What is a Business Continuity Plan? Essentially the business continuity plan is exactly that: it is a strategy put in place that will allow a business to get back up and operational quickly after an event happens that causes interruption. Only part of a continuity plan has to do with your business? technology, but since most businesses have built a major reliance on their technology to operate, understanding how it fits into their continuity strategy is essential to mitigate major problems if they do arise.  This isn?t always easy. In fact, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) found that about a quarter of companies aren?t able to reopen if they are hit with a natural disaster that takes out their ability to operate. That percentage grows pretty rapidly the smaller your business is. Of course, having a plan in place to mitigate the effects of flood, fire, and other major disasters is pretty commonplace, but a lot of times there are just so many situations that arise during an interruption event that keeps a business from being able to completely recover. Business Continuity Plans Need to be Flexible Let?s disregard catastrophic weather events and look at a threat that has been causing massive amounts of downtime to even more businesses?ransomware.  In 2021, a whopping 37 percent of all businesses in the United States were impacted by ransomware of some kind. It?s worth pointing out that ransomware is constantly being improved (so it?s becoming more and more dangerous) and thus the amount of downtime and risk has only increased over time. When a ransomware attack strikes, it often disrupts business for several days. Depending on the severity of the attack, it could even steal your data, whether you are able to recover it or not. This type of situation requires a massive amount of work to identify what was stolen, communicate to partners, staff, and customers, and remediate the situation. This is only scratching the surface of how to respond to a data breach, but the point is, it?s a lot of work and a lot of disruption before business can go back to normal. A business continuity plan needs to have the pieces and processes to take this on. Fortunately, for this type of disaster, the most fundamental IT piece of a business continuity plan is a pretty good first step in combating a ransomware attack. Restoring the impacted servers from a previous backup should eliminate the ransomware. This means your staff can get to work sooner, although the threat isn?t over yet. You?ll need to work with cybersecurity experts (like White Mountain IT Services) to root out the source of the attack and determine the possibility of a breach, establish chains of communication, perform preventative actions to harden the network, etc.  On the other hand, let?s say a key individual in your organization suffers from a sudden health issue and is out of the box for 6 weeks. Your business continuity plan needs to account for the shift in command, the delegation of responsibility, and again, the communication involved to keep everything running smoothly. Every Business Continuity Plan Needs an Iron-Clad Backup Strategy Remember, you can?t benefit from the backup you don?t have.  If your business isn?t backing up its data, you are simply asking for risk.  Fortunately, we offer the world?s […]

Explaining Zero-Day Exploits Zero-day exploits are flaws within a system or application that go undiscovered until a threat actively targets it. Depending on the severity of the attack, it could then expose this vulnerability to the general public, or if the attack is more discrete, it could remain hidden, making the attack even more difficult to pinpoint. In any case, the definition of a zero-day exploit remains the same; it?s an undocumented flaw that becomes exploited by a security threat. What Makes Zero-Day Exploits So Dangerous? There is a big reason why there is so much trouble made out of these types of exploits, and it?s because they are undocumented and difficult to predict or anticipate. The unknown factor means that researchers and individuals don?t know that these threats exist, making them difficult to prepare for or remedy until it is too late. When these types of threats are discovered, developers do all they can to remedy the problem before the threats cause too much damage, but it?s not always simple to fix them. Every moment that the flaw is not resolved is a moment when attackers could be leveraging the flaw?especially if it is out in the open. What Should You Do About Them? Since zero-day flaws are generally unknown to security researchers and professionals until they are actively being exploited, it is hard to take action with them until a fix has been issued. That said, you do a lot to protect your business from the majority of threats, even if there are issues with your security infrastructure. Comprehensive security solutions like the ones we offer at White Mountain IT Services can go a long way toward keeping your business safe in a general sense. We also like to recommend that you train your employees on security best practices, and if you aren?t already monitoring your infrastructure to start doing so immediately. You don?t want to react to problems as they appear; you want to prevent them from happening in the first place. This proactive strategy is at the heart of all the services White Mountain IT Services offers. To learn more about how you can protect your business from all manners of threats and resolve those that are discovered after the fact, reach out to us at (603) 889-0800.

Provide the Equipment Needed for Remote Work While your team may very well have the equipment needed to successfully work remotely, it is often wise to provide them with mobile devices (like laptops) so that they can still do so, but with your company still maintaining a level of control over the devices they use. In addition to this, it may not be a bad idea to provide your team members with a stipend to help them create an area in their home that is conducive to remote work efforts. A bit of up-front investment can easily result in long-term productivity and employee satisfaction. Enable (and Encourage) Collaboration and Communication With your team members dispersed, there is an inherent obstacle that remote work puts in the way of communications and collaboration. Fortunately, this is easy enough to overcome through the implementation of various cloud-based tools and applications?something that has its benefits in the office as well. Cloud-based email, collaboration platforms, and even instant messaging applications all serve a valuable purpose in the modern business. Not only do they allow your team to continue working together on various tasks and projects, they can also be used for a reasonable amount of off-topic conversation. Why do we mention this? Simple: interaction amongst coworkers is an asset for your business, as it keeps them motivated and engaged with the rest of their team. In short, discussions about last night?s game or the latest must-watch series ultimately save time and energy, so don?t be afraid of your employees having them. Simplify and Optimize The more nimble your business processes are, the more effective they will be?remote or not. Turning to streamlined tools that can accomplish numerous objectives for your business?collaboration platforms, for instance, over several disparate applications?will help make your business? operations more portable and therefore make remote work more accessible. In addition to this, maintenance and management become far simpler to accomplish as well, also allowing more energy to be put into profitable business processes. Reach out to us to learn more about making the most of remote work. Call (603) 889-0800 today.

However, Disney Research Studios has created a new technology that allows actors to be more seamlessly re-aged, as the House of Mouse calls it, automatically, saving tons of time for the visual effects artists and preserving the profits for the studio. Let?s go over the basics of the technology, just to consider another application artificial intelligence has.  Like We Said, the Uncanny Valley Has Been Present in Numerous Films Many modern films have demonstrated the use of computer-generated images to either depict human (or at least humanoid) characters, and each arguably has demonstrated the Uncanny Valley to some degree?particularly seen in the case of Sonic the Hedgehog in 2020, before the official trailer received enough outrage from fans to convince Paramount Pictures to bring the titular character back to the literal drawing board. Plus, these kinds of characters and images have historically taken forever to produce, as all edits needed to be made to each individual frame. Considering that there are 24 frames per second in a movie, and the average movie is about 131 minutes long, that?s a total of 188,640 frames that could potentially need editing. That?s a ton of work, necessitating a ton of time and effort to complete. So, in addition to the Uncanny Valley issue, there are real cost concerns associated with re-aging actors. These were the issues that Disney Research Studios set out to tackle?and little wonder, once you consider how many actors have needed to be re-aged for Disney?s various properties. Jeff Bridges was re-aged for 2010?s Tron: Legacy to reprise his role from the 1982 original film. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has seen Michael Douglas, Robert Downey Jr., Kurt Russell, Michelle Pfeiffer, Stan Lee, Samuel L. Jackson, and more all digitally de-aged for varying lengths of time?in Jackson?s case, the entirety of 2019?s Captain Marvel. Star Wars has used the technology to de-age Mark Hamill in another 2019 film, The Rise of Skywalker. Harrison Ford is set to be de-aged for the upcoming Indiana Jones film. So, with Disney clearly investing a lot of time and money into this process, it comes as no surprise that they would seek out a simpler means of completing it. Enter FRAN, Disney?s Face Re-Aging Network FRAN is the tool that helps to automate a lot of the digital fiddling that would otherwise take hours or days in post-production to accomplish. While FRAN works much like any other AI-powered tool would?leveraging a neural network that has been trained on thousands of fake human faces to accurately determine how a person?s face would look with years of growth and experience added or subtracted?Disney?s new tool is capable of applying these changes to video footage, all the while preserving expressions and lighting changes. Perhaps most importantly to Disney?s use case, FRAN also enables artists to tweak the results of the effect with hands-on tools. FRAN has a few limitations, however. Since hair going gray wasn?t included in the training data, the network doesn?t currently make these kinds of changes. Other issues are also present, but can largely be resolved by live artists going in and revising FRAN?s work. This human-software collaboration ultimately results in re-aging that is more convincing than ever. Harrison Ford said as much when he commented on the results of his own de-aging for the […]

Let?s go over how to access the same web page you were viewing on your workstation or mobile device on the other one. Chrome Offers a Few Options, in Terms of Pushing Web Pages Between Devices First, let?s assume that you?re on one device, and want to continue viewing a page on the other. Provided that you?re signed into the same Google account in both places, you can always just view your browsing history, as it tracks activity on all devices logged in. From the desktop, open Chrome and press Ctrl + H to access your History. If using your smartphone, open the Chrome app and access the three-dot menu, selecting Recent tabs. You?ll see your complete browsing history from everywhere you?re signed into that Chrome account, allowing you to retrieve the page you were browsing. If you?re presently reading something and want to proactively push it from one device to another, you can do that as well. From the desktop version of Chrome, you?ll see a small icon on the right side of the address bar that looks like an arrow coming out of a corner. Clicking this icon (or right-clicking the tab?s title) gives you the option to Send to your devices. You?ll be given a list of devices?computers and Android devices alike?where you?re signed in. From Android, tap into the three-dot menu and select Share. A panel will appear, where you can select Send to your devices. We?re big fans of anything that potentially makes work processes easier, so we like this feature quite a bit. Make sure you keep checking back for more ways to use your technology just a little better, or give us a call at (603) 889-0800 to find out what our managed services could do for you.