Today on the Edge of Innovation, we are talking with Enza Lilley, a doula from “A Mommy’s Friend Doula Service” about her experiences as a Doula and small business owner on the North Shore of Boston.
Show Notes
Enza Lilley’s Website: www.amommysfriend.com
Enza Lilley in the Boston Voyage Online Magazine
Link to SaviorLabs’ Free Assessment
Sections
A Mommy’s Friend” – Searching for a Doula
What’s in a Name
Doula-ing From a Technology Point of View
WannaCry, Petya and Ransomeware – Why Protecting your Website is Important
Why Small Businesses Need to Back Up Data Too
Be Proactive With Data Backups
What’s IT Matter to Me?
Paul: Well hi! I’m here today with Enza Lilley.
Enza: Hello!
Paul: She’s headquartered, or really works geographically out of the North Shore of Massachusetts into Boston and she helps moms bring new people into the world.
You are obviously geographically located, you know, so you basically go a certain geography. How far do you go from here?
Enza: Usually within 30 miles.
Paul: So we’re on the North Shore of Boston. So will you go into Boston?
Enza: I will go into Boston. I do charge a little bit more to go into Boston, but I do. And sometimes you can find me in New Hampshire. I have done Catholic Medical Center there and Exeter. Not very often.
Paul: Right. So do you think about it from a point of view of the hospital or the birthing center? Is that sort of the anchor points for you?
Enza: Yes, yes.
Paul: So if somebody called you from Lexington, are you immediately thinking, “Well, what hospital is in Lexington?” Is that how you think about it?
Enza: That’s how I think about it.
Paul: Interesting. Do you do marketing?
Enza: Very little. My website speaks volumes. I occasionally will put my card up in coffee shops. I have done the baby bash, the annual Danvers Baby Bash, which I’ll do again this year. But that’s really all I do in marketing.
Paul: Interesting. That’s cool. Are you fairly busy? I mean, it sounds like you’re booked.
Enza: Oh, I’m very booked.
Paul: So I guess what we’re saying is if you’re going to have a baby or thinking about having a baby, call Enza first.
Enza: Don’t wait. Don’t wait till you’re 36 weeks pregnant to call for either me or any doula. I’m already pretty much booked until the end of September.
Paul: Wow. So what would happen if somebody came to you and said, “I really want to hire you.” Obviously, they’re doing it a little late. You refer them to somebody maybe?
Enza: If I’m really crazy, I’ll take them on. But most of the time, yes, I have a couple of other doulas that I will refer them out to.
Paul: Okay. So now are there professional organizations for doulas?
Enza: There are.
Paul: And are you a member of those?
Enza: I am currently not a member.
Finding “A Mommy’s Friend” – Searching for a Doula
Paul: But then if you want to search for a doula, what do you do? We’ve talked about your website, and what’s the URL for it?
Enza: It’s www.AMommysFriend.com.
Paul: Okay. And it’s m-o-m-m—
Enza: —y-s… Yes.
What’s in a Name?
Paul: Okay. A mommy’s friend. Okay. Not m-o-m-m-i-e-s apostrophe, hyphen, dash. So AMommysFriend.com. What’s with the name, just in that it encompasses that, or where’d that come from?
Enza: So, years ago, I was trying to come up with a name for my business and I was asking around, and trying to come up with different things. And a client of mine said, “I really don’t care what you call yourself, but to me, you’ll always be a mommy’s friend.” And I thought, I like that because I do become their friend. I think it describes me. I’m loyal. I am dependable, committed. I’m a friend.
Paul: Yeah. That’s cool. So, what if you’re looking for a doula, alright, you can go to AMommysFriend. What happens when you search for a doula. I mean, is it a commercial business? Or is it individuals like you? Because I imagine you have a choice if there are. I can go and get a doctor. I can go to a hospital, or I can go to a single practice, or maybe, three doctors that work together. Is that the same in the doula world?
Enza: So there are some bigger corporations that you have them… You have a corporate, like a specific corporation who will have doulas and lactation consultants, and it’s kind of like a one-stop shop. There are a few of those in the area. But mostly, we’re just self-employed. We’re one-man doula. How do you say that? One doula?
Paul: One-doula doulas.
Enza: One-doula doulas.
Paul: Doing doulas. Do— do…
Enza: Doula doulas.
Doula-ing From a Technology Point of View
Paul: So let’s talk about your business a little bit from a technology point of view. We helped you with your website and again, you made it very easy because you’ve got a great personality. You’ve got a great story to tell. You’ve got very engaged visitors. So, you know, you go to Amazon, and it’s like, “Well, do I want to buy that, or do I want to buy that?” And it’s very easy for you to passively just click off of that and go somewhere else.
When you’re considering a relationship with somebody that’s going to be there at your birth, it’s like, well that’s a little more intense. So, that’s a huge benefit to your website is that when you have that very motivated buyer or person engaged, we can present data to them, and they’re going to enough consume it. One of the most difficult things on the web right now is sort of our attention deficit disorder. You know, we always want the fastest things. Twitter is 140 characters. We want it all summarized, and we want to be able to think we’ve got it and go on. That’s not how people are wired to be, a million miles wide, and a millimeter thick. We’re wired like I think you’re discovering, and the value you offer is the depth of relationship.
And so, it’s key that a website communicates that.
WannaCry, Petya and Ransomeware – Why Protecting your Website is Important
Paul: Now you have heard, rightfully so, that there’s all these malware out there. These particular ones we’re talking about are WannaCry and Petya. So there’s these ransomwares out there, malware, specifically a ransomware called WannaCry and Petya. There’s many others as well. If you go to a website. You click on something. It might be an image or whatever it is or a link, and the process of doing that installs a piece of malicious software on your computer. And this is why it’s very important to have up-to-date antivirus and antimalware because hopefully your antivirus and antimalware will detect that and stop it.
The problem is there’s these things called zero-day exploits, which come out right now. It’s the zero day. So the virus company hasn’t had a chance to write the block for it. And so that’s what we’re seeing is a few weeks ago, we had WannaCry, which was an exploit based on some research and some weaponization that the NSA did. They created software that allowed them to infiltrate computers. WikiLeaks leaked that information and the details of how to create that, and it turned out it was an unpatched hole in a Microsoft operating system. Microsoft was very frustrated with the NSA because if they had told them about it, they would have patched it. But the NSA is in a spy game, so they don’t want to close the door. You know, it’s like you left the window open in your basement, and nobody knows about it. It’s not that obvious, but that’s effectively what it is. And so the NSA could crawl in through that window and do anything they wanted in the house.
And so WannaCry made this available to the world at large. Microsoft immediately patched it. But the problem is how does that patch get installed. Not everybody puts their patches on. Not everybody is concerned about the hygiene of their computer because it’s just out of sight, out of mind. They don’t know.
And what happened is a lot of people got bitten by WannaCry. Now WannaCry was written in such a way that if it got into your basement, it could use all the secret tunnels to all the other basements in town. Okay? It could literally connect to another computer connected to your Wi-Fi or to your LAN and infect that computer. And then on and on and on.
Well, so what? It infected it. Well, what they did was, there’s this whole thing going on now called ransomware where I go into your data, and I encrypt it and hold it hostage, that you cannot decrypt it. So it’s scrambled with a secret decoder ring that they haven’t given you. Then they pop up a message, and they say, “Oh, by the way, we’ve just encrypted all your data. And if you want to get it back, you have to pay us.” Now, 10 years ago, if you said, “How am I going to pay you? Because if I give you my credit card… First of all, I don’t want to give my credit card to a thief.” And if you send you a check, I’m sending it to somebody, and they go, and I’ll go to arrest them.
Well the appearance of Bitcoin, which is a somewhat anonymous way to transfer value, transfer finance, money, has come out. So now I can pay something to somebody by sending it to an address, and I can’t know where it goes after that. I can, but it’s very difficult to track down how it actually gets in the pocket of the criminal.
And so Bitcoin has done some really cool stuff. But it’s also enabled criminals to be able to extort money and not be explicitly caught, you know. Because you have the movie where you’ve got a hostage situation — bring me the bag of money — somebody has to physically pick up that money, that cash, and we can have a helicopter watching them, and then follow them to where they’re going. So that now has been mitigated by Bitcoin. I can’t put a helicopter up there watching where the money is going. And so it’s made ransomware a really attractive way to do things. So, the Petya Virus, which is fascinating, uses the exact same threat vector that the WannaCry used. Well, wait a minute. WannaCry came out a month ago or two months ago. Why didn’t the people patch it? Well, why didn’t they?
I don’t know why, you know, and so it’s sort of like, I come to your house, and I say, “Hey, your basement window is open in the back.”
And you say, “Oh, my gosh. That’s right.”
You know, and then I go to your neighbor’s. “Your basement window is open in the back.”
You lock yours. And you going to call the guy over to come over and fix the glass and fix it. Your neighbor didn’t do anything. So now there’s another exploit. We killed WannaCry, another exact same exploit with actually some more stuff added on. And it goes in and infects your neighbor’s basement.
Why Small Businesses Need to Back Up Data Too
Enza: So what you’re really saying is that everyone is susceptible to this. It’s not just targeted towards large corporations or large businesses.
Paul: Right. Yeah. There was some news reports where they were talking about this morning, Merck was targeted. They may have been targeted. There is a way to target things and try to do that and try to exploit a target. But most of it is just happening by circumstance, just propagation, just happening. People go places. Something bad happens. And the bad thing happens because they didn’t put all the protections in place.
Enza: So for us small business owners, my fellow doulas… So we just have to make sure that our security updates are where they need to be.
Paul: Well, that’s one thing. But the real important part here is you need to have a backup of your data. And now, different people understand or hear the word backup and interpret it differently. A backup does not mean a hard disk connected to your computer with a copy of your files on it. It’s technically not a backup. It is a second copy. But the issue is with WannaCry or, Petya, it will encrypt those files as well, because it’s connected. So in order for a backup to be a backup, it has to be separate and disconnected.
So if you’re going to make a copy of it — let’s put it in the simplest terms — you buy an external hard drive. You copy all of the files over to it. You disconnect that hard drive and put it in a bank vault. That is technically a backup because if the place where the computer is ceases to exist, oh, no big deal. I have my backup. Whereas, if it’s right next to your computer, and there’s a fire, the backup just burned up. So it’s not just a semantic argument about the word but really what is a true backup. No, that’s a copy of your files. A backup is a little bit more. So you say, “Well, wait a minute. It’s a real hassle to do that, take that disk, and move it to the bank every week or every day.” Uh, and yeah. It is. And that’s why most people don’t do good backups.
So now, given the speed of the Internet that we have in our homes and businesses, we can do online backup. So online backup’s great. Because what it can do is backup everything by the moment. So you go and type a letter in, and the minute you save it, it’s being backed up. But that’s still not good enough because I go and type a letter. I save it. I get the ransomware. It encrypts that files and backups up the file to the cloud. It’s encrypted on the cloud.
A key point of backup in the cloud is that you have to have multiple versions. And most of them offer that. We recommend Backblaze almost universally. So with Backblaze, you go to the web interface, you can say, “Okay, letter to Paul.” I can bring that up and it said, “Oh, you have a version from this day and a version from that day.” So the one on Thursday is when I got hit with the ransomware. That’s encrypted. But if I go back to the Wednesday version, it’s not encrypted. So at most, you lose a day’s worth of work. Or even not even that because it’s doing it continuously. So you should loose almost no work.
So all of that, all of those words, is the key is to have good backups that are up to date. You can feel great about saying I have an external hard drive, and I put it on the shelf next to my computer. That’s sort of a backup. As long as it’s disconnected it becomes a backup. My problem with that is that if there’s a fire, you don’t have that protection. So when you say, “Well, okay, I have an office. My computer is there, and then I’ll bring the disk home.” That’s a true backup. You know. But then you sort of forget. You’re busy. You’re running out. “Oh, I forgot to do the backup.” You really don’t want backups that are dependent on humans. You want to make sure that they’re just happening.
Enza: So what if you have been attacked by this ransomware?
Paul: You have to pay for it usually.
Enza: There’s no other way to get around it.
Paul: No. There have been ransomwares that people have figured out how to decrypt. Okay, so it is possible to do that. So for this particular ransomware, you have to send a certain amount of Bitcoin, a number that it indicates, a Bitcoin and a wallet to a certain email address which is no longer working. So if you’ve got encrypted, right now you’re in a no-man’s land because you can’t get your data back because the people were taking the money, their email address got shut down. So how do you get to the people that have the key to unlock your data?
Be Proactive With Data Backups
So it is so much easier just to be proactive about this stuff. I mean Backblaze for individual users, it’s $50 a year. It backs up unlimited amount of data. In businesses, we use that for all of our business clients for every user in the business has Backblaze on their machine. We also back up servers and all that kind of stuff. But there’s been too many cases where people are supposed to store things on the server and they don’t. And it’s the important spreadsheet or correspondence that they happen to have on their computer. And it’s now gone.
We’ve never been bitten by any of our clients getting ransomware or malware in that way, which hopefully will remain the case because we’re pretty diligent about patches. But, if there’s other people listening to us out there, you’ve gotta have a good backup. And I can’t sing the praises of Backblaze high enough. They’re just great. There’s other ones — Carbonate, Mozy… I’ve found that Backblaze just works so well.
Enza: So placing something on Google Drive is…
Paul: Well it depends. If you have Google Drive and you have the Google Drive app installed, that will encrypt it. It will encrypt everything on Google Drive. Because, if you notice, you just… When you save something on Google Drive, you don’t browse to a website. You go to that folder and just drop something in. Same thing with OneDrive, the same thing with DropBox and Box.com. All of those have the ability to sync to your computer. And if you’re using that sync, you go get the ransomware, it will encrypt everything there, and then push it up.
Now some of them — DropBox and, I think, Box — has versions. So you could go back. But I don’t know about Google Drive, if it has versions for everything. So that’s something to be concerned with. But even that, there is this assumption by people that, “Oh, I’m storing it in the cloud. I don’t need backup.”
That is not true. There hasn’t been that many catastrophes with online storage, but there could be. And they are not offering redundant, resilient storage as a general part of that. There will be the day when, “Oh, we’ve lost this and… sorry.” And we’ll point out in our contract where, “See? It says we weren’t guaranteeing it.” So it’s really incumbent upon you as a computer user to make your own backups.
So have I scared you?
Enza: I just need to go home and make sure that all of my security updates are…
Paul: Put a bag over your head. Right?
Enza: I need to make sure I’m patched.
Paul: That’s right. Do that. Have the doula do that.
Enza: Doula do.
Paul: Doula do. Dudly do the right. Sorry.
Paul: So we’ve been talking with Enza Lilley of A Mommy’s Friend doula…What’s the actual title? A Mommy’s Friend, period?
Enza: Mommy’s Friend Doula Service.
Paul: Doula service. Okay. And, she’s headquartered, or really, works geographically out of the North Shore, Massachusetts into Boston. And she helps moms bring new people into the world. Is that fair?
Enza: That’s fair. Thank you for having me.
Paul: Absolutely. It’s been a pleasure, and look for her, her book, and you were recently in Voyager Boston?
Enza: Yes. Boston Voyager.
Paul: Boston Voyager. Yes.
Enza: Boston Voyager online magazine.
Paul: Okay. Cool. So if you want to get some insight into that and your website is aMommysFriend.com.
Enza: Correct.
Paul: M-o-m-m-y-s friend.
Enza: Correct.
Paul: Okay. Well, thank you.
Enza: Thank you.