Boom!  Your house blows up and you lost your computer as well as all the files stored on it.  Good thing you backed up your files on that external USB hard drive, but wait it’s now in 6 pieces.  The likely hood of your house blowing up is slim, the likely hood of your computer and external hard drive crashing as the same time is even slimmer.  Having a backup plan to your backup is a good idea and can save you hours of valuable time and money.
What smart companies have done for their disaster recovery plan is not only store their data to a secondary storage device, but also on a third device.  The third storage device will then be transported to a safe location that is a minimum of 30 miles away. Backup solution companies actually drive to the customer’s location to sign, pickup, and safely bring their backup to their facilities.  There has to be trust to hand over your customers personal information and/or the company’s bank records to a “Truck Driver”.  Eventually this truck driver brings your backup to another person you’ve never met before.

Any sensitive company data that has to travel outside the building has to be encrypted.  Encrypting the data ensures that the files are garbage until you Decrypt them back to normal.  How secure is your encrypted data?  Well it depends on what type of encryption you are using.  Some encryption software only use a password to decrypt your files, so it depends on how complicated your password is.  The longer and the more random characters you use the more difficult it is to crack.  Other types like symmetric key encryption encrypts the data twice, once with its key and the second with the receiving computer’s key.  Which ever way you send it, it will be secure.  The minimum encryption you should consider is 128 bit, mostly popular is the 256 bit encryption.  Even with a 128bit encryption there are 3,402,823,669,209,384,634,633,746,074,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possibilities.  You use encryption everyday when you log in to do your online banking.  Notice the HTTPS in the address bar, the S stands for Secure, so now you’ll know your information is being encrypted when its sent.

Companies have been saving tons of money by using different types of disaster recovery strategies.  One of the strategies is to cut out the middle man (Truck Driver) and send your data securely over the Internet.  Now, most of you reading this are starting to twitch from the idea of sending your precious files over the Internet.  It’s fine, it will eventually get there once China is done making a copy of all your file.  Seriously though, with encryption and a good plan your files will be safely and securely backed.  Having a plan is important in order to have a successful backup.  Everything needs to be considered the right schedule, directory structure, recovery plan, and bandwidth usage to name the least.  Support Visions is a local IT Solutions company in Rhode Island that will sit down with you and your team, to ensure backup recovery solution is setup correctly.

Back in the 60s the internet was created.  It was created for the Department of Defense to communicate with each other.  It wasn’t created for them to update their status or profile pic, they were using it for serious business.  Once the telephone modem came around people started using them to connect to each other, which allowed them to send files, or even chat with each other.  Then Buliten Board Systems (BBS) came around, allowing the public to connect to their server, but it was limited to how many phone lines they had, it could have been 1 or 5.  These hosts had to dish out their own money and pay the phone company to have these extra dedicated lines. I’ve used BBS back in the day, and even thought of hosting my own, but it would have been costly not to mention running wiring in my parent’s house.  If you want to connect to a BBS you’d hope that the phone lines weren’t busy, once you’re in you could selfishly take your time to post ads, share files, or play text based games, etc.

Then came AOL and CompuServe and helped get this internet thing more streamline.  Now surfers can see pictures instead of that boring text based BBS phone system.  Although the speed wasn’t lightning fast pictures on webpages took forever to load.  To solve that problem downgrading the quality of the picture helped because there is less of the file to download.  Big companies started creating websites for their customers.  They would list helpful information such as time they were open, their phone number, products they sold, investor information, and the list kept going on and on.  If you’re GMC, or GE and have not reserved your dot com name then you’re screwed.  Remember when wrestling was called WWF?  Well the WWF stood for World WildLife Fund, so the World Wrestling Federation had to change its name to World Wrestling Entertainment, but they still have WWF.com which refers to their WWE.com site.  Domain names were very important and they were starting to get eaten up quickly for business and personal use.  Why are domains being bought for personal use?  Well, people didn’t have MySpace, Facebook, or twitter yet, plus they had to practice their web designing skills because it was going somewhere.

Geocities was a company that allowed users an easy way to create a website, and even hosted their website for them.  You could change your background to Neon Yellow or any other annoying color you choose, fonts, size of fonts, you can even put up pictures.  They made it very easy that even my dad can create a webpage and show his collection of backgammon boards.  Now there is no need for people to create a webpage, they can express themselves on Twitter or Facebook with their friends and family.  Businesses even setup Fan pages on Facebook and try to get their customers to click Like.  Even though Businesses have Facebook they still need a way to express themselves and go out of the limiting box that is Facebook.  Don’t get me wrong Facebook is a great way to attract more people to you (as long as you keep it active with status updates, etc.), but Businesses need to expand and grow, which brings me to WordPress.  WordPress allows users to easily create a simple and logical looking site that Google likes. Mobile surfers can also enjoy WordPress websites, and there are so many posibilities.  More and more i’m starting to notice the increased use of WordPress for not only business, but also personal.  Now that we have WordPress, what will the future hold for websites?