 ThinkTek Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Welcome back to the Cyber Underground, I'm Dave the Cyber Guy, Dave Stevens. I teach at the University of Hawaii, Kappie Alliany Community College, and I'm here to bring you the latest news and events in the world of cybersecurity. And we're going to discuss some stuff in the tech support field today with the Chief Technology Officer from Hawaii Tech Support, Tim Ames. Welcome, brother. Hey, Dave, thanks for having me back. Did I pronounce the right Ames? You did. Okay, good. I have trouble with the English names. I'm kidding. You know, if I'm in Mexico, it's Ames, though. Ames, yeah. Win in Rome. Win in Rome. Just go with that. Wow. So, first of all, you haven't been on the show for a little while, so tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, how you came to Hawaii. Sure. Show them how you got to Hawaii Tech Support. Yeah, so I'm the Chief Technology Officer over at Hawaii Tech Support. We're a managed service provider. So, we help out with mostly the small and medium-sized businesses in Hawaii. Yeah. Some of the larger organizations as well. We are their one-stop IT shop. So, they might be too small to have a full IT staff. What we do is we come in there and we're their virtual CIO. And we provide help to support tier two, tier three, you know, the escalation and the architecture for their enterprises. But how'd you come to Hawaii? I came to Hawaii after getting out of the military. So, I was active duty Marine Corps for about ten years. Except for five. Except for five. Right on. And I got offered a job with a civilian contractor for the DoD. And they asked if I wanted to go to San Diego, Hawaii, or Japan. I had just spent the last five years in Japan. Three good choices, though. Those were really good choices. I grew up in Southern California. Right. Lived for five years in Japan. And I'd only stopped over in Hawaii like on a deployment. So, you took a shot? I took a shot. And it paid off. You know, I met my wife over here. We have two lovely girls. Good job. This is where I'm going to stay. So, you're local now? I am. All right. You wanted to come? Married in. All right. I'm counting on you. It was a best case scenario to take the talent and motivation from the military services. The motivated and intelligent and educated people that come out of the military to keep them here on the islands. I really like that. I'd like to do that for our students, too. They're attracted to the mainland, but I'd like to bring them back and get that experience back here on the islands. They are. It's not a bad thing to go off and get the experience from other organizations, whether it's here on the island or if it's on the mainland or even go to another country. Find out how they do it and bring it back. I like that. Most people forget, especially in information technology, it's amazingly critical that you do change jobs every once in a while, maybe every two to five years, to get the experience from multiple organizations. And then come back and bring that experience and knowledge and know-how into a new company here in the islands. Well, we were talking about that before the show. We were talking about how people can get really pigeon-holed into their specialty. So a programmer might not know the networking, might not know the security. But yeah, that job rotation really helps you expand. Well, we're going to discuss what we talked about before the show. I'll give my example. When I was really young and I was just getting into computers, I started just programming, you know, Perl scripting and stuff like that. Really old school, some VB4. I mean, it was way old school. And I didn't know anything about networking until I bought a game that had to do, you know, multiple players and I had a router. And I had to read the instructions and hey, I need some port forwarding. So wow, what is this networking stuff? So I had to learn networking. And I go, oh, that's what this stuff is. But I wouldn't have known. You're right. If you do this job and you're terrific at that job, you might not realize that there's more of the world out there. Besides, you were also saying that, you know, like you go back to 80s and 90s, even at the beginning of the 2000s, you could be the IT guy. Right. Yeah. You can't do that anymore. The field is way too deep now. Yeah. It used to be a mile wide and an inch deep, right? And now it's just a mile wide and a couple hundred meters deep. I mean, it gets very deep. I think the fact that you guys can take a lot of that critical service infrastructure, the responsibility, the know-how and the efficiency, and take that responsibility away from the business. And they just pay a fee and they don't have to think about it. Because a lot of people, me included, I had a business, I still do. Sometimes I don't have the resources and the time to dedicate to that kind of stuff because I had a business to run. You're running a business. Your business is to make money. IT is a tool for that business. And a lot of people get carried away with IT, right? They might want to go for too much or they might not go for enough. And I think finding a professional like yourself or Hawaii Tech support to kind of give that advice, you know, where do I need to be as an organization? That's wonderful to have you guys out there. So if I need legal advice, I'm not going to do it. Right. I'm not going to go out and get a degree. I'm going to go out and hire outsource and legal. If I need HR. I do not even pretend to know everything about human resources. So I'm going to go out and hire, you know, pro-service Hawaii or something, you know, an HR company. And when I need tech support, I'm going to go to the pros. Right. And you guys are probably going to say, let's see, you're an elementary school. Do you really need 24-7 support? Probably not. You know, work hours, couple of weekend days, not even 365 days a year. You know, you can model your support infrastructure or your support service to them, to their business, right? Yes. And if I went out and hired as an elementary school, I go out and hire an IT guy. First of all, he's overworked because he's got to handle everything. Right. And he's on salary. So he's 24-7. Yeah. And I don't need that. And you're paying for the health and benefits and all that. Yeah, the 401k and all that stuff. Yeah. So it's a great match to dig you guys up. I appreciate that. And you guys can come and say, well, based on other people we've served in the same industry, we think that you could use this service to reduce the time and effectiveness that you're using over here, or you could use this service and this might save you a little money. Yeah. That kind of advice is invaluable to somebody who's, like you said, just running a business. I own a 7-Eleven. I run a gas station. I own a, I don't know, I run a public swimming pool, whatever it is. And you guys can say, we'll channel this and meet your needs. Do you have any stories like that? Yeah. Well, lately we've been, so it's about defining resources that you need, right? So we have the resources to just sit there and do proofs of concept on new technology. We have the resources to sit there and read all of the bulletins that come out concerning cybersecurity or just better ways of architecting new improvements to the IT community. Some of the newer stuff that's coming out like cloud computing, that's been really, I think that we can take a lot of advantage of the cloud computing resources that are available. So now as people are retiring their servers, I'm looking at that, we're looking at that from an organizational perspective and saying, do you really need to invest tens of thousands of dollars in a new data center? Or would you rather move that organization to the cloud, the cloud computing platforms like Microsoft, Azure, Google? Well, let's talk to the people in the chief seats really quickly and bring them up to speak because there's some people, some viewers that really don't understand what cloud computing is. Cloud is a mysterious, ethereal thing. Explain it to us. It bothered me so much when everybody was talking about cloud computing. I think one of the original cloud computing was rack space. And what this is. Oh, one of the pioneers. One of the pioneers, right. So what it is, is instead of having a data center inside of your organization where you have to provide air conditioning, you have to provide conditioned power. Fire suppression. Security. Yeah, UPS, all that kind of stuff to keep everything up and running. Instead of doing that, you know, Microsoft or Amazon, they have these huge data centers and they carve you out a little piece of it. You know, it's a logical piece of their data center. And they assign it to you. And from a management perspective, it looks and runs just about the same. And it can be redundant invisibly. Absolutely. So you're looking at a piece of it, but that's actually backed up in real time to another place. So if one of them goes down, you still got the other one. Really, all the requirement is for you is to have a good internet connection. Yes. And that is key. That's the critical component that we look at now. And Hawaii can be hit or miss, you know, depending on where you go on the island. You may get the fiber. You may get, you know, you may have to. The old copper cabling. Or the DSL. You might have to go to some of the guys that provide like the line of sight, you know, the antennas. The microwave antennas. So that happens. But we try and get our customers to, this is another thing. So you were talking about cost savings. I encourage all of your viewers right now to take a look, you know, get in contact with their ISP, their vendor for their, you know, internet connectivity. And just check, if you haven't spoken to them in the last couple of years, you might be able to double or triple your internet speed right now. Hawaii telecom is going to hate me in spectrum. They're the same price, right? Yeah. I think they want us to move over to that new architecture. You know, they're building out all this new infrastructure, they're going to move to it. So yeah, double your speed up. If you don't have to pay anything more, I mean, it's just an easy win, right? Low hanging fruit. Once you have that speed though, the cloud becomes, it just, you can do remote desktop to the cloud. So we've been giving people thin clients that don't have any operating system on it. Describe a thin client. Right. Back to the cheap seats. What's a thin client? A thin client is a computer that connects directly to a remote session. Okay. So usually you log into your computer and all your data is stored on that computer. Okay. A lot of people are familiar with file shares. File shares usually reside on a server, right? So you access the file shares from your computer. But when you download that, it gets stored on your computer and you have an operating system like Windows 10 or, you know, Mac OS, you have an operating system on that computer. That's what we consider a thick client or just a normal workstation, a normal PC. What a thin client does is it runs a little bit of an operating system, just a little operating system kernel, but it actually boots into, it starts up a session with a remote server that has your desktop that you're, you know, you used to seeing when you log in. So it maintains all your shortcuts, your links, your your share folders and all that. Your printers even, you know. So you wouldn't see the difference really as a user. There's a little bit of a difference, but I think from a user's perspective, no. If you're already used to using a computer, it's going to look the same. The difference is I think when it comes to graphics, so you're not going to be wanting to stream videos across this connection. Oh, yeah. You don't want to sit there on YouTube all day. Yeah. Now there are specific processors and with graphics, you know, that you can buy in the cloud. They're kind of prohibitively expensive, you know, to to do that kind of stuff if that's not your job. If you're not a, if you're not inside of some computer aided design, you know, if you're not an engineering company that needs that. But everything else runs fine. So email, internet connectivity. When you go to these cloud services to like Amazon or Microsoft and you set up your cloud environment, when you're logged in, and it looks like you're just logged in in your own computer, you go do a speed test, do an internet speed test from one of Microsoft's data centers and you're getting gigs downloaded from the internet. So that's just the beauty right there. The speed and the, you're in a premier data center. And we have a data center here, DR Fortress. Right. Right. Yeah. Local company. Local company. Yeah. And they offer cloud services now too. So my wife used to work for Citibank for a while as a contractor and they did this extremely well. Okay. So the thing I thought was a tremendous bonus to Citibank is that every person could log in, but the computer is hosted and managed, the OS is hosted and managed and secured. Right. Remotely. So all she had to do was have a VPN connection, a desktop computer and an internet connection. Yes. And all the other software that Citibank needed her to have is on that image. And if anything goes wrong with it, Citibank can manage it from right there. Right. They don't need to log into their computer. That doesn't need to be a remote session. They don't need to come to the house and secure it physically. She's secured just by that VPN connection and everything else is handled on their side. Right. And when you have to patch a computer, when a new virus comes out, a new update comes out. It's immediate. Instead of patching 100 computers, you patch one. And it just propagates. Yep. Yeah. And it's wonderful. I think this is a great idea and it can save a lot of money. What's the, how much money would I save? Say if I, if you're my user and you have a Dell computer on your desk and I have to manage your Office 365 subscription and your Windows license and your Adobe license for like an Acrobat versus I'm going to host this off-site and do the thin client. Would I save 10%, 20%? They're savings there. Yeah. So with the subscription type services like Office 365 or Adobe has gone to a subscription service also with Creative Cloud. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. There's, there's opportunities to load that on one server. You're going to pay a different subscription model than your normally used to paying where the big savings cost savings come up with is network refreshes. So like computer refreshes or electricity, the air conditioning. You also get something you remember as cybersecurity professionals, we're always interested in the confidentiality, integrity and availability of our information resources. I think that's the biggest value right there is the availability. It's always on. You know, Microsoft's data center. We use the West U.S. to data centers, our primary data center. It's always going to be on. But even if it's the worst case scenario, Microsoft's data center goes down, it pops up in the West data center. So you're always on, no matter what's going on at Microsoft, they have a redundancy to keep you up. And we're going to talk about that. We're going to take a little bit of a break. When we come back, let's talk about worst case scenarios and what's going to help your business. So the disaster-resistant technologies that we can employ as business people to keep us secure and keep us going. So business continuity, the availability you're talking about. So we'll come right back. Until then, everybody, stay safe. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea is on Think Tech Hawaii. Every other Monday at 11 a.m., please join me where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music and Hawai'i Ana all across the sea from Hawai'i and back again. Aloha. Hey, Aloha, Stan Energyman here on Think Tech Hawai'i where community matters. This is the place to come to think about all things energy. We talk about energy for the grid, energy for vehicles, energy and transportation, energy and maritime, energy and aviation. We have all kinds of things on our show, but we always focus on hydrogen here in Hawai'i. Because it's my favorite thing. That's what I like to do. But we talk about things that make a difference here in Hawai'i, things that should be a big changer for Hawai'i. And we hope that you'll join us every Friday at noon on Stan Energyman and take a look with us at new technologies and new thoughts on how we can get clean and green in Hawai'i. Aloha. Welcome back to the Cyber Underground. I'm Dave the Cyber Guy and we're talking with Tim Ames, a CTO of Hawai'i Tech Support. And now we're going to get into disaster-resistant technologies. Tim, let us have it. I'm a business person. I need my technology on all the time. That's part of what we call business continuity. Right. I have people, backups to me and a backup to that person. And I need to do that with technology too. Now out here in the Pacific, we're in the middle of a hurricane season. We just had one coming by. This is Hurricane Lane. Came right up to Oahu, kissed it on the cheek and moved on. But it just devastated the big island. Yeah. Brothers and sisters over in Hawai'i got hit hard. Almost four feet of rain in some places, right? So let's talk about I'm running a business like on the big island. Hurricane passes through and just dumps the biblical floods on me. But I need to be up and running as soon as that stops. But if I have a data center, most likely it flooded. Right. Yeah. So we're looking at this from a business perspective and then an IT and security perspective. Let's do both. All right. So the business perspective, the business requirement is to have a business continuity plan. So the business continuity plan is where the managers, the executive team gets together and decides what services do we need up to maintain our business? How quick do we need to be recovered from any kind of disaster and how long do we need to be down? And when we do recovery, when we do our recovery, what is our recovery point objective? So you want to keep the doors open. So an example would be Amazon.com. It goes down for an hour. Right. How much money have you lost? Millions. Millions, yeah. Right? If I'm a department store, I got to close my doors. If I stay with the doors closed every day after the hurricane goes away that I'm not open for business. You're losing money. I'm just losing money. Especially in a disaster, if you were one of the retail shops that has stuff that people need to recover from the disaster. You want to open up right now and you don't want to go back to hand jamming it on paper because you're going to lose something. Right, right. So what we recommend on that is to just double down on your availability. It's called high availability. And the first part you can get high availability on is your actual access to the internet. Now if your organization has the ability to go to two different service providers like for example the telecom spectrum and Hawaii telecom. If Hawaii telecom goes down and this could happen just during a normal business day, right. You can use your ISP. Well then your other connection stays up. Technology's advanced to the point though where you don't have to pay for two circuits to run constantly and maybe you're not using both circuits at the same time you're not load balancing. You just have one just in case. There's actually appliances now that you can use your ISP and you can have a SIM card that goes in there and so when you lose that connection to your local ISP the SIM card kicks in and now you're on the LTE network. Okay. You set up the security it's still firewall and it's still doing all of its work doing the inspection but you're up. So you know that's one big way to tackle that challenge from the get go. Having redundant power is important too. So having everything on a UPS making sure that you know you're not rated your UPS isn't rated to handle any kind of like lightning. You've got to define this uninterruptible power supply. Uninterruptible power supply. I'm sorry I tend to use acronyms. We've got people in the chief seats. We've got to play to the whole audience. So the uninterruptible power supply people should be aware of this it's just a big battery. So you plug all of your devices into that if the battery loses power from the wall or switched to a generator or safely shut down. Or safely shut down. Right. Right. But if you want We've got a pause here. UPS is the batteries don't last forever. They don't last forever. Every five years they'll go in there and test your batteries switch them out. Especially in Hawaii high humidity bad stuff for batteries they can explode they can burst they're going to get all that fuzz on the outside. These are the lead acid batteries so you want to dispose of them with the batteries so they're and they're great at disposing of them properly they don't go in the landfill. Okay. Battery bill everybody that's a local vendor. Just so you know. Battery bill look up as commercials it's on YouTube. Yeah. Yeah. So you have a UPS a redundant internet connection rightfully what else. Well then you want to look at okay what do I do for backups and backups is a question that you have to ask all the time now because we're not just thinking about ransomware so we're into cyber security finally right cyber underground so yeah ransomware can terminate your your data by just locking it up and if you don't pay the ransom you don't get the key to yeah and even if you do pay sometimes you don't get the key right I think it's only 30% of the time you get the key to unlock your data additionally there's ransomware out there now that I just read that will get into your backups store your backups and we'll just stay there and wait until you and then it hits you again so this is this is bad stuff so backups not only you have to do them you have to test them and you have to make sure that the testing that's the key you have to make sure the technology you're using doesn't doesn't allow the ransomware to kind of bridge that gap right oh yeah you don't want to so a lot of people do their backups and they just do them to a separate computer on the network hopefully hopefully that if this computer goes down this computer stays up but they do it over a shared that that shared that that connection is on so the ransomware now you got ransom backups too we should tell our audience the reason is if you have two computers that share a connection and you're backing up one to the other if ransomware attacks the live one it has a connection that it can use to get to your backup server and encrypt that data as well so if you're making that backup just connect that share after you're done making the backup stay from the ransomware right and then for for your home users even you got things like carbonite so carbonite and iDrive those are both like technologies that they're cloud backup they're cloud storage right so you just install an agent and it takes care of the backups for you Mac has time machine there's just tons of tons of good products out there my only my only is to stick with you know get a backup solution but now for the businesses though they can start backing up to the cloud so cloud storage is ridiculously cheap that you ask the question you know what are the cost savings when you go to the cloud compute memory those resources are pretty much on par with buying a a server of your own but when it comes to cloud storage you can't buy any cheaper Microsoft or Amazon when it comes to just getting plus if I have another go live point like if my if I'm in Hilo in the big island there's torrential rains coming down but not much rain on the cone side and I have an empty data center up there I can just move everybody up there and restore my data from the cloud I don't need to go get it from the flooded office bring it up and physically restore or you can spin it up in the cloud and that's what a lot of people don't realize once that data's up there there's no problem just spinning it up as a computer let's describe that so in the cloud you have images of servers right so it's a virtual machine yes and if you need more because there's more processing power you can spin another one up which means create another image of that and it replicates another computer with more processing power and you pay a few more pennies but only for the time you need that more power so let's for example amazon.com again because I love picking on Jeff Bezos I love Jeff I order everything from you Jeff damn it so convenient so amazon.com is running and they have what do they call a black Monday or whatever cyber Monday so they're going to go from having 100 servers to having 10,000 servers running at the same time because they don't want anyone to have a bad experience but when that is over it's a key word we're looking for here the scalability of the cloud is amazing so it used to be that if my business ramped up I have to increase my data center footprint by an enormous amount and just put all these computers up there but then if my business ever scales down I'm stuck I got all that stuff there with the cloud business scales back okay I scale back oh it's back up I scale right back up to meet my need and my costs are right the traffic that you're getting the traffic that you're expecting you mentioned spinning up other servers and what's cool about a lot of these options is that you can actually resize the server while it's running so I need a big server I need a small server I just need another 32 gigs of RAM on this server and you just with the flip of a button you can do it while it's in production I wouldn't do it while it's in production you probably shouldn't do that but we do have load balancing therefore you have multiple servers so you can take some down and not interrupt and you can turn them off at night too so with that remote desktop host for example with the thin clients you might have 100 people working during the day but you only have a skeleton crew working at night you don't need three remote desktop servers up during the nighttime you only need the one and it might be the smallest one you can set it up to every night shut down the other two so you're saving over the long term you're saving the cost by only having you know all three of them up for maybe 10 or 12 hours a day you're cutting 30 or 40% off your cost over the the euro and plus your P&Ls are going to look great at the end of the year you just can't do that with a regular physical infrastructure with our last minute of the show give us a little sales pitch about white tech support exactly what you guys offer and how to get in touch with you guys because I want to know if anybody's interested in some of these new cloud technologies to make your make your organization highly available highly available and secure and secure during the storm season contact us Hawaii tech support our numbers 808-535-9700 or you can email us at learn at Hawaii tech support hightechsupport.net so learn at high tech support that's H-I H-I like Hawaii yeah Hawaii tech support.net okay thank you so much for being there and again for that subscribe on thank you everybody for joining us on cyber underground we'll be back next week until then stay safe