Dear Customer,

We hope you are all well and looking forward to a productive and busy summer!
In light of recent events in the news, we have decided to give you a general update on Ransomware, Backups and certain technical aspects of Class. Although useful to ALL Class users, please do feel free to forward this to your IT team. If they aren’t already included, please do ask them to contact us should they wish to receive all future technical mailshots.

Ransomware and Backups
We’ve seen a large increase in Ransomware/Virus attacks reported to us recently.  Not only with the recent wide-spread ‘WannaCry’ attack which infected nearly 300,000 users worldwide, but with Ransomware in general. Ransomware is a malicious piece of software designed to target Network Shares & Folders, encrypting files or threatening deletion unless a ransom is paid to those that infected you.

Are you confident, that in a worst case scenario, you could recover your data from a Ransomware attack?
We would like to take this opportunity to remind you, Infospeed are only responsible for the backups of our Class Cloud customers.  Those that are ‘self-hosted’ must configure & monitor backup routines themselves, although we’re more than happy to answer any questions/assist with the initial backup configuration.  Even if backup routines are already in place, for peace of mind you’re more than welcome to contact [email protected] to clarify everything ‘Class’ related is being included in any backup routines.

Class & Microsoft SQL Server 2016
As we move forward into June, we’re pleased to announce the release of Class 8. We’ve been working hard to ensure Class does not fall behind on technologies available to us and as a result, Class 8 and onwards will now be compatible with Microsoft SQL Server 2016 (up from a previous maximum supported version of Microsoft SQL Server 2012).

Emailing from Class
In addition to widening the versions of SQL Server compatible with Class, we’ve also made some adjustments to the emailing function. For those of you that decide to upgrade to Class 8, you will be able to send emails through TLS SMTP services.  Not only does this make our emailing more secure by protecting email traffic, but it allows Class to route emails directly through hosted services such as Office365 & GoogleApps.  If you’re looking for more information/detail on this, please take a peek at the Class 8 release notes available on the Customer Login section of our website, or contact our Engineering team.

Class Application Configuration
For the more technical bunch of our newsletter readers, Class 8 also introduces the capability of moving the configuration file of Class from a central location for all users, to that of a per-user basis.  This means you now have the ability to limit what certain users see within the Company dropdown, when initially logging in to Class. As a result, you will also have the capability of having a different SQL Database User than the generic one provided by us (which again, can be adjusted per-user).  Again, should you have any questions, a quick call/email to [email protected] and we’ll be happy to help!

More news soon…
Some of you may also be aware that we’ve been working hard ‘behind the scenes’ to produce an all new way of providing Class to you.  Currently Class is self-hosted, whereby Class and its Database are all run within your own internal networks and on your own servers.  Watch this space though, as we’re just around the corner from announcing Class Cloud: a Cloud Service managed entirely by us, providing Class to you.

The Infospeed Team

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