We get this question a lot, so I thought it would be a good idea to document it here. You have several options with Act! Premium. You can self-host your database - which is what is called Act! Premium for Web, or you can pay to host your database "in the cloud." In this article, I'm just going to cover security precautions we recommend for clients running Act! Premium for Web and allowing Internet access to their Act! database.  If you are using Act! Premium for Web solely inside your

Compromised password emails abound these days. I'm sure you've seen them..."your account has been compromised...I know your password...send money." Many of my clients ask how could this happen? Well, data breaches are dismayingly common.  If you've been using the same password for multiple website/services, you are at risk personally and in your business. Here are some good tips that you've probably heard before: never re-use passwords don't use common passwords such as "password" and

This week we helped a client recover from a data loss.  However, it was not without some pain.  The data was not being backed up correctly so we had to restore from a really old backup copy. Responding to another question regarding data restoration, someone asked if deleted records could be recovered. The answer was yes but with a caveat.  There had to be a good working backup that contained the data that was deleted.  If the data had not been backed up then it could not be

You have probably been hearing quite a bit about GDPR - the European General Data Protection Regulation. What you may not realize is if you have European contacts that you interact with and store their data, you need to understand how that can potentially impact you via heavy fines. The biggest point of GDPR is protection of personal data - at a much deeper level than is practiced in the US. An individual is in control of their data - not the other way around, even to the point where they should

Recently, we have had several frantic calls from customers needing to restore contacts in Act! after a user has unwittingly deleted them. Unfortunately, in some cases, these clients haven't had a recent backup of their Act! Database to pull the deleted contacts from. Don't let this happen to you. Follow these guidelines to protect your Act! data: Limit user security to ONLY what the user NEEDS to do their job. It is a misconception that users need to be "administrators" in Act!. The

[caption id="attachment_4711" align="alignright" width="300"] Is it legal to monitor employee emails.[/caption] Last week I got an interesting email from a client regarding the legality of monitoring and reading employee emails. There were some internal issues that were causing concern and they wanted to know what tools to use and how to go about implementing the process. Before looking into tools, I wanted to ensure that it was legal at all. The answers I found turned out to be a bit more

If you have have not heard about it yet, you will in the future. IOT is the Internet of Things. Basically this is all the equipment, appliances and cars out there in the world that can access the internet. The reasoning behind this is a good one - maintenance of appliances and vehicles, systems to turn them on and off, etc.  However, they have now become a great back door for Denial of Service (DOS) attacks. Last week, DYN, one of the main DNS server hosting companies was down because of a

Over the last few years there phishing incidents have been on the rise, playing havoc with many small business and individual users. Even large businesses can be a target. The only way for a computer user to avoid these threats is to recognize a phishing email/phone call and know what to do (or not do). To understand what these threats are let’s start with the basics: What is Phishing? Phishing is an attempt to get someone to give sensitive information such as username, password, and