Happy End of Financial Year!

What a month!

The rain has started falling, the temperatures have dropped, but the heat in IT seems to be building!

Even Microsoft is not immune to outages and issues, as proven this month when on June 24 the Microsoft Lync (instant messaging platform) suffered a global outage, then the next day the Exchange Online (Office 365) system suffered a major failure causing business’ to be unable to access or receive/send mail for many hours.

Microsoft have issued statements indicating that services had entered degraded states, and it had rectified the issues, but would take quite some time for the email queues to ‘drain’ to end users.

To add to the horror experienced by end users, it’s been revealed by McAfee this month that users of smart phones who are bypassing the official Google Playstore or Apple AppStore, to gain access to illegal or non-official Apps are putting themselves at extreme risk. For instance up to 79% of versions of the Flappy Bird app contain malicious malware which once installed can let these ‘authors’ do things like : make unauthorised phone calls, send text messages, access your contact lists, even access your microphone and camera as well as capturing banking data.

Please make sure when you install ANY app that when it prompts you to access anything that you don’t think it really needs in order to function you deny it.

Did you know that EtherTech deploy managed Trend Micro for smart devices? and for only $5.50 a month per device it’s a small amount to pay for protection. If you run antivirus and filtering on your PC’s you should be running it on your smart phones/tablets as well.

EtherTech Announcement:

During June, EtherTech finally got our SMS alerting service fully functional after a few teething problems were finally fixed. What this means is that we can now send SMS updates to our customers updating them of system issues and upgrades as they happen, rather than manually calling hundreds of people. If you would like to be added to this SMS alerting service, please email us at support@ethertech.com.au with your contact mobile number and we’ll add you to the alerting lists.

As we mentioned last month, we have managed to keep our technical support rates fixed for the last 6 years, but effective 1st of July 2014 all the EtherTech technical support rates have changed. If you are receiving the hard copy of this newsletter, you will have an attachment detailing what the new rates are. If you would like an email with a soft copy of the new rates please email us at support@ethertech.com.au requesting an updated version. If you managed to secure a pre-paid or still have hours remaining in your pre-paid support packs, these new rates will not affect you until you run out of hours in your current packs.

This month is already gearing up to be another busy one here at EtherTech, with a lot of new Hosted Exchange clients coming on board as well as infrastructure upgrades and changes being made to our redundant links for seamless BGP failovers, as well as major network projects nearing completion, so there is always something on the go.

So, until the next month, thanks for reading and please pass along any feedback about our newsletter or ideas you may like covered in upcoming newsletters!