Practical guidance on infrastructure, security, operations and technology decisions, informed by the environments we manage and the work we perform.
Our primary marketing website and email domain are moving to alcohq.com. ALCO USA Inc remains the company you know; ALCO HQ is our marketing DBA and a simpler address for reaching us online.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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Carly Leveille has joined ALCO as Client Operations Coordinator, bringing customer-service experience and an entrepreneurial perspective to our family-led and operated business.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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The weak password is rarely the one that gets you breached. The reused one is.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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When every device can reach every other device, one compromised laptop becomes a path to everything. Segmentation is the unglamorous fix.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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Paying only when something breaks looks like the frugal choice. The math usually says otherwise.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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If you fund IT but can't see what it's doing, you're paying on faith. Here's what a clear report should show — and why it matters to people well outside the server room.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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The most common security gap we find isn't exotic. It's the accounts and access nobody cleaned up when someone joined, changed roles, or left.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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Shadow IT is usually framed as a discipline problem. It is more often a sign that people needed something and had no sanctioned way to get it.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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RTO and RPO sound like jargon. They are really two questions about your business that you want answered on a calm day, not during an outage.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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Most organizations have all three records in place. A surprising number have them configured just wrong enough to do nothing.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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The term is overused and oversold. Underneath it is a simple, practical idea most organizations can start applying without buying anything.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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The practice is usually explained by software companies, to software companies, with examples from software companies. The underlying idea is more broadly useful than that — and adopting it does not require becoming a development shop.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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A marketing site is usually the least critical system an organization runs and the most frequently compromised. That combination — low attention, high exposure — is exactly what makes it the entry point.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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Removing local administrator rights is one of the highest-value security changes available and one of the most frequently abandoned. The projects that fail almost always fail the same way, and it is not a technical problem.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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Moving to a major cloud platform transfers a great deal of operational risk to the provider. It does not transfer all of it, and the part that stays with you is not the part most organizations assume.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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The published averages are enormous and nearly useless, because they average across organizations nothing like yours. Here is how to calculate a figure for your own business that will survive contact with a finance director.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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Almost every organization we assess has backups. A much smaller number have ever restored one. The gap between those two facts is where most of the damage in a serious incident actually happens.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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Multi-factor authentication is the highest-value security control most organizations can deploy. It is also routinely deployed in a form that a competent attacker walks straight through. The difference is worth understanding before you tick the box.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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The commercial terms in an MSP contract are usually straightforward. The operational terms — scope boundaries, exclusions, data ownership and exit — decide whether the relationship works. Here is what to read carefully and what to negotiate.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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The vulnerabilities used against mid-sized organizations are rarely novel. They are usually months old, publicly catalogd, and patched by the vendor before the attack. Understanding why the patch did not get applied is more useful than understanding the vulnerability.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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Almost every provider advertises round-the-clock support. Far fewer will tell you who is awake, what they are allowed to do at 3am, and what happens when the answer is "nobody, until Monday". Here is how to read the claim.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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Most monitoring degrades into noise within a year. A full account of how we decide what wakes a person, what raises a ticket, what is merely recorded — and the database constraint that stops one flapping disk producing forty tickets overnight.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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A complete account of how we move a live system onto new infrastructure: what we check before we start, the order operations have to happen in, the failure modes that cost people their weekend, and the one step we will not automate.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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Mid-market companies lose enterprise deals at the security questionnaire, usually over things that were cheap to fix a year earlier. What reviewers really check, which answers end a deal, and how to be ready before the questionnaire arrives.
Adam Leveille, CEO & Principal Consultant
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