Blog – Cloud Edge

Ransomware and what you need to know

Recent events
Ransomware is the most common malware doing the rounds at the moment, with two separate spates of it reported in the last two months.
Last month’s attack was reported to have started in Ukraine before spreading around the world to infect over 12,000 machines in over 65 countries, including the US, Europe and Asia. It hit some major corporations along the way, including hospitals in the US, Cadbury here in New Zealand and global shipping giant Maersk, affecting our […]

July 12, 2017 By Andy Barker Cloud Services, General IT, Security ransomware, Security 2 Comments

Copper phone lines vs fibre and VoIP

Today we rely on fibre like we used to rely on copper.
Since the late 1800s, shortly after the telephone was invented, landlines relied on copper to transmit sound. Switchboard operators were in high demand and rotary diallers were all the rage. Our communications technology was quite a different scene a hundred years ago.
Today’s phones
Fast forward to today and the operators, rotary diallers and chunky corded phones are all gone. Today’s phones can text, pay for things like parking and […]

June 13, 2017 By Andy Barker Internet & Phones 0 Comments

How to stay plugged in while overseas

When you’re the key person in your company, it can be a worry to step away for an overdue holiday or a necessary trip away. Recently my wife and I took a well-deserved break to LA and Las Vegas and here’s how modern technology kept us in touch with home and business …
Step 1 – make your friends jealous
First of all, like most people, once I landed at LAX my first point of contact was with Facebook to check […]

May 8, 2017 By Andy Barker Cloud Services, General IT, Internet & Phones 0 Comments

Charities! Your charity status can help your charity IT in a big way!

Charities are eligible for stacks of free and hugely discounted products and services and often don’t realise the extent of what’s available for their IT.
How does a huge boost to your donations sound?
Imagine your charity has a $4,000 Google Adwords budget, so you set up an online donation portal on your website to act as a funnel to capture those donations. Even if only 1% of people who see your Google ads donate to your cause, can you imagine […]

April 27, 2017 By Andy Barker Cloud Services, General IT charity it 0 Comments

How to identify harmful SPAM

If your computer has ever caught a virus, you’ll know the headache these bugs put you and your business through.
How do the bugs get in?
There are a few ways this happens: either through your email, by visiting dodgy internet sites, or via a USB device from home (coming from an infected machine). These are the most common avenues.
Our blog concentrates on email as the others can be easily avoided. So first up, if you’re ever unsure of an email, […]

March 28, 2017 By Andy Barker General IT, Security 0 Comments

Phone and internet savings

Did you know your monthly phone bills, including calling, can be fixed so you know what you’re paying every month? We tell you how …
We offer phone packages with pre-allocations of minutes based on your requirements plus we regularly save clients between 20-80% on their monthly phone bills. Take a look at a couple of case studies below.
Case study #1 – small Lower Hutt company with two phone lines and eight staff
This company was paying a larger telco: $245.60 […]

February 10, 2017 By Andy Barker Internet & Phones 0 Comments

Earthquakes, floods – what next?

With the recent earthquake registering 7.8 on the Richter scale and plenty of aftershocks to go around, this got us thinking about backups and how well our clients’ businesses are covered in the event of a major disaster.
When the devastating Christchurch earthquake hit and most of the CBD was cordoned off, it was those businesses that had a good disaster recovery plan in place that were able to carry on at another location and survive.
This made us think of […]

November 22, 2016 By Andy Barker Cloud Services, General IT 0 Comments

What does HTTPS or SSL mean for my website?

SSL is an acronym for Secure Sockets Layer, an encryption technology. HTTPS is the same as standard web traffic (HTTP) but using the SSL encryption to make the website traffic secure.
The primary reason why SSL is used is to keep sensitive information sent across the Internet encrypted so that only the intended recipient can understand it. This is important because the information you send on the Internet is passed from computer to computer to get to the destination server. […]

October 6, 2016 By Andy Barker Security, Websites 0 Comments