Obviously the big one right now is security. We’re big on that. We like to come in and the first thing we do for new clients, even existing clients, we will run a full security assessment against their network. It goes out crawls through the entire network, hits every single device, does an in-depth review, and spits out a report. It takes about 48 hours so it’s extremely in depth. It’s a long report we go through and pare it down, parse it out, pull out the things that are important, the things we need to address.

This takes a lot of the guesswork out of it. It’s a printed copy that says, here’s where your pitfalls are, here’s where your holes are and here’s how we can plug them. Right now, the network security is the big one. The malware, the ransomware, these things are happening almost daily now and you’re hearing about them in the news. There was a large hack that came down from Microsoft yesterday.

They believed the Chinese government threw this out there for their Microsoft exchange mail servers. We actually had an all hands on deck yesterday, going through our client’s mail servers. Thankfully, a lot of our clients are using email in the cloud now, but we do have a few that do still run their own mail servers. We found three actually had the hack loaded on. And what we’re reading this morning is there’s about 85% of the servers that Microsoft has in the U.S. were hacked.

They basically went out and put in place the tools to do some damage, but haven’t actually done anything. It was kind of a probe just to see if they could, and we were going in, cleaning those out, making sure there was no residual leftover after that. Pretty much the whole I.T. world was doing that yesterday.

So security is a big one for us, especially with our small clients. Providing security can get expensive quickly. We try to put together what we in the industry call a stack, which is a set of tools that allow the customer to have a secure network. We use the same brand model, typically, of firewall for all of our clients.

We found the one that we liked the best at the price point that our clients feel comfortable with. Same on the antivirus software side, the malware software side, spam filtering. We have this stack of utilities, software, and hardware that we can come in and sell as a package and works for pretty much every client that we have.

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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