Carbon is Ready to Support
Over the years, Carbon has worked hard to guide our customers to adopt flexible, accessible, and secure environments. These efforts have allowed many of our customers to transition to distance working with relative ease. If you or your staff are having trouble working from home please reach out to Carbon. Our staff is available and ready to help your school or business stay connected, productive, and protected.
By Phone: (908) 696-9140 x4
By Email: helpdesk@carbontechnologies.com
By Remote Support (when directed by a Carbon technician):
https://support.carbontechnologies.com
Carbon support is available during normal business hours (9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern), Monday through Friday for phone, email, and remote support. If you need support outside these hours or are in a different time zone, please let us know as soon as possible (existing contract hours remain in effect for all block time and annual contract customers).
All active monitoring, hosting, and backup services continue uninterrupted.
To avoid any unnecessary disruption in service, Carbon is suspending software updates and patches to our managed services customers. Only critical security updates will be pushed during this time and will be preceded with notification prior to patch delivery. There is no reason to introduce new variables to anyone at this time. It is better to deal with the devil we know than to introduce a new one.
For severity one issues that require onsite service, Carbon requests that access is provided that limits contact to staff and facilities. This policy is constantly monitored and Carbon management will adjust based on State and Federal recommendations and/or limitations.
At this time, onsite service outside of New Jersey will be denied or delayed until travel restrictions are eased.
We have a limited supply of loaner devices. If you have a system failure, contact us and we will do our best to get you back and running.
Working from home does not mean dropping best practices. Don’t forget about backup and data integrity. See below for more details.
Backup Is More Important than Ever
With companies moving to a distributed workflow model, it means that your data may also become distributed. Carbon preaches the importance of backup but our efforts have been to concentrate at the core of your environment, which is often a file server as it is where your data is concentrated. If you are distributing data to home devices, Carbon strongly encourages deploying backup services to those machines.
Contact your Carbon technician, Help Desk, or your sales rep to get setup on our affordable backup service. For $.15 a day, we can provide continuous, unlimited backup. In this time of risk, don’t risk the safety of your business data. All setups can be performed remotely and can be setup in minutes.
Beware of Scams, Phishing, Fraud, and Misinformation
As our economy, healthcare, and financial systems buckle under the strain of containing the virus, bad actors are looking for ways to make your life even more stressful. Be on alert for phishing and phone scams. Phishing scams are becoming more sophisticated and in this time of uncertainty, you may not scrutinize emails as adeptly as before. If you are receiving messages that appear to be from your bank, credit card company, investment firm, or the government, approach them with caution. The volume of announcements and our fears of the uncertain may cause us to click through links and emails that otherwise would be discarded.
Avoid email links. If the messages is from a company you do business with or are a customer of, simply open a web browser and navigate to the web site manually. Another simple thing you can do is check the From address. Phishing emails will often have something that looks legitimate in the beginning but have extensions that redirect to their email.
Also, not everything reported on social media is fact. I think, deep down, we all know this. But unfortunately, our brains in times of crisis are not as adept at filtering out the nonsense from the facts. Don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t perpetuate misinformation by re-sharing it on social media. This is a time were we need a lower volume of factual information instead of a larger volume of mostly noise. Just because someone posts a message on social media does not make them an epidemiologist.
Maintain Your Mental Health
Stay productive. Stay in communication. Isolating yourself for the health and benefit of the community does not mean you should live in isolation.
For business owners and employees, this is the time to work on those projects that always take the back burner. Use this opportunity to document, refine and optimize your workflows, or build your knowledge through online training and certification. While this period is challenging for everyone, there is no reason why we all can not emerge from it stronger, smarter, and more efficient.
Stay in touch with your staff, coworkers, family, and friends. Reach out by phone and have a conversation. In our connected world we are often isolated and disconnected from social interactions due to our reliance on devices and the Internet. Now, we are physically isolated and while it is easy to turn to our devices to get lost in the endless world of the Internet and social media, it is not the same as a conversation and making a person to person connection. We all have phones with amazing and endless capabilities. Start using its base function. Make a telephone call.
Talk with a friend, co-worker, relative, or neighbor. Check in on people and ask how they are doing. You will find that you are not alone in your fears and concerns. Knowing we are all in this together may ease the stress and worry that is growing each day.