IMPORTANT UPDATE – PLEASE READ – Email Conversion Delay AND Security Updates

We are DELAYING EMAIL CUTOVER to Monday night, January 8th due to a major security flaw that is impacting all computers worldwide. The flaw is called Meltdown and Spectre. You may have seen or heard reports of this issue in the news yesterday and today.

We need to focus our efforts on our Hardware systems and making sure updates that can be done right now are done. This is why we are delaying our email cutover.

Today into tomorrow we will be doing the following:

– This morning we are going to be testing and installing updates on select equipment that we can isolate (Surface, Laptop, PC, and Server) to install the currently available updates, test performance and ensure it completes.

– Once we are done with this we will be working department by department starting with HR and then Accounting (Due to the nature of the data they use on a daily basis) to install workstation updates.

– We will be updating the workstations for Community Care representatives who work the afternoon/evening shift mid-day so they are up and operational for their shifts beginning at 1 PM.

– We will then move from group to group to complete the remaining updates

– While this is going on we will also be testing the updates on our server environment. There have been conflicting reports of performance hits that slow down computers after this update so we want to make sure we minimize these issues as much as possible prior to server wide installation.

– We will be completing the server updates and installations tonight into tomorrow morning

We have made these decisions due to the potential security threat of this particular issue. To give you a sense of the severity, Microsoft patched and rebooted their ENTIRE cloud server infrastructure last night, without notification to users, to make sure they were protected.

We will keep everyone informed as we work through this. Thank you.

FOR YOUR PERSONAL COMPUTER AT HOME

Our advice to you for your home computers is to allow Windows Update to perform its work and follow the instructions for a reboot when it asks.

IF you have turned off automatic updates on your computer at home you should manually open Microsoft Windows Update and perform a check and install.

SOME computers may not have the ability to install these updates due to the type of Anti-Virus software that is installed on your computer. The biggest names impacted by this are MacAffee and Sophos Anti-Virus systems. If you use these software the updates will not be installed. Once McAffee, Sophos, and others have made updates to their software then the Windows updates will install.

Ryan Vieth

Senior Systems Engineer