Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity: Welcome! Pros and Cons of Online Collaboration Tools and Security plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

Welcome! Pros and Cons of Online Collaboration Tools and Security plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

Jun 26, 2020

Welcome!

Craig’s walking you through a deep dive of the Pros and Cons of Online Collaboration Tools for Businesses and the Security implications for Businesses who have Regulatory Requirements.

For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

This is probably one of the most requested shows ever. We're going to talk about online collaboration. We'll the stuff that's needed absolutely needed for working from home. So stick around for the whole show. We got a lot to talk about.

[00:00:22] Of course you're listening to Craig Peterson. I am so glad you're here and online. Craig peterson.com. In fact, that's where I've been getting a lot of feedback from you guys. And I want to thank everybody that sent me a no talking about the types of things you want to learn more about. And today that's precisely what we will be talking about.

[00:00:43] We're going to go through the. Top online collaboration tools that are out there. We'll be talking about WebEx, which is by far my favorite. It's what we use because of the security, the flexibility. But we're going to get into that. We're going to talk about Zoom and that's what we used for my daughter's wedding a couple of weeks ago.

[00:01:04] Why would we use that one? It's so insecure. Well, we're going to get into Zooms biggest features, Microsoft. Teams is a fairly new player on the block, but we're going to talk about them and the pros and cons, and then the granddaddy of them all. We're going to be talking about, go-to-meeting. They've been around a very, very long time.

[00:01:26] They have pros, they have cons. We're going to be talking about that as well. And we have a number of articles to get to in this week's news. But we'll see just how far we can get with some of those things. But there are two things we have to get to right now at the top of the show. And one of them is about the latest windows 10 upgrade that they came up with.

[00:01:52] Now, the May updates are starting to roll out, in a little bit better speed. Now, if you can believe it here we are the middle of June and, the windows, what the 10th of May. It's starting to roll out to everybody because of all of the problems. And unfortunately, that's the big problem we're seeing right now with windows 10, version 2004.

[00:02:18] Now, if you have a computer, one of the best things you can do for that computer to protect your data from a crash, not from the bad guys, but from a crash, is to have something called Raid, which stands for redundant array of inexpensive disks. And the idea here behind raid is that you can have multiple disc drives and

[00:02:43] it will store the data on those multiple disc drives, but it stores it in such a way that if a block goes bad on one of those drives, it can pull that block from another drive because essentially it keeps two copies of all of the data you technically, it's not really two copies, but we don't need to get into that right now.

[00:03:05] So if you lose a whole disc or you lose a part of a disc, even as small as one block, hopefully, can be recovered. Now, there are a lot of different types of raid out there. Many of them are done in hardware and can provide you with some really great defense. Those are the ones I've been using for probably about 30 years now.

[00:03:25] Now with my customers, but there's something else that I've been using for almost as long, ever since it came out, it was developed by Sun Microsystems and it's a file system called ZFS. Now. It's absolutely amazing. It is continually every time you read that disc, it is checking the checksums, see if anything might be wrong with it, if there's anything wrong with it, it recovers that block because there's something known as bit rot when we're talking about computers and discs and even memory, frankly, but particularly with disks.

[00:04:01] And that is over time, mathematically, we can figure out how much of that data. That you haven't changed that it's being stored there, the emails, but more importantly, things like your accounting files, et cetera, how just individual bits can decay literally decay because remember they're magnetic. Remember they're on magnetic media. Nowadays that magnetic media is usually on a piece of glass.

[00:04:31] That's sitting inside that disc drive. Well as decay, the problem is that the numbers change. So you could have something that says a million dollars and because of bit rot, it changes to, again, could change to zero, right? Because just one bit flips from a one to a zero. That's all it takes. You could lose data storage because a bit flipped inside your directory structure.

[00:05:02] You can lose bits on the discs at any time. And they do decay over time. I remember there's a French aerospace manufacturer who we put a proposal to, and I did all of the math. I showed all of the research or some great Ph.D. research that I had found that showed how over time, regular raid devices are not going to help them with longterm retention of the data because they made parts for airplane engines and they had to keep all of the data, all of the scans, the X rays, everything they did, they had to keep it for decades.

[00:05:43] As long as that blade that was in that turbofan for that engine for a plane. As long as that blade was out there. In the field in use, they had to keep all of the original data. And so I showed them all of the studies cause I knew what they were looking at. They were looking at just standard grade stuff, Hitachi data systems and some others and, you know, pretty high end, very, very, very expensive hardware.

[00:06:12] And I showed how it was impossible for them to keep that data long term. If they put it into a normal raid system. So I proposed, this was some years back, but I proposed a system where there were multiple machines and each machine had what was called the ZFS, which is a Zetta-byte file system on it. Then on top of all of those machines was another distributed file system and I showed how they would not ever lose any data for decades and decades and decades. Now they'd have to replace just drives as they went bad and we have the system set up, so it would inform them about a bad drive so they could replace it. They could actually lose three drives with each one of these data set handlers, just a fantastic system.

[00:07:03]It is the type of system we've been using for our clients forever because nowadays, under the federal rules of civil procedure that every business has to follow. You have to have plans in place to keep things like the purchase orders, the bills you send out, even emails have to be retained longterm, IRS and others require you to have policies, retention policies in place, and to keep that data.

[00:07:31] You can't do that with regular raid for the longterm. So I brought all of this up because of what Microsoft is doing right now with windows 10 version 2004, Microsoft introduced something that. Is kind of patterned after this ZFS that I talked about. ZFS is just phenomenal. I typically use the two or three, for those of you that are really technical and know what that means in order to help keep the data safe.

[00:08:00] And then. Of course, I encrypt it all, push it up into cloud storage, which also has raid, but guaranteed, the data will never be lost. So Microsoft said all this is just wonderful. Wonderful, wonderful. And so they came up with their own version. Apple came up with a version as well. They started to use EFS.

[00:08:16] And then when Sun Microsystems went under basically, and their technology was acquired, and this particular ZFS technology, I think it was Oracle that managed to glom onto it. There wouldn't be licensing issues. Apple said, okay, well, we got to do our own thing. So Apple has some very cool advanced file system that is on the SSDs that are in so many of our machines today.

[00:08:42] So there's a lot of cool stuff, but Microsoft has stored spaces. Now I don't trust it. I never trusted it. I always use EFS even in the Linux world where they've come up with their own version of the software. That's kind of patterned after ZFS. ZFS, just been around for so long and, and is just so stable.

[00:09:03] That's what I use. Cause it's available for them. Really everything out there. But this particular thing I'm talking about storage spaces is a feature Windows and Windows server, and it supports systems with multiple drives and lots of users put those drives together into bundles and create a pool of storage that you can then use to store your stuff.

[00:09:26] And the idea is if a disc goes bad, just like raid, just like ZFS have a disc goes bad. You can recover. Now, one of the beauties of the systems we've designed for our clients over the years on ZFS, and you can do this yourself. If you're a little bit more advanced is, as I said, you can guarantee the data never goes bad because every time it's red, it is checked.

[00:09:48] Now, if you're using hardware raid or some of these other storage systems that combine desks, it's rare that it's ever checked. Ever checked. Right? So you can check to make sure that that raid array is working properly, but you cannot check that the data in that array has not been damaged. Maybe it was damaged by the raid controller itself or the disc drive or the cashing function on the disc drive, or it lost the power at the exact wrong time.

[00:10:22] And now you lost even more of that data. Well, Microsoft has come to yet a new low, well, I don't know. Should we call it a new low? Why not? Okay. A new low. And it turns out that their storage spaces, software that's designed to keep your data safe. Apparently can mess up all of your data. How's that for fun.

[00:10:48] And that's particularly from Windows 10, version 2004, Microsoft apparently didn't bother testing it or at least testing it thoroughly enough. And according to these articles, I'm seeing online, like right now, I'm looking at one from ZDnet. It's saying when using some configurations partitioned for storage spaces might show as raw in disk manager.

[00:11:12] Microsoft has advised against running the check disk command on any device affected by this issue because fixing your disc is going to make things even worse. Oh gosh. So if you're using storage spaces wise up, get something better. And secondly, don't upgrade yet. It's just like, the May release. It's not out there yet.

[00:11:37] Anyway, stick around guys. We'll be right back listening to Craig Peterson and we've got a whole lot more coming up and yes, we're going to get to collaboration. I guarantee.

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