Mike Stoveken
A new business location needs four waves of IT work in order, what the lease locks in, what gets ordered first, what gets built on site, and what you test before anyone tries to work there. Most owners call me after the lease is signed. That is the wrong week. Not fatally wrong, but the … Read more
Accounting firms count as financial institutions under federal law, so the FTC Safeguards Rule requires multi-factor authentication, encryption, access controls, and secure disposal on every system holding client data. Firm size does not change that. Most of the accounting firm owners I talk to in Rockland, Westchester, and Bergen believe cybersecurity rules are something that … Read more
For most Tri-State businesses without internal IT, Microsoft 365 is the safer default, mainly because your IT provider can fix more problems without opening a vendor ticket. Google Workspace fits teams already built around Google. Ask ten people to compare these two and you will get ten feature charts. Storage per user. Whether Excel beats … Read more
For most Rockland County small businesses, cybersecurity is not a separate line item. Here is what sits inside a managed IT agreement, what gets quoted separately, and the order to buy it in.
Keep the file server if your daily workflow depends on it, and move to SharePoint or OneDrive if your people need to restore their own files without calling IT. Most small businesses are better off running both. My answer here is the same one I give when somebody asks whether they should scrap their server … Read more
Westchester businesses are switching to VJNetworks despite our headquarters sitting across the Hudson in Rockland County, because the Tappan-Zee Bridge (we’re never going to call it the Mario Cuomo bridge, sorry not sorry) turns “across the river” into a twenty to forty minute drive, not a different market entirely. I hear the same question on … Read more
Renewal questions have shifted from whether you own a control to whether anyone maintains it. Detection somebody watches, a firewall still being patched, and a backup you can prove.
A NIST CSF 2.0 self-assessment scores your business against six Functions, Govern, Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover, then documents the gap between what you actually do today and what you should be doing. Nobody grades it. There is no auditor, no certificate, no minimum score to hit. NIST publishes the whole framework as voluntary … Read more
VJNetworks ranks first among Bergen managed IT providers because of a 97% client retention rate held over 20+ years — the strongest long-term proof of service quality in this market. powersolution.com is the top pick for compliance-intensive firms needing a premium security credential stack. Coban Computer Solutions is Bergen’s most-reviewed local MSP. Providers are ranked … Read more
A remote work security policy for a small business without IT staff comes down to five things, MFA everywhere, a password manager, minimum device requirements, secured home Wi-Fi, and a plain list of who to call when something looks wrong. None of those five things require hiring anyone. That’s the part owners get wrong most … Read more
