Caught in the act thanks to a security camera

Do you ever wonder what is going on at your home when you are not there? Maybe you just want to know if someone approaches your door, or if a vehicle pulls into your driveway?

Call me paranoid, but I do!  We have surrounded our home and businesses with full color, night-vision cameras that record to a DVR (Digital Video Recorder) and in the event of motion, will send alerts in email to our phones, allowing us to see what we are missing out on.

In addition to that, we can view our cameras using a supported smart phone or any computer equipped with a web browser from anywhere in the world. This has come in handy several times, such as the other day when our alarm company called and said the fire alarm was going off at our home. Talk about a scary moment, but having the ability to see that the house was not full of smoke helped set our mind at ease and to cancel the call to the fire department (before they charged us money).

We receive discounts on our home and business insurance thanks to having both premise security in the form of intrusion detection alarms with smoke/fire/glass break and video surveillance keeping a watchful eye over the property. The cost of the alarms and video security will pay for themselves in reduced insurance premiums.

Camera systems have dropped dramatically in price over the last few years allowing home owners to experience the same security as businesses.

Whether you want a single camera watching your front door, or possibly facing towards where your boat / PWC is parked, or complete 360 degree exterior protection, it is all possible! Please call us at 864-990-4748, email info@homelandsecureit.com or stop by our offices if you would like more information about what is available or to see a demonstration of an installed system!

badadadadadadadadadadadaadadad (Simulated drum roll)…

Hal Westmoreland from AccessAbility Services Inc, of Simponsonville, SC was the lucky winner of the wireless network security / surveillance camera giveaway for July! Congratulations to Hal!

Incidentally the first name drawn was Pamela Hoyt, my wife, which somehow didn’t seem fair, so we drew again.

I would like to thank everyone for playing our little game, those who are signed up will be automatically entered into our next contest… Watch for details coming soon!

Only a few days left until we giveaway the Wireless IP / Network Security Camera so be sure to get signed up to win…..  Visit this URL for more information or hit the “follow me” link over on the right hand side of this page.

Next month, we will probably give away some awesome Trend Micro Anti-Virus product!!!!!

Thanks for playing…

One lightning strike can ruin your whole day...

This last week has been a bad week for computers in Greenville & the Upstate.  I don’t know what it is, but we have had computers come in with fried power supplies, toasted motherboards and hard drives, and a call from a potential client this morning with a dead PC and a destroyed hard drive.

Power protection experts estimate that over half of all dead power supplies could have been prevented if an UPS / Uninterruptable Power Supply had been used. That’s a lot of power supplies! And more importantly, that is a lot of money that consumers could potentially save.

While the power supply itself is not expensive, usually costing less than 100 dollars on most computers, the damage that a power supply can cause to the PC can be much greater. We have seen entire motherboards ripped apart and even fires on the extreme end of the spectrum, and lesser damage such as zapped memory, processors, and hard drives on the other end. At the very least, a power supply that fails will cost you in terms of time and inconvenience.

Should a hard drive be damaged by one of these power events, you could potentially lose everything on the drive, or need to send it out for recovery if you don’t have backups. What? You don’t have backups? Please try our FREE trial of Servosity Online Backup before it is too late….

What can you do to protect yourself? Install an UPS! We are proud to be Eaton Power Advantage partners and can offer the full line of Eaton products. They have an UPS for every application, from your small home system, home office, small, medium and large business, all the way up to enterprise and data center solutions!  Don’t forget about your expensive Apple Mac systems, CCTV and VoIP systems, they need protection too!

Please check out the Eaton Product Showcase at http://www.homelandsecureit.com/Partners/Eaton-Power-Products.html

Or, call us for more information at 864-990-4748 – email info@homelandsecureit.com

IRS Tax Code Section 179 can save your business lots of money!

Time to upgrade your server or servers? Need new computers for your business? How about upgrading all your firewalls to the latest technology? New VoIP phone system? CCTV Cameras? Notebooks for all your field reps?

Congress extended the amount that small businesses may write-off for capital expenditures in 2010 to $250,000, and that means this may be the best year ever to upgrade your infrastructure!

Business Equipment:

Business owners who acquire equipment for their business, such as computers, servers, network & security equipment and other tangible goods, usually prefer to deduct the cot in a a single tax year, rather than a little at a time over a number of years. This deduction is known by its section in the tax code, a Section 179 deduction.

Under Section 179, businesses that spend less than $800,000 a year on qualified equipment, may write-off up to $250,000 in 2010. The rules are designed for small companies so the $250,00 deduction phases out when a business purchases more than $800,000 in one year. (Companies cannot write off more than their taxable income).

Benefits of a Non-Tax / Capital Lease:

The benefit of a Non-Tax/Capital Lease is that it can take advantage of Section 179: expense up to $250,000 if the equipment is put in use in 2010. In addition, you may depreciate any excess on the depreciation schedule for that asset. Examples of Non-Tax/Capital Leases include a $1.00 Buyout Lease, an Equipment Finance Agreement (EFA), and a 10% Purchase Upon Termination (PUT) Lease. Example: Assume you finance business equipment, put it in use in 2010, and take advantage of Section 179. Your tax savings could be significant:

An example of a typical server installation and how this applies might look something like this:

Cost of equipment: $9,500.oo

Section 179 reduction if expenditures are over $800k: —

Dollar for dollar phase out if over $800k: $9,500.oo

Section 179 write-off amount: $9,500.oo

Regular First Year Depreciation Deduction: -

Total First Year Deduction: $9500.oo

Cash Savings on your Equipment Purchase: $3,325.oo

(Assuming a 35% Tax Bracket, Deprecation 5 years)

Lowered Cost of Equipment after Tax Savings: $6, 175.oo

Tax Code Section 179 & Election to Expense Detail:

The election, which is made on Form 4562, is for the tax year the property was placed in service or an amended return filed within the time prescribed by law. The total cost of property that may be expensed for any tax year cannot exceed the total amount of taxable income during the tax year. Section 179 property is property that you acquire by purchase for use in the active conduct of your business. To ensure property qualifies, reference Publication 946.

This expense deduction is provided for taxpayers (other than estates, trusts or certain non-corporate lessors) who elect to treat the cost of qualifying property as an expense rather than a capital expenditure. Under Section 179, equipment purchases, up to the amount approved for a given year, can be expensed (deducted from taxable income) if installed by December 31st. Non-Tax leases qualify for this deduction in their year of inception. Any excess above the expensed amount can be depreciated depending on the equipment type. Not all states follow federal law. Contact your tax advisor for the specific impact to your business or visit www.irs.gov.

Further Detail:

Reminder: to take advantage of the tax incentives, your business equipment must be put in use by year-end. You should contact your tax advisor to learn about the specific impact to your business.

We can help you maximize this as we offer leasing and financing… Please email info@homelandsecureit.com or call 864-990-4748 for additional information!

Network surveillance camera giveaway

I present to you: July’s freaky fun thing from Homeland Secure IT…

We are going to give away a cool color WiFi IP surveillance camera!

These network security cameras are pretty nifty! They feature wireless 802.11b/g connectivity, or wired CAT-5 to your network, as well as full color via a 1/4″ CMOS sensor, with 640×480 resolution at 30fps (full motion). They support WEP and WPA encryption.

These babies can automatically email you a snapshot at the first sign of activity, so you can get it on your smart phone, or you can log in and watch the video feed live with a web browser or some mobile smart phones…  It comes with software to turn a computer into a DVR to record the video.

Oh, did I mention that it features infrared illumination so it can see it total darkness?  Yep… pretty cool!

All you have to do is to attach the little mount it comes with to a wall and then attach the camera to that, connect the power supply and your network cable, or you can program it to connect wirelessly to your network.

What’s the catch?  There is none…  Absolutely no purchase, no obligation to enter our giveaway, other than to get connected to us via our mailing lists or this blog.  On this blog you can look to the right, and enter your email address in the “Follow Me” section and then hit subscribe and you can sign up for our email mailing lists HERE.

We combine the subscription lists from the blog and our two mailing lists into one list and draw randomly, which creates a loophole that can work to someone’s benefit – If you are subscribed to all 3 places, you have 3 chances to win…

Legal mumbo-jumbo: This offer is void where prohibited. Winner must pick up prize at our office in Greenville SC, or make arrangements for it to be shipped at his/her expense.

We will select the winner on July 31st 2010 and announce it the following week via a blog post, social media, etc!

In the meantime, if you want to purchase one of these snazzy cameras, we sell them as well as a full line of security and surveillance cameras and DVRs, so shoot us an email at info@homelandsecureit.com or call us at 864-990-4748….

One lightning strike can ruin your whole day...

If you live here in the Upstate of South Carolina, you probably enjoyed nature’s light show last night, but you might not have enjoyed it if your computer, server, network components or other sensitive electronics fell victim to one of the many strikes that occurred.

While it is very difficult to protect yourself from a direct lightning strike, a modest investment can prevent the most common threats from destroying your equipment. Power events such as blackouts, where power is totally lost, or brownouts where the voltage drops to less than 120 volts AC, and the worst culprits of power surges and power spikes, which occur along with the blackouts, brownouts and nearby lightning strikes can usually be stopped before they cause damage.

The cheapest form of insurance is a surge protector, but we suggest you go one step further, and use an UPS, which is an Un-interruptable Power Supply. This type of device goes in-line between your power outlet, and your computer, and can protect the computer, printer, monitor and other devices that are plugged into it.

BONUS: If there is a power event that causes a brownout or blackout condition, an UPS will continue to power your computer until it can be shutdown safely, after saving your documents! With a cheap surge protector, the computer would go down immediately and everything you were working on could be lost.

There is an UPS for every application. UPS large enough to power your servers, network equipment and VoIP or analog/digital phone system are available, and small enough to protect a surveillance camera system and keep it online. Most feature the ability to protect a network too, so you can stop a surge from coming in on a DSL line and possibly save that expensive Cisco router or firewall!

Homeland Secure IT offers a full line of outstanding power protection products from surge protection, full-house surge protection, to UPS and power isolators. We are partners with two of the biggest manufacturers of these products, APC by Schneider Electric and EATON.  Whether you need protection for just one computer, or an entire data center, please email info@homelandsecureit.com or call 864-990-4748 and select option 1 to speak with me and arrange for a free consultation for Greenville and Upstate SC businesses and individuals.

Computer network security and support is about more than a quick fix or repair on your PC, it is about preventing devastating damage through planning…

PTZ or Pan Tilt Zoom cameras can change your outlook on life!

We have been using Panasonic network cameras which feature PTZ, or Pan, Tilt and Zoom here at Homeland since we moved into this building. They are awesome little cameras and I even use them at our home because they will email me when a car or person is in our driveway or front door, etc.

Earlier this week, I ordered a new system to install at our office. Not network cameras this time, but 8 channels of standard CCTV goodness with 600 hours of real-time recording time on the DVR (Digital Video Recorder). They *are* reachable via the internet using Microsoft Internet Explorer or a 3g phone like a Windows Mobile, and thanks to our great bandwidth here, we can view all 8 cameras in real-time at once from remote, as well as our Panasonic network cameras.

We opted for several different styles of cameras to use in this system. Four enhanced color dome cameras with night vision and 580 lines of resolution, a couple “bullet” cameras with 100+ft of infrared illumination for night viewing outside, and two PTZ cameras that will allow us to change what we are looking at from remote. We also purchased a heavy duty power supply to power all of these devices.

This system was not expensive, though it costs a bit more than some of the budget packages that are out there. We will be using it as a demo system to show potential clients what video surveillance can offer them.

What are you doing for physical premises security at your business? Could a small investment in a video surveillance system like this give you peace of mind or even lower your insurance rates?

Should you have questions, or would like to see a comparison between a standard CCTV system and a network camera system, give us a call at 864-990-4748 or email info@homelandsecureit.com!

We offer a full line of CCTV and Network camera systems from Panasonic, Cisco,  Sony, Digimerge, and many others!

Beat the criminals with a security camera for your home or business

The attached picture was taken a few moments ago from a network security camera at my home. Anytime there is motion within that camera’s field of vision, it will alert me via email, immediately (I receive it on my blackberry). The driveway is covered with this camera, the front yard with another, the full driveway and sidewalk with another, and yet another keeps an eye on the rear of the house.

This provides me with a simple means of seeing every path that someone could/would use to get to my home and alerting me to the activity. They also record audio, and time-stamp the images and record full motion to a digital video recorder (DVR). It is almost like being there! Most of the time when someone approaches our home I get the notification that they are there before they even make it to the door!

Will it stop a criminal? No way. A real criminal would not care that our house was under constant video surveillance, nor would they care about the ADT alarm system with cellular backup. But what it does do is to give me peace of mind, knowing when UPS or FedEx drops off a package, or when someone pulls into our driveway.

What can a security camera system do for you? For starters, if you run a business, it can help with loss prevention, just the mere presence of video cameras can deter some would-be thieves. And in the event something actually occurs, you can possibly use the video to help prosecute the offenders.

One person I know beat a liability claim that was going to be lodged against them by showing what REALLY happened.

We use them at our office for peace of mind, a deterrent and for a reduction in insurance premiums.

You may have remote areas of your business that you want to monitor so you know that your workers are actually working, or that they are working safely and that inventory is not walking out the door.

Home owners may want to keep an eye on a swimming pool or play area and view the cameras with their iPhone or while away at work.

Whatever the reason, there is a perfect system to suit your requirements. Call us today at 864-990-4748 for a free evaluation of your Greenville / Upstate security & surveillance camera needs.