Think of it this way: a thief is walking down a street lined with parked cars. He stealthily attempts to open the doors of each car he walks by. If its locked, he moves on. He doesn't even leave the sidewalk to try the street side lest he expose himself to viewing by the buildings across the street. He tries the next car, and the next, and the next, until he finds an open door on a 9 year old unassuming sedan. He sits down, rifles through the glove box, under the seat, center console, floor in the back seat, and takes whatever he can carry. He even finds an extra ignition key in the glove box, but he doesn't care he has no intention of stealing the car. However he just walked away with your $90 sunglasses, your $50 Pottery Barn gift card you got for Christmas, an iPad on the floor of the back seat, and worst of all several old credit card and banking statements you left in your center console.

Seems Google has learned the old ways of Microsoft and other software companies. It was discovered that if you used the Google Chrome browser, it is loading listening software without permission, to turn on your microphone and listen in on your conversations.

Microsoft Azure has become the most effective solution for your Disaster Recovery plan that I have ever seen, especially in terms of cost to implement compared to the abilities you get. You can use Azure to back up your systems and/or replicate them in their entirety so that during an emergency, and even for testing purposes, they can be turned on in the cloud and accessed just as they were when running on your on-premise hardware.

So what is this Azure? You have no doubt by now heard of this thing we call the "Cloud". It's everywhere, but a lot of people still don't quite understand what it is. To put it very simply, the "Cloud" is just a computer (or loads of them, actually) that are not where you are currently sitting.

In the world of information security, there is a saying "security by obscurity is not security". The breaches that get national attention would have you believe, and understandably so, that hackers go after high profile targets and they don't care about the little guys. But in fact the opposite is true because the little guys (small business) spend less or no money or security, and worst of all, nobody is even watching for an attack. In my line of work, we call that the "low hanging fruit".