messaging that covers support to the better security with encryption, file storage, voice and management we hope that this is the best year you’ve ever had with us and we’re committed to keep moving it in the right direction. On a personal note: I want to extend a huge thank you to all of you that have brought us more business through ExchangeDefender Essentials, the $0.50/mbox price has been extremely popular and has unfortunately upset a lot of our competitors because it clearly beats them. As a result we have received several notices of unethical behavior or highly questionable sales practices so this webinar – while extremely positive – will be executed in private so we do not have to deal with the backlash. Frankly, all we do and everything we do here is for our partners and it is my responsibility to get you the best and most effective product possible – so you can choose and apply the right one as the business dictates. I hope you pardon us and accept the minor inconvenience of privacy while we get you off the ground and give you a huge market advantage as our partners!

ExchangeDefender Encryption Survey

As discussed on our quarterly webinar, we are rolling out an upgrade to our encryption package and adding lexicon encryption (custom dictionary), pattern matching (account, date of birth, ssn, credit card numbers, etc) and more. The standard free encryption that is triggered by the user (by putting [ENCRYPT] or [CLEARENCRYPT] in the subject) will continue to be free but the more advanced features will come at a price and we are looking for feedback on what would be the most valuable to a small business.

ExchangeDefender Encryption Survey

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/xdencryption

The whole thing is 11 questions and only 4 of them will require some creative thinking (the first 7 are all contact info). It will take you 2 minutes – tops.

Here is what we are trying to figure out.

We have no problem selling ExchangeDefender to the high end enterprise, corporate environments and organizations that have government regulators threatening them with fines. That part is easy.

What we want to target is small business that might pay for encryption as a part of it’s organizational management. Allow me to explain.

Let’s assume you just hired a sales person. They do not have a huge technical background so you want to help them by screening their outbound emails. How? Set ExchangeDefender to route their sent messages to you for approval. Before the message from them can go out you must sign of on it.

Down the road you grow and now you have lots of sales people. Instead of approving and babysitting all of them for quality control you want to just stay in the loop on the deals they are working on. So you set ExchangeDefender to copy you on all their activity. You keep a folder in your Outlook that holds every message sent by your sales staff to potential leads and don’t have to ask who they are talking to or did through CRM, you see it in front of you in realtime.

What we would like to figure out is if there is enough interest out there among small businesses to better control client communications. I know from managing a small business and dealing with lots of small business owners that the concern for data leakage is significant but is it significant enough to spend a few bucks a month to safeguard it? That’s the question I hope you can help us answer!

Please help us out by filling out the survey. We might be nice and throw you a discount on some of the encryption subscriptions in return

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO
Own Web Now Corp

Outlook 2007 SMTP Security Add-in (Fixed)

Here at ExchangeDefender, we have finally resolved the issue with our Outlook 2007 SMTP Security add-in. This project has been a thorn in our side for quite some time and I’m proud to announce that our development team has finally got it working! We spent the good part of the week going over and over Outlook 2007 & 2010 documentation and implementation methods for Outlook controls. After hours and hours of troubleshooting and testing new scenarios we’ve finally got all the pieces to fit together correctly. I’ll briefly describe the development cycle of this project, to help enlighten those who think bugs/feature requests get brushed aside and forgotten about.

Our original Outlook 2007 add-in was created years ago and was at a time where Outlook add-ins weren’t really supported NATIVELY. So part of the conflict was restructuring our code to take advantage of the native Office 2010 hooks, since they are backwards compatible for 2007. We had to phase out all of our old methods that had a heavy dependence on a 3^rd party Outlook .dll called (Redemption). That was our first hurdle.

Then we found out while everything would compile without any conflict, the add-in still wouldn’t load correctly inside of the Outlook application. So we went back to the drawing board and examined what was happening on a lower level. To our surprise, the compiler (Visual Studio 2010) kept replacing the Outlook 2007 included references with the newest 2010 files. This was completely unexpected and unwarranted behavior in comparison to what we were expecting. So to keep things on par, we moved the development environment to a virtual machine running Windows XP, Office 2007 & Visual Studio 2010. This resolved the conflict of Visual Studio fetching incorrect .dll files and replacing them at compile time.

Perfect right? Everything should work…

Nope, the next issue was the worst! The add-in would not load and didn’t generate any errors…

A developer’s worst nightmare: Trying to figure out what’s wrong with absolutely nothing to formulate a reason for the failure. We’ll apparently there was a slight conflict between the old way of handling the .manifest file and loading the ribbon controls. So after we tweaked the registry controls and load behaviors, we then rewrote some of the ribbon controls to support the newest version of VSTO. That’s when things started to work!!!

So, as you should be able to conclude, it was no walk in the park. We would have loved to get this working a very long time ago, but at the time we simply didn’t have the time or resources to address the issue directly.

Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com