FRESNO, California – Cody Sarhan, Communications Specialist

On November 2^nd, Fresno State is celebrating its 6^th annual Day of Giving Fundraiser event with the greater Bulldog community. All friends, family, and alumni are welcome to join and lend whatever aid they feel to support the next generation of leaders.

“Your gift, no matter how big or small, will have an impact on student success. By investing in Fresno State students, our next generation of leaders, you’re investing in the future of our region and world.” — Official Day of Giving Website

Celebrations will be held on-site at Fresno State, and digitally through their campaign’s website. Patrons can give a gift to a specific school/college, or whichever program they feel resonates with them the most. If you aren’t sure what area you should give to, the Fresno State Annual Fund provides for the highest priorities on campus. BCT will join in on the celebration by making a financial contribution to the Technology Services program.

Learn more: How you can contribute to the Fresno State DOG

The Day of Giving will last for 1,911 minutes in honor of the University’s founding year. It all starts Wednesday, November 2^nd at 5 a.m. and ends on Thursday, November 3^rd at 12:51 p.m. Contributors can make a difference by donating a gift in any area they chose, even if it’s just word of mouth — you can show support by using #FresnoStateDOG on social media.

BCT is excited to be a part of this amazing event and help give back to the community that helped shape us as the leading technology experts in the Central Valley.

“As an alumnus of Fresno State, I’m honored to be invited as an ambassador to this prestigious event. We at BCT are continually challenging ourselves to find new ways to empower our community and give people the tools they need to succeed. This is just a further extension of that, and we’re excited to see the impact this makes on our future leaders.” — Eric Rawn, BCT Consulting Founder & CEO

Learn more: About BCT Consulting

This campaign enables Fresno State to achieve its mission of educating and empowering its students; supercharging their success into the future. We hope to see you there and are excited to see what the future brings to these bright new leaders.

Cody Sarhan | Communications Specialist, Xobee Networks

FRESNO, California – Cody Sarhan, Communications Specialist

California small businesses are being sued more than all other US states combined over their websites not being ADA compliant. Due to a combination of state tax laws and a general lack of business awareness, law firms are capitalizing on the opportunity to file lawsuits against companies whose websites lack certain web accessibilities.

Learn more: How BCT can ensure your website stays ADA compliant

Any member of the public is well within their rights to use the accessibility legislation that exists as part of the ADA to argue that their needs are not being met by a company or public organization. Additionally, law firms are becoming increasingly efficient at targeting small businesses.

“There are thousands of lawsuits filed each year alleging websites and mobile applications are not coded so that they are accessible to individuals who are blind.” — Kristina Launey, Seyfarth Shaw litigator

Source: Seyfarth Shaw analysis, February 2022

Settlements range from $20,000 to $100,000 and average around $35,000. There were 265,000 demand letters sent out last year alone, with nearly 50% of lawsuits filed coming from just five different law firms.

Source: Report by UsableNet Inc

“Companies with revenue below $50 million were the targets of two-thirds of lawsuits between Jan. 1 and June 21, a shift from the year-earlier period, when the share was less than half” — Ann-Marie Alcántara, Wall Street Journal Reporter

What is Website ADA Compliance?

Web accessibility is a set of rules, behaviors, code standards and design guidelines that allow people with disabilities — which comprise 20% of the world’s population — to effectively use websites. To achieve this, the W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium) has created the “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines” 2.1 (WCAG 2.1), which are meant to explain and guide developers on how to make websites accessible.

These guidelines have been adopted by governments around the world and are now a part of various legislations, such as the ADA, Section 508, EN 301549, and others. Businesses with websites that are not WCAG compliant are at risk of costly web accessibility lawsuits. Read on to learn why and how.

Further reading: How to prevent a web accessibility lawsuit

BCT Web Accessibility Compliance Protects You

In the physical world, there’s a clear framework set by time, experience, legislation, and precedent. But the internet is evolving at a rate that is difficult to keep up with for some companies. That’s where an MSP like BCT can help. Through our experience, expertise, and specialized focus we can help protect your business so you can focus on your clients and customers.

BCT’s web accessibility compliance service is the only solution that ensures full accessibility compliance at any given time, even on websites with daily updates.

Click here: Contact one of our highly-skilled team members to learn more

We can add our tool to most website platforms including WordPress, Wix, Joomla, Shopify, and more – even if we didn’t build it!

BCT Consulting now has engineers servicing clients within Fresno, Clovis, Madera, San Jose, Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Las Vegas, Bakersfield, San Diego, San Luis Obispo, Anaheim, and Palm Springs. If you wish to learn more about our services, contact a team member here.

Cody Sarhan | Communications Specialist, Xobee Networks

FRESNO, California – Cody Sarhan, Communications Specialist

Over the past five years, California businesses have led the nation in data breach incidents From 2017-2021, more than 3.7 billion dollars in lost revenue can be attributed to poor cybersecurity, according to a recently released report from Forbes. California nearly doubled the next closest state in both data breaches and lost revenue, and the number is only expected to go up.

“I implore all entities that house confidential health-related information to be vigilant and take steps now to protect patient data before a potential cyberattack.” — California Attorney General Rob Bonta

The most targeted form of cyberattacks in California came from bad actors compromising email accounts — costing 14,925 victims more than $1.18 billion in lost revenue.

Learn more: How BCT can protect your email account

Small Businesses Have the Most to Lose

In 2021 businesses suffered 50% more cyberattack attempts per week, with 43% of those attacks being aimed at small and medium-sized businesses, according to Accenture’s Cost of Cybercrime Study.

“While many large businesses suffered breaches, small and medium businesses were an easier target for hackers because of their lack of resources and security expertise.” — Chuck Brooks, Global Thought Leader in Cybersecurity and Emerging Tech

Source: Check Point Software

Business Cyber Threats by the Numbers

Ponemon Institute’s State of Cybersecurity Report details the most recent and compromising cyberattacks on small to medium-sized businesses.

• Insufficient security measures: 45% say that their processes are ineffective at mitigating attacks.
• Frequency of attacks: 66% have experienced a cyberattack in the past 12 months.
• Background of attacks: 69% say that cyberattacks are becoming more targeted.

The most common types of attacks on small businesses include:

• Phishing/Social Engineering: 57%
• Compromised/Stolen Devices: 33%
• Credential Theft: 30%

2022 & Beyond

Due to the advancement of the modern economy; remote working, e-commerce, and the need for digital infrastructure protecting both your employees and your clients has never been more paramount. Couple that with the ongoing issues caused by climate change, the pandemic, and supply chain bottlenecks, the smallest wrinkle in your cybersecurity can cripple your business.

“2021 saw unprecedented levels of disruption, caused by various triggers. Crippling cyber-attacks, the supply chain impact from many climate change-related weather events, as well as pandemic-related manufacturing problems and transport bottlenecks wreaked havoc.” — AGCS CEO Joachim Mueller.

Joachim Mueller summarizes by saying, “Business interrupted’ will likely remain the key underlying risk theme in 2022. Building resilience against the many causes of business interruption is increasingly becoming a competitive advantage for companies.”

How to Maintain Your Competitive Advantage

One of the first things to keep in mind when trying to gain a competitive advantage as a company, is the idea of futureproofing that advantage. With a constantly changing economic and technological landscape, a sustainable advantage takes diligence and a firm pulse on industry shifts — that’s where BCT comes in.

We keep a sharp eye on industry standards and emerging technologies to help better serve our clients. By being on the cutting edge of these technological advancements, we can help build better systems for our clients — no matter if we’re converting an older system or creating a fully tailored solution for our clients’ specific needs.

Learn more: About BCT’s service benefits

How BCT Can Protect You

On top of the increase in cyberattacks, there’s the ongoing battle against supply chain disruptions, the aforementioned data breaches, and more. One of the top priorities for companies is ensuring that their businesses remain weatherproof, as climate change and natural disasters continue to devastate large regions of the country and the rest of the world.

Learn more: How BCT can protect your data from wildfires, hurricanes, winter storms and more

One of the best and most effective ways of protecting yourself is by having a proper disaster recovery solution in place in the event of total data loss. Hurricane Ian is the most recent example of such catastrophic loss.

“Previous once-in-a-century-events may well occur more frequently in future and also in regions which were considered ‘safe’ in the past. Both buildings and business continuity planning need to become more robust in response,” — Maarten van der Zwaag, Global Head of Liability Risk Consulting at AGCS

With all this said, cyber perils are still the biggest risk and worry for companies globally in 2022, according to the Allianz Risk Barometer. The increasing reports of cyberattacks, ransomware, data breaches, and major IT outages continue to set back businesses and whole industries. These threats, according to many experts, outnumber the damages and costs from supply chain disruptions, natural disasters, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic — which have all continued to heavily affect businesses in the past year.

We at BCT are committed to protecting clients’ data, taking proactive measures against cyberattacks, and safeguarding our clients’ infrastructure in the event of a natural disaster. To learn more about how we can protect you from these ongoing threats, contact one of our team members today.

BCT Consulting now has engineers servicing clients within Fresno, Clovis, Madera, San Jose, Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Las Vegas, Bakersfield, San Diego, San Luis Obispo, Anaheim, and Palm Springs.

Cody Sarhan | Communications Specialist, Xobee Networks

BCT Consulting, a Fresno-based business technology firm, announced the acquisition of a Los Angeles company that provides technology solutions to nonprofits.

The acquisition will allow BCT to better serve clients in the nonprofit space, said Eric Rawn, BCT Consulting founder and CEO.

“We’re thrilled to announce this new way forward with ZAPtech, who’s been the choice for nonprofit technology solutions in Southern California for more than three decades,” Rawn said in a statement. “By partnering with ZAPtech, BCT is able to focus and dedicate more resources to our clients in the nonprofit space. With ZAPtech’s history, we’ve gained insight into the unique and in-depth interworking technologies that these organizations need to succeed in their mission.”

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. The Business Journal is a client of BCT Consulting.

ZAPtech has provided IT support and technology solutions for major nonprofits for more than three decades in Los Angeles, Culver City, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, according to a news release.

Nonprofits that subscribe to BCT’s managed support services will receive customizable VoIP phone service at no additional cost, according to the release.

Rawn founded BCT as a single-person consulting firm in 1996. Today, it has thousands of clients throughout the Central Valley, including law firms, school districts and other local businesses.

BCT Consulting now has engineers servicing clients within Fresno, Clovis, Madera, San Jose, Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Las Vegas, Bakersfield, San Diego, San Luis Obispo, Anaheim, and Palm Springs. If you wish to learn more about our services, contact a team member here.

FRESNO, California – Cody Sarhan, Communications Specialist

Over the past few months, there’s been a high increase in solar activity that has drastically interrupted communications and technologies here on Earth. On July 19th, Dr. Tamitha Skov — who has worked with NASA and The Weather Channel — reported on a solar flare that impacted the Earth-strike zone, causing radio blackouts and GPS disruptions for several hours on many parts of the planet as it interacted with Earth’s magnetic field. 

“Direct hit! A snake-like filament launched as a big #solarstorm while in the Earth-strike zone…” — Dr. Tamitha Skov, Space Weather Physicist

This is not the first time this has happened of course, not even the first time this year. In April and May, Live Science reported that two solar flares caused R3 blackouts over the Atlantic Ocean, Australia, and Asia. This has been an increasing occurrence, and astronomers expect that it’s only going to get worse. Sunspot AR3038, as it’s known, is a massive solar eruption that astronomers have been watching for the past few weeks. It was expected to die off, but it’s grown three times larger and is facing the earth. If a massive solar storm hit us today, like the one in 1989, then scientists warn us that it could cause trillions of dollars in damage and trigger widespread blackouts.

Protect Your Data

These solar eruptions can cause massive geomagnetic storms that can be crippling to our technologies and infrastructure. SpaceX reported in February that they lost 40 Starlink satellites as a result of a geomagnetic storm, and Live Science reports that the next solar storm could send our world into an internet apocalypse that “keeps large swaths of society offline for weeks or months at a time”.

Magnetic lines of force surrounding Earth known as the magnetosphere deflecting solar wind and radiation from the Sun. Elements of this image furnished by NASA.

Move your data off-site in the event of a catastrophic event like a geomagnetic storm. We at BCT built our cloud on state-of-the-art technologies. We remove on-site servers and infrastructure, so your data is protected with us in the event that you lose everything. Your cloud servers reside in our server clusters in our Level 3 data centers. Our infrastructure runs on ECC memory, enterprise tiered storage, redundant power, and redundant data from end to end. This cost-effective at-rest backup solution requires no additional onsite hardware and utilizes your existing Veeam installation. In as little as ten minutes, your business can be on its way towards being protected against solar threats, and others. 

Secure Off-Site, In Case You Go Offline

The scariest part about all of this is that we really have no safeguards in place to prevent this from happening or to deal with it effectively. Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine wrote in her research paper, “A disruption lasting even a few minutes can lead to huge losses for service providers and damages in cyber-physical systems.”

“What really got me thinking about this is that with the pandemic we saw how unprepared the world was. There was no protocol to deal with it effectively, and it’s the same with internet resilience.” — Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi

Events like the coronavirus pandemic are known as “black swan events” — an unpredictable catastrophic event with severe and widespread consequence, that are often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. Abdu Jyothi goes on to say that Internet researchers and operators are “mostly blind to another black swan event that poses a direct threat to Internet infrastructure.”  She notes that this black swan event is something that the scientific community is generally aware of, with predictive modeling efforts and precautionary measures such as power grids. However, she goes on to detail that the networking community has largely overlooked this vulnerability during the design of network topology and geo-distributed systems such as DNS and data centers. This means that even if power returns in hours or days, mass internet outages can persist for weeks or months at a time.

“Nations at high latitudes — such as the U.S. and the U.K. — are far more susceptible to solar weather than nations at lower latitudes. In the event of a catastrophic geomagnetic storm, it’s those high-latitude nations that are most likely to be cut off from the network first.” — Brandon Specktor, Senior Writer, Live Science

— The Microsoft Azure Global Network

What Can You Do?

The short answer: BE PREPARED. This is not over. Solar activity rises and falls in 11-year cycles. This is something that astronomers have observed, studied, and documented for centuries. We’re currently in year 2 of that 11-year cycle, and the sun’s solar activity is only going to get stronger until it reaches its peak in 2025 (known as solar maximum) at which point it will start to fall again. So, while we might not have a protocol for how to handle these events when they occur, we can certainly predict them and prepare for them. 

What that means for you is to not just back up your data, but protect your data. Safeguard your assets in the event of a total blackout or loss of infrastructure. We here at BCT can help you with that. Feel secure knowing your off-site data is stored on an enterprise-grade NetApp storage system. Our scalable cloud server hosting is able to provide infrastructure for one user or 10,000 users, and we take the complexity and cost out of deploying a secure off-site backup and disaster recovery solution for any and all of your data.  You don’t want to be caught off-guard and feel like you could have done something when the next solar eruption strikes Earth’s magnetic field. So secure and backup your data with us and get peace of mind knowing that you’re in safe hands with the #1 voted MSP in California.

BCT Consulting now has engineers servicing clients within Fresno, Clovis, Madera, San Jose, Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Las Vegas, Bakersfield, San Diego, San Luis Obispo, Anaheim, and Palm Springs. If you wish to learn more about our services, contact a team member here.

Cody Sarhan | Communications Specialist, Xobee Networks