Brendan Howe chats 3 important questions to ask about your backup systems.

Its cold out and you are going for a walk. How many pairs of socks should you put on under your winter boots, one, two, three?

Most people would agree that at some point adding more layers of the same item pays diminishing returns. So why is it that we often find multiple antivirus programs installed on a single computer? If effectively walking with 3 layers of socks inside your boots is difficult, imagine how hard your computer needs to work to power through the workload that multiple antivirus utilities add.

With the recent Toronto storm, your network backup, business continuity and disaster recovery plan is something you should definitely revisit.

The most important thing any IT person or company can do for you is to protect your data. If you have a strong backup, disaster recovery and business continuity plan, then you can feel safe the long term interests of your business will be protected no matter what happens.

One of the best practices we insist on with clients is having a UPS device protecting their critical servers and network devices.

What is a UPS? UPS stands for Uninterruptible Power Supply.
It performs two critical functions:

Protects servers, network equipment and computers against power surges or blips which can damage hardware
Protects servers and computers in the event of a power outage by gracefully shutting them down.

This won’t be all that shocking to you. One of the secrets to fewer computer and network problems is making sure you’re not operating using old hardware and outdated software.

Therefore an obvious solution to this is to be proactively planning to upgrade hardware and software.

Think for a moment about why you take your car in for routine maintenance. You know that if you don't get the oil and filters changed and a few fluids topped up that your car is going to have problems.

They may not happen right away but the longer you neglect your car, the more risk there is that something will go terribly wrong.

Organizations that have a firefighting approach to IT instead of a proactive one usually don’t have any sort of IT plan in place. Fires pop up and they are doused but there is no long range planning to prevent these fires from coming up in the first place.

2013 could be the year many people forget about their home computer and spend most of their time on a tablet device, according to a new survey by Gartner Inc.

On the corporate side, we’re seeing more tablets being used in offices across the GTA in addition to work PCs, however this study predicts that at home, consumers will be getting rid of their PCs altogether.