For Unlimited IT Support and Cloud Computing Services, Visit Our Web Site: www.25sevenIT.co.uk

January 2015

London

Inside This Issue…

“As a business owner, I

understand that you just

‘want your technology to

work’. Call us today for

exceptional IT Support

delivered with passion

and integrity.”

- Mark Hanson, 25sevenIT

TECHNOLOGY TIMES “Insider tips to make your business run faster, easier and more profitably”

Botnets: The Dark Side of Cloud Computing……

………………………………………………………....Page 1

Social Media Marketing Tools—Top 8

Picks……………………………………………….....Page 2

Recommended App of the Month………...Page 3

Take Your Profit First—Always……….…..Page 3

Internet Vigilance…………………………….....Page 4

Win Chocolates and Bubbly!…………….….Page 4

Recently, eager Christmas celebrators across the world hooked up their brand new Xboxes and PlayStations only to find that both online networks were down, leaving countless new games totally un-playable. This left many keen gamers disappointed, and while Microsoft's ser-vice recovered after 24 hours, the PlayStation Network suffered a pro-

longed outage that lasted two full days. Sony has blamed the problem on a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack—an intentional flood of traffic designed to cripple a network's servers. Overloading a computer with requests can slow it down or even cripple it entirely, and it can be very difficult for a machine to separate the real traffic from the fake, especially when attackers are using some combination of bot-nets and fake IPs. Just picture it: a thousand computers all using the same DDoS tools to gen-erate countless fake connections, all flooding the same website or server with thousands of gigabytes of data per second. For someone who knows how to get those tools and use them, you can hide on a small bandwidth connection and create tens of gigabytes of traffic. Botnets—networks of computers that have been compromised by hack-ers—pose a serious threat to your network, your business, your partners and customers. Botnets rival the power of today’s most powerful cloud computing platforms. These “dark” clouds, controlled by cybercriminals, are designed to silently infect your network. Left undetected, botnets borrow your network to serve malicious business interests.

In order to protect your network against constantly changing attcks, de-fenses need to be agile and they need to be informed by constant network monitoring and threat intelligence. Network monitoring can also be used to substantially simplify network traffic by eliminating "chatty" and unused ser-vices, making it easier to spot threats, reducing the attack surface and gener-ally increasing network performance.

At 25sevenIT we monitor our Managed Services clients’ networks 24/7 to detect any abnormalities before they become a threat. If you are not 100% sure that your company’s network is being monitored, call us today for a free network assessment.

Botnets: The Dark Side of Cloud Computing

Technology Times Newsletter January 2015

At 25sevenIT we believe that referrals are the greatest form of flattery. We

love having you as a customer and quite honestly, wish we had more like

you! So, instead of just wishing, we have decided to hold a referral contest.

If you know of someone who is concerned about any aspect of their busi-

ness technology, then do them a favour and put them in touch with us.

By recommending partners, associates or professional contacts in

organisations with at least 10 PCs, you can help them enjoy stress-

free IT and reap some rewards for yourself. For any referrals we meet with, we will send you a £50 gift

voucher or make a charity donation on your behalf and if they become a Managed Services customer

we will send you a new iPad Air!

For more details or to make a referral, please ring Mark on 07774 957838 or visit our website: http://www.25sevenit.co.uk/about-us/referral-programme/

For Unlimited IT Support and Cloud Computing Services, Visit Our Web Site: www.25sevenIT.co.uk

Would you like £50 and a Free iPad Air?

New social media marketing tools seem to pop up every day, so here’s some help sorting the best from the rest:

1. Mention: Google Alerts for the social web. Mention helps you monitor your brand ’s presence on social networks, forums, blogs and more. It also includes social features that allow you to respond to mentions of your brand and to share industry news that you find.

2. Buffer: Social media publishing plus powerful analytics. Buffer is a powerful social media tool that lets you schedule your updates to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and App.net.

3. Feedly: Content discovery. Finding great content to share with your audience is easy with Feedly. Not only can you subscribe to RSS feeds to keep on top of industry blogs and news sites, you can also use Feedly to discover new content related to your topics of interest.

4. Twitter Counter: Track Twitter progress. It can be easy to lose track of how your Twitter account is growing; that’s where Twitter Counter comes in. It’s a free service that tracks changes in your follower count and predicts future growth over time.

5. Zapier: Link favorite social services. Zapier connects the services you use independently. For example, if your team uses HipChat to keep in touch, you can use Zapier to set up automatic notifications inside HipChat rooms for Tweets, MailChimp campaigns or new RSS items.

6. Bottlenose: Intelligence for social networks. Bottlenose features a real-time search engine that queries all public information from social networks and groups and displays it in algorithmic order of importance. The result is a stream of content ranked by most to least important.

7. Followerwonk: Follower analysis for Twitter. Although you can use a tool like Twitter Counter to watch the growth of the number of your Twitter followers, you may need to analyse your followers more carefully. Followerwonk breaks down your followers into demographics so you can understand them better.

Social Media Marketing Tools: 8 Picks

Technology Times Newsletter January 2015

Staff Spotlight

For Unlimited IT Support and Cloud Computing Services, Visit Our Web Site: www.25sevenIT.co.uk

January’s Recommended App—My Fitness Pal

MyFitnessPal is one of the most popular apps around to help keep you on track for those weight loss and fitness goals for 2015. It’s a free calorie counter but you also set up a profile of your current weight and height together with your goals, look up your meals in their massive food product database to find the calories and track your calories burned during daily exercise. You can also log on for support and motiva-tion from people in the discussion forums - share your own tips, receive and give encour-agement, and make friends.

The formula for profitability has been established for ages. Every business owner, CEO, freelancer and entrepreneur knows it. It is required by Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), which is enforced by the International Accounting Standards Board internationally. GAAP’s fundamental formula for profit is simple: Sales – Expenses = Profit

There is just one problem…the formula hurts profitability. There is a reason that the majority of small businesses in the UK are surviving cheque to cheque. It’s not that people are smart enough to start and build a business, yet not smart enough to turn a profit—it’s that they are relying on a flawed formula. “Sales – Expenses = Profit” is a lie. The formula doesn’t yield a profit.

Logically, of course, the formula is sound. A business must first sell in order to generate inbound cash flow. Then the business deducts the expenses utilised to deliver its product or service and to run its operations. What remains is profit.

While the GAAP formula makes logical sense, it ignores the fact that it is managed by people. We are, first and foremost, emotional beings, prone to ignore (or even defy) logic.

Arguably, money is the ultimate resource. In GAAP’s “Sales – Expenses = Profit” formula, the business owner sees the cumulative deposits (resource) from sales and has a propensity to conclude that all the money is available for expenses (the demand expands to match the supply). The new equipment purchase is justified because the money is there. A new employee starts, because the money is there. Profit? It is an afterthought. Therefore, there rarely is any.

Now consider a new formula, where a business takes profit first: Sales – Profit = Expenses

Mathematically, the formula is identical to GAAP’s. But from the perspective of human behavior, the Profit First formula is radically different. In the Profit First formula, a preset percentage of deposits generated through sales are first allocated to profit. The remainder is used to pay expenses.

In practice, as deposits from sales come in, a predetermined percentage—for example 15%—is immediately transferred to a separate profit account. The remainder is available for the business leader to run business as usual. The business owner will see his available cash (which has had the profit already deducted) and make decisions accordingly. The new equipment purchase may be delayed, or a more cost-effective alternative may be found. A new hire won’t be made because the money is not there, and perhaps the entrepreneur will conclude it was unnecessary in the first place.

GAAP offers so much more in business insights than most entrepreneurs could imagine, but it does fall short on working with an entrepreneur’s “bank balance” habit. I have become an advocate for the Profit First approach to cash management, because of the one thing it does do extremely well. It works with the natural habit of business owners.

Admittedly, Profit First is not the panacea to all cash-flow problems, but it surely makes profit a habit.

TAKE YOUR PROFIT FIRST, ALWAYS

This months business advice was written for us again by MIKE MICHALOWICZ who I was fortunate enough to hear speak at an IT conference in Nashville last year. He started his first business at the age of 24, moving his young family to the only safe place he could afford – a retirement building. With no experience, no contacts and no savings, he systematically built up a multimillion-dollar business. Then he did it again. And again. Now he is doing it for other entrepreneurs. He is the author of the cult classic book The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur and his book, The Pumpkin Plan, has already been called “the next E-Myth!” For more information, visit http://www.mikemichalowicz.com/

Pedro Campos Pedro is one of our Restaurant Support Managers and is incredi-bly experienced in this industry having spent 15 years working in a variety of roles within the Café Rouge, Bella Italia and Strada restaurant groups. Pedro comes to 25sevenIT from Tragus where he assisted in the implementation and training of their new IT and chip and pin systems. He is now part of the team re-sponsible for ensuring that all our hospitality customers receive the best possible support and integra-tion over their entire IT infra-structure. He says the greatest thing about his job is the interaction with cus-tomers on the front line and the joy of helping them and dealing with third party suppliers on their behalf. He also enjoys visiting the restaurant sites to resolve issues and attend briefing and training meetings with Area Managers. Pedro is married with a gorgeous nine year old daughter and on the weekends he loves spending fam-ily time in the garden or helping friends with their computers. He is also a self-proclaimed perfec-tionist who is obsessed with any-thing to do with technology.

Technology Times Newsletter January 2015

For Unlimited IT Support and Cloud Computing Services, Visit Our Web Site: www.25sevenIT.co.uk

Despite constant development in security and stability, the Internet still remains very much a Wild West landscape. You can navigate through it, but you never know when you might encounter a hidden danger. Threats exist on a global scale.

Cybercriminals want information. They don’t care whose information they access and steal, or what damage they do. They want to take what they can get and they want to sell it. There are people who do this for a living. This morning, in the period of one minute, there were hundreds of cyber-attacks originating in China, targeting the United King-dom.

What can you do? Stay vigilant.

Visit web sites you know and trust: This is the simplest and most effective way to keep safe.

Keep your web browser and computers up-to-date with the latest patches and security updates: While your office com-puters are kept up-to-date automatically as long as you’re covered by any of our maintenance plans, you still need to keep an eye on updates for your home computer(s). Don’t ignore these updates!

Know web sites you input personal information or credit card information into are secure: Look at the address bar . If you see “https” you are on a secure web page. If you see “http” you are not on a secure web page.

Make web sites you visit more secure: Browser extensions, such as HTTPS Everywhere, help make web browsing more secure. HTTPS Everywhere takes standard “http” web pages and secures them with “https” by automatically directing you to the secure version of the site. It’s not compatible with every web page, but it goes a long way in protecting you.

Internet Vigilance

WIN LUXURY CHOCOLATES AND BUBBLY FOR YOUR VALENTINE!

Photograph or scan your completed wordsearch and email it to:

competitions@25sevenIT.com

Can you find the hidden sports? They may be hori-zontal, vertical, diagonal, forwards or backwards.

ARCHERY, ATHLETICS, BADMINTON, BASE-BALL, BASKETBALL, BOXING, CRICKET, CURLING, CYCLING, DIVING, FENCING, FOOTBALL, GOLF, GYMNASTICS, HAND-BALL, HOCKEY, HORSE RACING, JUDO, LA-CROSSE, MOTOR RACING, NETBALL, POLO, ROUNDERS, ROWING, RUGBY, SAILING, SKATING, SKIING, SOCCER, SQUASH, SWIM-MING, TENNIS, VOLLEYBALL, WRESTLING

Congratulations to Chris Nunn from La Tasca

who was the winner of a bottle of Bollinger in our December quiz!

The 9 letter word was Snowstorm

Created to make your partner feel utterly pampered and adored - with sparkling pink rosé, luxurious Pink Champagne Truffles and Eton Mess Slab – presented in a stylish ribbon-tied bag.