Can you trust cloud services? How safe is your data in the hands of Microsoft, Facebook, Google, or Amazon Web Services?

Even if your data are reasonably safe, how reliable are these cloud services? What are the cloud providers' uptime guarantees? Their demonstrated competency in providing responsive customer service? Can you put your faith in their security audits?

These are important questions to ask, whether you're a home or business user. As businesses increasingly move to cloud-hosted compute and data storage solutions, a few powerful companies control a larger and larger slice of the Internet itself. This presents practical problems to end users, as well as thorny political and social issues. 

There has been no shortage of widely publicized data and security breaches stemming from bugs and exploits in the software that all but runs the public Internet. When Amazon Web Services (AWS) experiences a service outage, the ripple effects are felt in every corner of the world.

​If Microsoft 365 goes down, millions of people who now work from home are left without a proverbial paddle. Zoom meetings aren't possible when Zoom suffers a service outage; how well can distance learning and remote work function under such a mercurial system?

Just today, Microsoft experienced a service outage that impacted multiple cloud services, affecting large swaths of home and business users who've chosen Microsoft 365 as their cloud document, storage, and collaboration platform.

One would think multi-billion dollar tech giants would have the resources to provide rapid fail-over and service resiliency, but consolidation in tech has made many services we all use on a daily basis increasingly reliant on single points of failure within these companies. 

So what can you do? Adopt cloud services cautiously. Retain control of your data by keeping a copy of it physically on site, either in your home or business. It might appear old fashioned advice in the age of cloud everything, but local data and local computing resources are important for the resiliency of your business and your work- and school-from-home demands. 

When you do use cloud services, make sure you understand which data you retain control of, the cloud provider's backup and data usage policies, pricing structures, security policies, and their track record for protecting customer data. For example, if you use Amazon Web Services for a hosted web server, ensure that you've properly secured your AWS instances.

"Leaky buckets", as they're colloquially known, are unsecured or poorly secured AWS instances that "leak" data for any hacker with a little skill to come along and use for their own purposes. 

Geek Housecalls wants to help you secure your cloud services as well as help you establish a secure, local backup of your data so you're not left high and dry when cloud providers go offline. Call or email us today for a consultation!

You’ve read it here first: the era of the comfortable laptop is nearly over. As laptops become slimmer and key travel of these thin laptops’ keyboards is ruthlessly diminished, laptops become less comfortable to use. The breathless and eager-to-make-a-buck tech media fawns ceaselessly over thinner machines with glossier displays and more complex and sophisticated design cues. They praise laptop makers for walking in Apple’s shadow. But they ignore, almost entirely, the issue of ergonomics. Surprise! A laptop can’t only look nice, it has to be pleasant to use, as well. In the age of aluminum chassis, sharp lines and aggressive corners, shallow keyboards, 16:9 display aspect ratios, higher surface temperatures, and whinier fans, laptops are becoming increasingly miserable to actually use.

Consider the Lenovo Thinkpad. The machine most known for its masterful keyboard and red TrackPoint has been under assault in recent years. Lenovo is investing more resources into 2-in-1s, tablets, and thin-and-light designs and this directive has unfortunately spilled over into its business-geared Thinkpad division. It is often alleged that businessmen don’t want a heavy laptop and they don’t need powerful hardware for Microsoft Office or Google Docs. While true, this analysis ignores all the other segments of users in the corporate sphere. Engineers are power users and need workstation grade performance. IT analysts and developers need more performance than what a 15 watt ultra-low voltage CPU can deliver.

Lenovo’s response? The discontinuing of its once-venerable W-series Thinkpads and the apparent lack of focus on its P-series workstations, which replaced the W-series. Lenovo is content to pour money into making the X1 Carbon and the X1 Yoga thinner and more expensive, claiming the expense is justified because of the “premium experience”. To wit, consider Lenovo’s total lack of interest in reviving its T-series ‘Performance’ laptops. The last of these, the T470p, was released in 2017; Lenovo announced no plans to release a T480p in 2018 and there is no evidence that a T490p will be released this year or in 2020.

Making matters worse, Lenovo’s current ThinkPad generation is the least repairable and least upgradeable line so far. The T480s retained one RAM slot while soldering 8GB of RAM on the motherboard, whereas the T490s features all soldered RAM, the jettisoning of more ports, a slimmer profile, and as a consequence, a worse keyboard. Even the T490 has dropped its second RAM slot and replaced the T480’s full size SD card reader with a microSD card slot–a strange choice which is proliferating within the business and consumer notebook segments alike.

Indeed, Lenovo seems to be following in Apple’s footsteps and moving in lockstep with the rest of the industry in their determined quest for thinness and port shaving at any cost. While their research may indicate that consumers won’t miss those ports and will appreciate the weight reductions in laptops, their research does not account for how these changes are making laptops less ergonomic and more unpleasant to use, generally. In Apple’s case, their insatiable urge to slim down the MacBook has produced the Butterfly keyboard, which is basically unusable. The key travel of these ‘butterfly’ key switches is nearly nonexistent, and the switches themselves are very prone to failure when subjected to any sort of dust or dirt ingress. Apple has had to spend millions upon millions of dollars to offer MacBook owners free keyboard repairs, yet they have no plans to redesign the keyboard itself, likely because such a task would be impossible unless the machines were made thicker again.

The end result of all of this? Perhaps Apple will soon move to a MacBook with a touchscreen keyboard, jettisoning physical key switches entirely. What then? Will PC makers like Lenovo follow suit in that hypothetical, as well? It’s safe to say if such a thing came to pass, the laptop would be dead. For a study in the frustrations of using a device with no physical keys, look no farther than the modern smartphone. Alas, phones are not productivity devices and laptops are. All the while, the media celebrates these perfunctory advances in thinness while seemingly oblivious to long term industry trends which are harmful to the end user experience. Given the platform the tech media has for opening up these issues to the public, which depends on said tech outlets when making their buying choices, they do a great disservice in simply functioning as glorified blogs for tech giants.

What might the solution be? Considering the trend of corporate consolidation doesn’t seem to be reversing, and probably never will, voting with one’s wallet isn’t the sage advice it once was. There’s a reason a small but vocal contingent of laptop users clings to older devices: they’re generally more functional and more usable, even if they are slower or have lower quality displays. The ThinkPad subreddit features prominently those individuals who are unhappy with the trend of the laptop industry, and who focus their efforts on refurbishing older machines and even going as far as to retrofit new hardware into ‘classic’ Thinkpad chassis of years past. And from where I sit, the dissatisfaction seems to be growing. When Apple users hold on to older machines to avoid Apple’s disastrous new keyboards and their now meme-worthy war on ports, it’s obvious there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.

The future of laptops is unclear. They might one day become entirely touch screen devices, with no more physical keyboards. They might then advance to being integrated into VR headsets or turned into head-worn augmented reality devices. The current paradigm may be in its death throes, but as the saying goes, “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. The human-computer interface has remained mostly unchanged for decades. The mouse and keyboard, while perhaps primitive considering modern technology, are proven input methods and give end users a great deal of latitude in determining what they need from those devices. The touchscreen is a regression, and seems to function only as a stopgap between the traditional keyboard and mouse, and what ever the next input revolution might be.

For the time being, it’s time to make laptops great again.

As workflows evolve and larger amounts of data are handled by even small businesses, the importance of data integrity becomes ever more critical. Hard drive capacities are now reaching 14TB in the standard 3.5" hard drive form factor, which means more chances for unrecoverable errors (UREs) during the RAID rebuild process, should you have to contend with a failing hard drive in your server or workstation's RAID array. During the RAID rebuild process, after inserting a new hard drive, the drive is put under high load for an extended period of time, which makes it all the more likely that these insidious UREs will assert themselves and lead to data corruption, or total data loss of the entire array.

So what can you do about it? Well, back up your arrays, of course. A backup is always the first line of defense against data loss. However, a second item to consider is whether your server or workstation's memory is error-correcting (ECC). ServeTheHome tells us more about what ECC RAM is and why it matters in the enterprise:

• "Error Checking and Correction (ECC) memory is mostly considered essential in enterprise environments these days. Single bit error checking and correction within an 8-bit byte allows for single bit errors to be both detected and corrected when they occur. Interestingly enough, the way this single bit ECC works is not all that unlike RAID 4 and RAID 5 where an XOR algorithm is used to generate parity bits. Instead of losing usable memory capacity, memory makers tend to add an additional chip to ECC memory for every eight storage chips. When a single bit error is detected, the parity information is used to reconstruct the data with an error. Again, this is conceptually similar to how RAID 4 and RAID 5 can scrub and fix data errors in storage arrays. Larger errors than multi-bit can be detected but not corrected by the single bit ECC type of parity scheme."
  

For desktop users, as we read above, ECC is not imperative and is not as widely supported as on server platforms (Intel Xeon and AMD Epyc, respectively). But even for your small or medium business, ECC RAM is crucial. Uncorrected on-the-fly errors are written to disk, which means the corrupt bits are stored, permanently, until they're accessed, leading to unpredictable and undesirable results for the customer and the business owner.

Any off-the-shelf tower or rackmount server from the likes of Dell, Lenovo, or HP should be configured with ECC RAM by default. If not, you most certainly want to configure it as such yourself, during the ordering process. Geek Housecalls can help you in auditing your servers for data integrity compliance, as well as help you configure and build your own servers for deployment.

Contact us today for peace of mind about your on-premise data!

Microsoft is ending support for Windows 7 in January 2020. As we head into the holiday season, and the end of Q4 for businesses, the mad dash to get everything done is no doubt leaving little time for thinking about migrating operating systems. However, there are important security implications for sticking with Windows 7 after Microsoft ends their support cycle for it. In January, Microsoft will cease providing security patches for Windows 7, leaving it in the same state that Windows XP exists in now--an obvious target for malware developers, botnets, and other threats.

For business clients running Windows Server 2008, the situation is equally critical. Support for Windows Server 2008 R2 will also cease on January 14th, 2020. If you're contending with gigabytes or terabytes of sensitive user data that must be migrated to an up-to-date version of Microsoft Windows Server, call or email us today. While client systems are at risk when running an End of Life version of Windows, server systems are generally a much more lucrative target in terms of valuable financial data and other personally identifying information.

While migrating from an operating system you're familiar with (and which is attached to all of your data) isn't a fun experience, Geek Housecalls is here to simplify the process. While Windows 10 still suffers from bugs and botched updates, these are relative inconveniences compared to the large security risk running an unsupported OS like Windows 7 presents. We can preserve all of your data, migrate your browser settings, bookmarks, passwords, and other important items, as well as help you find the lowest cost (or free) upgrade path to Windows 10.

Read more about Windows 7 EoL here: www.techradar.com/news/how-microsoft-is-making-upgrading-from-windows-7-to-windows-10-easier-than-ever

More information about Windows 7 EoL can be found here: www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/windows/end-of-windows-7-support