The hardware you use your for businesses, a router and a firewall, switches, wireless equipment, all of this, even though it’s hardware it also requires updating to keep security. Typically, for your computer, you have updates for hardware, but other hardware network pieces like printers fall into this category.

This is what’s called a firmware update. And the difference is firmware is software that firmware actually resides on a chip, on a silicon processor of some sort within the hardware. So we do have to go out and download firmware updates for these devices and apply them.

You should be going in and applying those firmware updates to those devices and rebooting those devices on a monthly basis, just to keep them all on the latest version, and to keep them all on the latest security patches as well. A lot of people don’t think about that.

If you were to go through a security penetration test, you’d be surprised at all the red you would see on your report from all of your hardware being out of date. There’s a reason they update that software, hackers can easily get into that software exploit security holes.

And once they do that, they’re on your network. Now they can start capturing network traffic. They can see whose computer is insecure and bounce over to that. We do monitor and maintain that for all of our clients as well.

And that’s another reason we like to standardize on equipment. We always use the same brand of hardware or firewalls, for switches, wireless equipment. We use the same brand, same models as much as possible just to standardize it, which helps us to keep up with the updates for all of them, knowing what needs to be where.

And obviously within the last year with so many people moving and working from home, we’ve had to deal with that a ton and that sometimes can be an issue. Users need remote access to the office, or they need to have access to files. And sometimes it doesn’t work. Not because something’s wrong with the office network. It’s usually something on their home network is outdated. Firmware hasn’t been applied, it’s old equipment and their remote access software.

At least the software we use requires those to be at a certain level and requires that security to be at a certain level before it can be used. And if it’s not, it doesn’t work. And 99 times out of a hundred, it’s something on their home network that’s causing the issue.

Do you need help? Remote worker access challenges or network access problems? Give us a call!

Host info

Kelly Herrod, the founder and CEO of Herrod Technology, started the company in 2000 to provide simple IT solutions for small and mid-sized businesses. His personal approach, over 30 years experience and his ability to simplify IT sets him apart in the IT industry.

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