Resources

Most of can easily agree that our IT universe has been dominated over the past several months by cybersecurity discussions as we daily (sometimes it feels like hourly) see reports of the next cybersecurity event that has occurred in our nation, state, or sometimes with our peers.

We have been having a lot of discussions about how to better protect against ransomware and other threats with the recent attacks that have happened in area school districts.   Recently, I heard a story about a network that was hit with ransomware.  The network admins cleaned up the mess and started to restore their “air-gapped” […]

Over the past few years, we have been recommending the use of switch stacks in all your MDF and IDF locations.   This has been done to aid in simplifying switch management, but it has led to some confusion from time to time when someone is physically working in one of the network closets.

In my 20s I went to Tahiti and went on a sunset cruise on the famed “Liki Tiki”.   It was an amazing sunset.  Hula girls, and music.   Along the way the Liki Tiki sprung a leak.   It was pitch black, and the boat was taking on water.  The captain and crew knew they were taking […]

A constant frustration of ours is ensuring “clean” backups.   If you corrupt your data or have a server failure, we need to reliably get that data back.  There are a few types of backups.   Image backups are popular with virtualization.  File system backups have always been the gold standard since the dawn of backups.

Hopefully, you all had a relatively sane and productive summer.   Security-related topics have been in the news for most of the summer with several incidents hitting fairly close to home. Perhaps the question I have been asked the most over the last month or so has been “what do I need to do to protect […]

Just when you thought it was safe to move along to other technical topics, along comes Scott Quimby’s Hardening Active Directory Part III to scare you even more.  If you haven’t watched Part I and Part II, you can find them here. In Part III we will do a little review of some core topics […]

We harp on the fact that if you have *ANY* VPN, or remote access capabilities into your district, you *MUST* use a commercial SSL certificate and not a self-signed SSL – no exceptions. However, an area of growing frustration is that many current browsers are starting to give warnings about whether or not you should […]

All of us at CSI are techs at heart.   We love talking about technical topics.  However, we do also sell products.  As you go into finalizing your 2019-2020 budgets and summer purchases I just wanted to point out that in 2018 CSI dramatically expanded the products and services we can directly offer you under valid […]

Hopefully for most of you, this is old news, but I know how busy everyone gets, especially this time of year with the end of school coming upon us.   So, in case you missed it Microsoft RDP has been back in the news again as the source in yet another serious vulnerability – dubbed BlueKeep […]