Immutable backups are a critical component of modern data protection strategies. These backups are designed to be unchangeable and undeletable for a specified period, ensuring that data remains intact and secure against threats like ransomware, accidental deletions, or malicious tampering.

Unlike traditional backups, immutable backups provide a "write-once-read-many" (WORM) model, which guarantees data integrity. This is particularly vital in an era where cyberattacks are increasingly sophisticated, with ransomware incidents affecting 75% of IT organizations globally by 2025.¹ Immutable backups act as a safeguard, allowing organizations to recover clean data without succumbing to ransom demands.

The importance of immutable backups is underscored by the financial impact of data breaches. Over the past three years, data breaches have cost UK businesses millions, with medium and large enterprises facing average losses of approximately £4,960 per breach.² These figures highlight the necessity of robust data protection measures, including immutable backups, to mitigate financial and reputational damage. By ensuring that backup data cannot be altered or deleted, organizations can maintain business continuity and comply with regulatory requirements.

To implement immutable backups, organizations have several options. First, cloud-based solutions like Amazon S3 with Object Lock provide scalable and secure storage with immutability features.³ Second, on-premises solutions, such as hardened Linux servers, offer localized control and compliance with data sovereignty requirements. Third, dedicated hardware devices from companies such as Object First interact with your chosen server backup solution to provide both rapid system recovery and safe, indelible, data backup. Each of these options can be tailored to meet specific organizational needs, ensuring that critical data remains protected against evolving threats.

Sources:
1 -https://www.veeam.com/blog/immutable-backup.html
2-https://www.dbxuk.com/statistics/data-breach-statistics-2023
3-https://www.veeam.com/blog/veeam-immutability-everything-you-need-to-know.html

...Or, 'what's new at Westward IT'.

We'd like to tell you a story about something called WIMS.

Like most small businesses that begin life in a back bedroom, Westward IT started with little more than an idea (to 'do IT better' than anyone else in the area) and a couple of basic Word and Excel templates to ping out the occasional invoice and keep track of the then (very) meagre income.

Fast forward a while and those Word documents were going out thick 'n' fast and Mr Excel was a frequent after-hours visitor, as despite a doubling of staff numbers (yup, there was two of us by then!), we just couldn't keep on top of it; things just got too damn busy to justify doing 'admin' during operational hours. You've heard the story of the mechanic who runs the worst car in the street? Well, we too were spending all our time making sure our clients didn't have the same problems and admit WIT's admin was in pretty poor shape in those days. It was time to look around and see what software was out there to help us out.

Initially, we adopted a cloud-based third-party solution that, whilst not doing everything we wanted, did mean we had real-time access to customer information and job scheduling, along with the ability to rapidly create quotes and invoices.

As the business doubled in size again over the following two years, the cracks started to appear once more. We couldn't ever quite configure it to work as we wanted and its lack of even the most basic of core product/stock options and inability to deal with customers running over multiple sites but requiring a central point of contact for project management and billing meant that once again the evening and weekend shifts were back. A return to the third-party marketplace yielded nothing but disappointing results - everything was either way too expensive or total overkill for our needs. Sound familiar?

Given that our two directors at the time both had a background in software development and business analysis - and the business by then had yet more 'feet on the ground' to deal with our clients' day-to-day technical requirements - we made the decision to write our own package. Thus version 1 of The Westward IT Management System was born.

To avoid completely re-inventing the wheel at that time, we developed WIMS on the Microsoft Access platform and whilst we had to stretch Access to its absolute limits in terms of multi-user functionality and write a lot of hidden code to do some of the 'clever' stuff, the deployment of WIMS into our business resulted in a massive productivity boost and a huge reduction in the amount of time needed to deal with routine administrative requirements - such as the production of monthly timesheets and the generation of our eclectic mix of contract and ad-hoc invoicing - whilst giving us for the first time the ability to directly export sales data into our accounting system.

Move the clock on to 2018 and clients had started to show an interest in WIMS for their own use. Whilst being in totally different spheres of industry (chimney sweeping, solid fuel system installation, listed building restoration and book keeping to name but four) to ourselves, they all had the same fundamental requirement of a fast, reliable, customer and job management package to free up more of their time and make their business run better and we were delighted to be able to offer them WIMS, albeit slightly tailored to their own requirements.

To bring the WIMS story right up to date, it's necessary to mention the C-word. When the global Covid pandemic hit at the beginning of 2020 many of our clients - in common with a majority of businesses on the planet - needed to change their way of working and do so fast. Not only in need of remote access solutions, network reconfiguration, server changes and equipment supply in short order, many of them found themselves needing to change their very way of working with their staff now often separated from each other for many days and sometimes completely disconnected from their core resources due to functional limitations of equipment or software that they'd purchased elsewhere over the preceding years.

At this point, we could have simply provided WIMS 'as-was' to those clients in need of a new management package but applying our mantra of 'if we're going to do this, let's do it right', we decided we wouldn't be happy with that. After all, WIMS v1 was never designed to be a 'click and run' product and required professional installation and some reconfiguration for each client, and was still missing some functionality that we considered critical for most (though not our) service orientated businesses. If only there were a few 'spare' months to be had; something like a nationwide lockdown for instance...

Work on WIMS 2 proceeded apace and by the end of 2020 we had a brand new modular, scalable, feature-enhanced and ultra-fast (multi-threaded, don't you know!) brand new product, all encapsulated within a gorgeous new User Interface. Developed on the .NET platform using the C# programming language and leveraging several new technologies to provide multi-platform support we went live with WIMS v2 ourselves in January 2021. And wow! Another transformative step on the productivity road. Job management, quotes and invoices are now more fluid than ever and back-end processes that used to take up whole weekends pre-cloud, a good day with the cloud product and still several hours with WIMS 1 can now be ticked off in under an hour and we've added so many more features along the way.

Enough of the history lesson! If you'd like to learn more about WIMS, go see for yourself on its own dedicated web site at https://wims.uk - we're really proud of what we've produced and would be delighted to talk to you about how it could transform your service business.

Oh yes. Software development. Nearly forgot that! You've read how we identified a need in our business for something that was bespoke yet reliable, affordable and easy to use. Not only have we developed WIMS (twice!) from scratch over the past few years, we've written a number of other applications for ourselves and others and we could for you, too.

We've developed applications for manufacturing control, data logging and reporting, materials requirements, credit control, bulk email, interfaces to Windows Server applications, security auditing, building access control and even embedded systems for use on intelligent doors. We've also written interfaces to allow disparate systems to talk to one another - need your ePOS system to be able to open your car park gates automatically? No problem!

We can write software that runs on Windows, macOS, iOS and Android operating systems as well as embedded utilities to be deployed on Raspberry Pi's, Arduino boards or even your own custom FPGA's, so whether you want a program for your PC, Mac, phone, tablet or Internet connected cement mixer (is that a thing?) we can help!

For more information on our software development services, take a look at https://www.westwardit.com/software-development or contact us.

As we suggested was likely, Apple last night confirmed that they will start to ship a new line of Mac PC's and laptops from the end of this year with their own processors based on ARM architecture. They further announced a new version of macOS ('Big Sur') along with upgrades to the operating systems for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Apple TV.

You can read the BBC's summary of that and all the other announcements made at Apple's WWDC keynote yesterday here, or watch the rerun of the event at https://www.apple.com/apple-events/june-2020/

In case you missed it, this week saw the launch of the new 13" MacBook Pro range of laptops from Apple.

Key highlights are the new magic keyboard (replacing the much maligned 'butterfly' style used on the previous generation) and up to 32GB of RAM, 4TB of solid state storage and 8x faster graphics performance over the previous model.

Full specifications can be found on the Apple site at https://www.apple.com/uk/macbook-pro-13/

One of the biggest frustrations with Microsoft Teams to date has been its inability to display more than four video streams in a meeting.

Microsoft have announced that this will be increased to 9 by the end of April, with more to follow in the longer term.

In the meantime, if you need video chat capability for more than 4 meeting participants, we continue to recommend Zoom (see our previous blog post) - it'll certainly be interesting to see if Microsoft can start to make inroads into their user base in light of this new announcement.

If you're aged 40 or over, or have an interest in vintage computing and electronics, you will no doubt have heard of Commodore. Starting as a Toronto-based typewriter manufacturer in 1954, Commodore became the only computer manufacturer to own their own in-house chip manufacturer (MOS Technology) and the first to sell $1 Billion worth of computers in a single year -1983-, their runaway successes being the VIC-20, Commodore 64 and Amiga range of home micros.

What you may be less aware of is that not only did Commodore very nearly buy Apple (but then-Commodore CEO Jack Tramiel considered the asking price of $100,000 too high), but they were also instrumental in developing key IT technologies, many of which are still in use today such as digital cameras, modems, synthesised speech generation and speech recognition. Oh, and they also developed one of the first IBM compatible PC's and led the way in early-years storage device technology.

If you're at all interested in the history of computing, you can do worse than to learn the Commodore story. And there is no better way to learn the Commodore story than to read Brian Bagnell's excellent trilogy of books - Commodore: A Company On The Edge, Commodore: The Amiga Years and Commodore: The Final Years.

We're big fans of all things retro here at Westward IT and have built a collection of some 40+ machines dating from the IMSAI 8080 (if you've seen 'War Games', that's the computer Matthew Broderick's character uses to hack the American Nuclear Missile control system) through various Commodore, Atari, Apple, Acorn, Oric, Sinclair, Dragon, Canon and Amstrad machines right up to the first ever 'proper' PC - an IBM 5150 - which still takes pride of place in our office today. We've even got some pretty cool home game consoles - mint condition boxed Vectrex, anyone?

The collection is an ongoing labour of love, so if you do have any vintage computers, software or peripherals from the 70's, 80's or 90's let us know and we'll do a deal!

We have received the latest advice from our insurers Towergate regarding the mothballing of premises where (like us), you may be working primarily from other locations for an extended period of time due to the COVID-19 epidemic:

The PDF is available to download here : Download Towergate Mothballed Premises

As always, we're here to help with any issues you may have relating to your IT infrastructure, CCTV or remote access solutions.

IT Security expert, author, webhost and our good friend of many years Rick Hellewell offered the following thoughts during a discussion regarding the well publicised security issues with the Zoom videoconferencing platform.

First up, the email from Zoom which kicked off the debate:

"Dear Valued Customer,

 

As Eric shared last week, our commitment to strengthening and improving Zoom is our number one priority. We wanted to reach out with a quick overview of our latest release, and highlight the number of new enhancements created specifically for ensuring the security and privacy of our product. For more information on these changes, please reference our Release Notes. 

Security Toolbar Icon for Hosts
The meeting host will now have a Security option in their meeting controls, which exposes all of Zoom’s existing in-meeting security controls in one place. This includes locking the meeting, enabling Waiting Room, and more. Users can also now enable Waiting Room in a meeting, even if the feature was not turned on before the start of the meeting. For more information, please visit this recently published Blog.

Invite Button on Meeting Client Toolbar
The button to invite others to join your Zoom meeting is now available at the bottom of the Participants panel.

Meeting ID No Longer Displayed
The meeting ID will no longer be displayed in the title bar of the Zoom meeting window. The meeting ID can be found by clicking on Participants, then Invite or by clicking on the info icon at the top left of the client window.

Remove Attendee Attention Tracking Feature
Zoom has removed the attendee attention tracker feature as part of our commitment to the security and privacy of our customers. For more background on this change and how we are pivoting during these unprecedented times, please see a note from our CEO, Eric S. Yuan.

Removal of the Facebook SDK in our iOS client 
We have reconfigured the feature so that users will still be able to log in with Facebook via their browser.

File Transfers
The option to do third-party file transfers in Meeting and Chat was temporarily disabled. Local file transfer is available with our latest release. Third-party file transfers and clickable URLs in meeting chat will be added back in an upcoming release.

New Join Flow for the Web client
By default, users will now need to sign in to their Zoom account or create a Zoom account when joining a meeting or webinar with the Web client. This can be disabled by the Admin or the User from their settings page.
 

Join Before Host Emails Disabled
Notifications sent to the host via email when participants are waiting for the host to join the meeting have been disabled.

Setting to Allow Participants to Rename Themselves
Account admins and hosts can now disable the ability for participants to rename themselves in any meeting. This setting is available at the account, group, and user level in the Web portal.

Language for Directory and Company Directory
Domain contacts: The language in your Company directory and Directory has changed. ‘Directory’ is now referred to as ‘Contacts’, ‘My Groups’ has changed to ‘My Contacts’, and ‘Company Directory’ is now listed as ‘All Contacts’ in version 4.6.10.

Domain Contacts Visibility 
For free Basic and single licensed Pro accounts with unmanaged domains, contacts in the same domain will no longer be visible. We’ve also removed the option to auto-populate your Contacts list with users from the same domain. If you would like to keep those contacts, you can add them as External Contacts.

Please be sure to update to our latest release to take advantage of these new features. We also highly encourage you to register for our webinar to get an overview of this latest release, and subscribe to our Blog for more information and resources in the days to come. 

Best,

Team Zoom"

which led Rick to comment:

"Zoom is clearly aware of [their] security problems. The encryption via China servers is already fixed, I believe.

Other security enhancements are being made, if not already done. Big emphasis on security at Zoom in the past couple weeks as problems became known. See this page for some third-party opinions on this new security emphasis - https://zoom.us/docs/en-us/privacy-and-security.html#reviews

…or this article: https://diginomica.com/its-time-stop-bashing-zoom"

We're utilising the Zoom platform ourselves as one of the remote working technologies to support our clients during the Coronavirus lockdown and we've seen plenty of updates coming through on all platforms, which would seem to support both Rick's views and those of the linked articles.

Visit Rick's marketing tools for authors site at https://www.bklnk.com/ or his own author's page at https://www.richardhellewell.com/

Contact us if you've got any security concerns or questions regarding remote working during these troubled times.

Those of you using Dell equipment may be interested in this article over on zdnet.com, detailing a new security tool released last Friday that detects attacks attempting to modify a computer's BIOS component.

Where one manufacturer leads, others often follow and we very much welcome this additional layer of protection for PC's which most software anti-virus and anti-malware software packages are not designed to detect and hope to see the likes of Lenovo, HP and Fujitsu pick up and run with this technology very soon.

Westward IT offer a full range of IT security products and services - contact us today to see how we can help enhance the security of your systems.

It's been widely rumoured for some time now that Apple are looking to re-engineer their Mac line of desktop, laptop and Pro PC's, moving away from Intel processors to their own CPUs based on the ARM architecture.

That move could well be a step closer now that a (albeit older) version of the macOS operating system has been seen running on the 2020 iPad Pro.

With current generation iPads already supporting mice, keyboards and trackpads, this is perhaps the biggest clue yet that Apple will indeed make the leap to ARM architecture with their 2021 model Macs.

We've been Mac specialists - it's what we use ourselves every day - since 2009 and are well placed to not only support past, present and future Apple products, but also integrate them into your Windows and Linux networks.