Here’s a sad story… A local (Spartanburg, SC) music store was broken into over the weekend and 40,000 dollars in gear was taken.

The theft doesn’t look like your typical smash and grab either, because the thieve/s appear to have known the layout and went to great lengths to avoid detection. They entered through a skylight, after cutting power to the store, cutting video surveillance wires and disconnecting the alarm system backup power. A newspaper article about the break in and theft can be found here.

As a small business owner, I know the devastation the proprietor of the music store must be feeling, and I sincerely hope the perpetrator/s is/are caught and the equipment returned, and that there was insurance covering that inventory.

However, as a supplier and consultant in the security field, I have to wonder about a few details and offer some suggestions.

The article states the power was cut.  That would not normally matter to an alarm system, as it has a backup battery.  Now if the phone lines were cut before the power, then the system could not dial out.  UNLESS the alarm system has a cellular backup system as our home and our office both have.  This costs a few dollars more, but in the event of a power failure and loss of telephone connectivity, it can make the difference between the system working or not.

Dropping through a skylight SHOULD have been picked up by motion.  Was it not functioning? Was the system unable to call out?  The alarm should have sounded and strobe lights in equipped should have been flashing.  Pulling the battery on the alarm would have then silenced it, but not before it dialed out on the cellular backup system if it used that, or VoIP if the internet were not disabled too.

Which brings us to video surveillance. Obviously, no system is perfect, but many modern systems are capable of alerting staff of intrusion before it happens.  If you walk into my yard at my home, or come into the parking lot of our businesses, still shots will be emailed to me.  This functionality is easy to configure and helps let you know about sketchy things taking place. If I receive email at 10pm on a Saturday then I am going to be paying special attention to it, watching in real-time.

But what if someone were to manage to disable the internet connections? Wouldn’t that disable the ability to notify anyone?  Not necessarily. Businesses can consider secondary internet services, such as wireless broadband internet (3g/4g) for their video surveillance.  Total cost, 450/year and doubles as a failover for the business internet.

What if the power were cut to the building? The video surveillance system should be on an UPS (un-interruptable power supply) to keep it running for many hours. Our system is on an inexpensive UPS which will keep the DVR and the cameras functional for about 72 hours.  Total cost, 350 dollars.

WHAT IF (Lots of what if’s here!) the bad guys managed to actually get in without being detected… Couldn’t they just take the Digital Video Recorder?  Yes, they could, if it were not in a hardened enclosure.  But, there are ways to deal with that too. All video up until the time the DVR went offline can be synced to a remote location.

We have opted to sync our video to multiple machines, so if the DVR were physically destroyed or taken, the video would still be elsewhere.

If you would like to discuss how to better protect your Greenville /Upstate SC business or home, give us a call… 864.990.4748 or email info@homelandsecureit.com.  We offer CCTV, IP Video, Surveillance systems,  DVRs and NVRs. We can also help plan for failover systems, such as UPS and cellular / 3g/4g wireless backups.

Acording to the IMS, by 2012 more network cameras will be sold in the Americas than analog cameras… And the growth rate continues to climb dramatically after that….

This should come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the two technologies.

IP Surveillance Systems offer a multitude of advantages over analog, including return on investment, ease of deployment, enhanced feature set and an owner experience and satisfaction.

Homeland Secure IT is happy to be a partner with D-Link, a world leader in IP Surveillance. Though we offer many others brands, a growing number of businesses and organizations are turning to D-Link’s products. If you would like more information about what IP Surveillance can do to give you peace of mind and security, call us at 864.990.4748 or email info@homelandsecureit.com

We are always happy to give a demonstration in the Greenville / Upstate area, at your office or ours. We can even meet for coffee and demonstrate the remote viewing and management capabilities using an Android, iPad or notebook computer.

Stop wondering what is happening at your business when you are away. Be notified of movement in sensitive areas on your smartphone.

Put an end to the unasked or unanswered questions about personnel attendance or actions.

Watch that blind spot in your store where product has vanished in the past.

Who’s using all the office supplies? You’ll know.

Watch the parking lot, know what is going on outside your walls.

All that and more is possible!

I’m away on vacation with my lovely wifey Pamela, and our first stop on the Gulf tour was the IP Casino and Resort in Biloxi, MS, where we met my older brother, his wife and their oldest daughter…

While roaming around, it was easy to see that the “eye in the sky” was ever present, and I do mean EVERYWHERE.  Heck, at check-in, there were 17 cameras that I spotted without even turning my head around! On the 2nd floor, where the big buffet and the non-smoking casino area is, there were at least 60 cameras clearly visible. (How many were not visible?).

There were cameras in hallways, elevators and parking garages. Who knows, maybe even some in the bathrooms. (Let’s hope not).

What it reminded me of was how grateful I am that we have surveillance at our places of business (Homeland Secure IT has at least a dozen that you can see inside and outside), and at our home.

When we are away from work or home, we get alerts in email, letting us know that something, or someone moved in view of our cameras. We can then use our Android smartphone, computer or iPad to watch the cameras in real-time. They record video and audio automatically. They see in the dark, and offer very high resolution.

While setting up a casino is not outside our realm of expertise, setting up your home or business is right in the middle of our sweet spot.

If you crave the peace of mind offered by high quality video surveillance, then give us a call and let’s talk about how we can put a system in place that will meet your needs and desires.

We offer IP Network cameras, both wired and wireless, as well as conventional CCTV solutions. We are dealers for quality products from Cisco, Panasonic and other manufactures and we serve the Greenville / Upstate SC area.

864.990.4748 or info@homelandsecureit.com for more information!

Today you can hardly have a conversation with IT professionals without the buzz words, “cloud computing”, “in the cloud”, “cloud solutions”, etc popping up.

What do these terms mean? To over-simplify the definition, it means that something is not stored at your location. It is stored “in the cloud”, or on a remote server, and accessed via the internet. The “it” could be data, as in your databases, email, files, or it could be programs / applications, such as web based suites of software like Microsoft Office suite, including Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word or custom applications.

All this talk about moving to “the cloud”, a term which is generically used for the internet, has people thinking about how it can be used for their business. Let’s take our own small business and use it as an example.

Currently, we use a large server which has Microsoft Server 2008 loaded on it and functions as our domain controller, DNS, DHCP, and other standard server tasks… It also serves as our file server, and it hosts Microsoft Exchange for our in-house email. Other tasks this one piece of hardware is responsible for are: TFTPd for management of our VoIP phone system’s configuration files, backup of data (Using multiple backup systems such as Servosity Online Backup Solution, an “in the cloud” product, and MozyPro) and Trend Micro Worry Free Business Security Advanced for anti-virus and anti-spam.

We have a second server which hosts additional files, Blackberry Enterprise Server (not currently in use due to the switch to Android phones), and is a test bed for us. Then we have two other servers, a Voice over IP server based on Linux OS which is in control of our phone system & voice mail, and a DVR (Digital Video Recorder) for storage of video from our CCTV cameras.

In order to reduce some overhead, we could potentially maintain a smaller main server with only Windows 2008 R2 running on it as a domain controller, then utilize Microsoft Aurora, or even Microsoft BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite), allowing mail storage and transport to take place outside our building.

We could then switch from Trend Micro Worry Free Business Security Advanced to the Trend Hosted solution, relieving our server from those duties.

Since we are already using a remote backup solution, we would not have to worry about that, and our backup requirements would actually drop since we would no longer need to backup the Microsoft Exchange Store (Microsoft would handle that for us with the BPOS solution).

As you can see, eliminating the main server entirely from the equation here is not going to be possible, however a considerable amount of storage, backup, and resources could be moved elsewhere.

One thing to take into consideration before moving to these hosted solutions is, what if our internet is down? That is a good question which still has many people concerned about these technologies. In the case of online file storage, if you do not have cached storage at your location, you simply have no access to it. In the case of mail, if you are caching the information locally, you CAN see your old/existing email, but you cannot send or receive new mail until the connection is reestablished. It is important to note that cloud based email will still RECEIVE email when your business is without an internet connection and you will get it as soon as the connection is reestablished, something that doesn’t happen now if you use an onsite Exchange Server, unless you are using a mail hold & forward (spool) system at your ISP or other provider.

Should you desire to discuss your needs and how products like Microsoft Aurora, BPOS, Google Apps, Servosity and other cloud services can fit into your infrastructure, please call us at 864.990.4748 or email info@homelandsecureit.com for a free consultation!  We are partners with Microsoft, Google, Servosity, MozyPro and other cloud providers. We also offer a full line of computer, server & network service, support, sales and consultation here in Greenville & Upstate SC!

Microsoft is offering a free 30 day trial of their Business Productivity Online Suite if you would like to see it in action.

One lightning strike can ruin your whole day...

Last night was scary for some people here in the Upstate of SC. Easley was hit hard in the business area of Main Street and Pendleton Street and residences along 135 by the passing storms.

As I watched the news and saw the video footage of damage, I felt horrible for the business and home owners affected. We turned on the scanner radio and listened as emergency crews went street by street, clearing each house they came to. We heard that business owners would not be allowed back into their business until 8 AM today, and an entire condo was evacuated and they were not allowed in until after power was restored.

Those who did not suffer structural damage from the wind, or trees falling on their building and the water that poured in, may have suffered in other ways. Servers and workstations that were not on an UPS (Un-Interruptable Power Supply) went down when the power went out, losing any data that was not saved, and potentially corrupting hard drives or data that was being written at the time.

Then there is the damage to electronics, especially computers & servers, when the power attempts to come on, spikes, surges, brownouts. These power events have the potential for destroying sensitive components.

A simple and relatively inexpensive device such as an APC or Eaton UPS could help prevent costly damage, lost productivity and save your data by automatically shutting down the computer after a power failure, saving data properly, and during the continual power up/power down cycles, provide the filtering necessary to protect your systems. Your insurance company may offer discounts for coverage of equipment covered by UPS due to the reduced chance of costly computer server repair or service, or even replacement.

Another nice feature of an UPS would be to supply power to internet routers / switches, CCTV system and VoIP systems to allow you to view your security cameras to assess possible damage before you can even enter your building (If the internet connection is not severed), and your phone systems can continue to function if you have a large enough UPS so that Voice Mail and FAX can still come in.  An UPS can serve to power your systems until your generator comes online if you have one, so your Microsoft Exchange system may never go offline assuming your building is not one of the ones affected by structural damage.

The obvious next layer of protection is a backup solution, such as an onsite backup, whether it is an LTO, DLT or other tape drive, external hard drives, NAS / SAN etc, which could help if the need to restore data comes up… Taking that idea one step further would offer an offsite, or online backup solution, placing your data “in the cloud” safely away from your geographic location, so if a fire, tornado, flood or even a theft occurs, your data is located elsewhere and can be downloaded to a new computer or server.

If you would like to discuss how power protection and backup solutions can safeguard your systems or if you require assistance with a business continuity plan, please email info@homelandsecureit.com or call 864.990.4748. We are partners with APC, Eaton, Symantec, Quantum and Servosity.  We also offer a FREE trial of the Servosity Online Backup Solution….

Free Servosity Online Backup Trial

Since we have cameras at our offices and homes, it was only natural to want to see them on our new Android phones (Samsung Epic 4g).

IP Cam Viewer by Robert Chou for Android

We downloaded every app we could find in the marketplace and tried each of them out. Without a doubt, the best remote camera viewer was “IP Cam Viewer” by Robert Chou.

This app is only $10.00 to purchase, and free to use if you only have 4 cameras. The registered version will view all of our cameras at all locations as the app supports up to 32 cameras.

Will it work with your system? Chances are good that it will as it supports over 200 camera systems. It had settings for our office CCTV DVR where we have 8 cameras and our Panasonic IP cameras at the office (4 additional cameras) as well as the cameras that keep watch over our home, which are also Panasonic IP cameras.

We can view all of them at once on the phone, or view one large and several smaller frames. We can use the Pan-Tilt-Zoom functionality and a really cool feature is that we can enable the microphones and listen in at the remote site for the cameras that support that.

So if you are looking for the perfect app for your Android based phone, skip all the others, which seem to have annoying issues and lack of compatibility and download IP Cam Viewer Lite first. I bet you pay the 10 bucks and register it within 24hrs!

If you are wanting security / surveillance cameras for your home or business, we offer a wide selection of standard CCTV systems and IP Network Cameras, DVRs, NVRs, and more! Call us at 864.990.4748 or email info@homelandsecureit.com

Wanna buy a RIM Blackberry 8350i for Nextel / Sprint? We have a few for sale! http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320599349838#ht_694wt_1139

In an earlier blog posts, I rambled a bit about the desire to leave the Blackberry, but why we didn’t, and then last week, I posted about finally dumping the Blackberry phones for new Android smart phones.

Today I will bore you with my thoughts on how these devices are going to fare in our own application. For those of you who don’t know, Homeland Secure IT is a provider of computer, server & network service, support, repair, consultation and sales here in Greenville, SC. We have a number of computer service technicians who need instant access to each other, to the web, and to their email, so they can better assist our clients.

Previously, the Blackberry was THE tool for the job, but more recently, we have had connectivity issues, poor coverage in the Upstate and a general unhappy feeling due to dropped calls, etc. The inability to run the latest applications was also a drag, but it did not prohibit us from performing our job.

Thank God, all of our fears of leaving the Blackberry behind were unsubstantiated, well at least most of them…

We were worried about the slow email transport that active sync to our Microsoft Exchange Server would subject us to… That was unwarranted. We are realizing only a slight delay over the Blackberry Enterprise Server. We are missing our “notes”, but there are ways to deal with that.

We worried that Direct Connect would be missed… While not perfect, the app suggested by our friend Bradley Durham called “TiKL” allows almost the same functionality. The audio quality is not quite as good, and it can get choppy, depending upon signal quality.

The best part about switching is that I am no longer being disconnected from half the calls that I make!!!!

Here’s a partial list of some of the apps that we are finding useful in our application:

• TinyDVR – Free version of a network camera viewer lets me watch a couple cameras at my home.
• IP Cam Viewer – Free version of a network camera viewer app, lets me watch 4 of the 12 cameras at our office.
• Advanced Task Killer – Free version of ATK helps keep memory in check by killing off apps on the Android.
• Barcode scanner – Free app lets us see those QR codes and scan bar codes.
• Bump – Exchange business cards between iPhone and Android users with a “bump”
• Files Anywhere – Lets us share files, even fax from the phone.
• Pocket Cloud from Wyse – Let’s us remote desktop to servers for quick maintenance.

There are a number of others I use, but mainly for personal purposes….

In using these phones over the weekend, it is painfully apparent that battery life is going to be our biggest obstacle. As much as I use mine to check email, text, talk and “direct connect”, I am only able to get about 3 hrs max without using a charger…  Not good. So I have purchased chargers for everywhere, and await the release of high capacity batteries.

The other problem may be in the durability of this device. A Blackberry can be dropped, or even thrown, and will survive. One wrong bump and I am sure that the Samsung Epic 4g will be damaged… Most likely the screen will break from a slight impact. To help protect myself, I have purchased a high quality cover and holster, after it shows up, I will post about it here.

As always, your comments are welcome!

Last night’s storms in Greenville played havoc with the sensitive computers, servers, network equipment, CCTV systems, VoIP systems and even alarm systems!

At 10pm we received a call from the alarm monitoring company saying that we had multiple zones activated at my wife’s business, including a door, and several interior motion sensors! Police were dispatched, and Pamela and I rushed out the door headed towards her office with flashlight and firearm at the ready. We actually beat the police to that location due to the large number of calls they were receiving due to power outages and lightning strikes in that area.

It was immediately apparent that we had a false alarm… Thankfully, nobody was arrested or shot, and in fact, the only casualty was the alarm system sensors that were damaged by the strike. The power had been off all around that location, and computers, servers, and more were offline.

After the storm died down and morning came we were greeted with calls from our clients. As you can imagine, computers were down and would not come up, servers were down, a lot of network connectivity issues such as no internet access, no access to application servers, etc. Most of these were solved over the phone, but a couple required visits to the sites.

Thought I would just take a moment to remind everyone that a large number of service calls and computer repairs can be avoided by simply investing in adequate UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) devices. These affordable products can be used to protect almost everything you plug into AC power. Those switches, routers, firewalls? Protect them! What about your time clock? Yes, that too. How about that expensive CCTV or VoIP system? Yewbetcha!

Small surges that come in on the power line can cause big damage to sensitive electronics!

Homeland Secure IT is happy to partner with some great power protection companies such as Eaton and APC and we can provide you with a quote for the proper product for your application! Please email info@homelandsecureit.com or call 864.990.4748 for more information…

This morning I was having a discussion with a potential client and we were talking about the “Homeland Secure IT” name, the individual mentioned that they understood the play on words, however they were simply not sure how to take “IT”, because they thought of “IT” only in the terms of “Information Technology”…

I explained that the “IT” in our case is an all encompassing catch-all term that covers just about anything you plug into the wall. We sell, service, repair, support a wide range of technologies, not just a computer, server or network, but VoIP systems, CCTV and network security camera systems, firewall appliances, anti-virus software and software in general.

So basically, whatever IT is, we can help you with IT!

I am unsure of a way to indicate everything we work with, but suffice it to say, it is not limited to just a notebook computer fix, or a simple virus cleanup. While we DO those things, we also deploy Blackberry Enterprise Server so your mobile users can stay connected. We help integrate wireless devices like Androids, iPads and more into your Microsoft Exchange. We configure VPNs that allow a mobile workforce or a branch office to connect to your data as if they were physically in your office. We design and deploy Voice over IP phone systems. We offer biometric and card swipe time clocks.

Again, if it plugs into your network, or connects wirelessly, or you WANT it to, we can help. Give us a call at 864.990.4748 or email info@homelandsecureit.com to discuss your unique needs! We serve the Greenville & Upstate SC area!

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!