The Importance of Server Security

With the increasing importance of the internet in our lives, websites have become the online faces of businesses, providing a platform for customers to learn more about brands and their products or services. A website is often the first point of contact between a potential customer and a business, and it’s become a critical component …

Is your Outlook secure?

Microsoft patched a serious security flaw in all currently supported versions of Outlook on Tuesday, April 10th. The patch fixed a flaw which allowed hackers to harvest details from users who simply previewed an infected RTF (Rich Text Format) email. What should I do to make sure I am not vulnerable? You should make sure …

Disaster recovery and business continuity

Many business organisations express fears about their ability to recover after a disaster. Business continuity and disaster recovery planning is often overlooked by businesses as it can be expensive to put in place and there’s no return seen on the investment. However, nowadays disaster recovery planning is more affordable and there are ways it can …

5 tips on disaster recovery plans for the small business

At the heart of every small business is the drive to succeed and to provide a continuous service to your customers. Many small businesses can become overwhelmed when thinking about how to both set up and then implement a disaster recovery plan. There are many factors to consider, including knowing where and how to start. …

C-level executives are not prepared for GDPR implementation

Recent research carried out by Trend Micro Inc. has revealed that many C-level executives across nearly 57% of SMEs are nowhere near prepared for GDPR implementation when it happens on 25 May 2018. In addition, almost half the businesses surveyed claimed not to know if their firm’s email marketing databases contain PII, and nearly a …

What is the GDPR and how will it impact my business?

On May 25th 2018, a new regulation concerning privacy comes into effect. This new rule called the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, will be implemented across all EU and EEA member states. The GDPR will apply to all businesses that store personal information about citizens in Europe, even if the company itself is based …

MySQL Vulnerability – CVE-2016-6662

Today a ‘zero day’ exploit was released for current MySQL versions, while we wait for patched versions to be released by the vendors, we have mitigated the vulnerability internally. We will continue to monitor the situation and update our response as necessary. If you have any questions or queries, please feel free to email support@catalyst2.com …

How to beat the threat of SQL injections

As one of the UK’s leading web-hosting companies, catalyst2 puts security at the top of the list when providing any technological solution. There are currently over 286 million types of malware on the internet, so a key part of our work is to identify new dangers and quickly develop ways of preventing them. One of …

VPNs explained: why your organisation needs this technology

As part of our managed dedicated servers, we provide a VPN solution as standard. But what exactly is a VPN? VPN explained VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. It’s the name given to a group of computers that are linked in a network, yet can still operate across the internet. Effectively, it extends a private network or …

Backups are critical to your business

Since the days of tape and floppy disks, creating a backup of business data has been accepted practice. Yet, there are still many companies that ignore the advice, or only take irregular snapshots of documents, databases, website designs, corporate literature and other files. In the cloud era, making backups is simpler than ever. Set up …