The Connection, Inc Blog

Nowadays, it is crucial that you make security a top priority. With the right approach, it not only saves you massive headaches, but also a considerable amount of capital—particularly if you leverage the appropriate solutions for SMBs. As a managed service provider, we can ensure that you implement the appropriate IT solutions to maximize the return on your security investment.

Your business' IT security effectiveness relies heavily on how well your technology works. With this in mind, educating your staff on their responsibility to safeguard your business’ digital assets is important. Let’s explore the key priorities businesses need to consider to establish a robust security training platform that works to protect those assets.

The effectiveness of your business’ IT security is largely contingent on how your IT operates. As a result, it is extremely important to ensure that your staff understands the role they play in protecting your business’ assets. This month, we discuss what you should prioritize when putting together a security training platform; an essential part of any business’ attempts to keep their IT secure. 

Cyberattacks can cost businesses a lot of money. They’re also more prevalent today than ever before. It seems you can’t go a couple of news cycles without hearing about some organization that has been hacked or scammed and it’s resulted in the sensitive data the organization holds being sold online, vast operational downtime, or worse. For this reason, many organizations have deliberately built up their cybersecurity infrastructure, enhanced their policies, and invested in training to ensure that they aren’t the next victim. Unfortunately, this attention doesn’t always work. 

Virtual reality has been one of the coolest technologies available for over a decade. Today’s applications make it an exciting piece of tech for individuals; and you’ve seen that market expand (especially during the pandemic) with Facebook, Sony, HTC, and HP coming to market with a VR offering. The question we wanted to look at is how VR could be used at a business like yours.

When businesses onboard new employees, they typically have a series of qualifications they need applicants to meet in order to get to the interview process. Once they interview and are chosen from a list of applicants, the new hire does his/her entrance training and then it’s time to get to work. If your business doesn’t have the right training platforms in place, however, this process can take a lot longer than you’d like. This month, we thought we’d take a bit to go over this process and how getting the right training protocols in place upfront can have a positive effect on the way your new employees hit the ground running.

Are you one of the countless people who find themselves performing repetitive tasks like moving files around, working with people on the phone, navigating email, or updating information? It’s easy to find yourself in a situation where one wrong click can create a plethora of issues, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of network security.

No one said business was going to be easy. One of the most frustrating aspects can be employee complacency. In fact, with the advent of the Internet and with more jobs trending toward service, you are finding that people are constantly looking outside their current organization for professional development. With employee turnover costing businesses everywhere substantial capital, retaining your proficient employees must be a priority.

In the course of doing business, sometimes the mundane and repetitive tasks, or the responsibilities that employees don’t necessarily always consider to be part of their jobs, can be overlooked. Like any other business, yours needs people to be vigilant to ensure that it isn’t the victim of a phishing attack. If your team isn’t well-trained, or if it isn’t engaged in the fight against cybercrime, you may find that your business is a sitting duck.

It can be a real head-scratcher when one of your otherwise well-performing employees routinely falls for the simulated phishing attacks that you roll out as a part of your cybersecurity awareness strategy. For all intents and purposes, the person is a great employee, but when it comes to acting with caution, they fail. If you’ve made a point to prioritize your staff’s working knowledge of phishing attacks, do you replace this employee? We’ll take a look at it today.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Bell telephone companies were making a mint off of offering the ability to call your friends and family that lived outside your predefined region, charging up to $2 per minute (during peak hours) for long distance calls. The problem for many people was that these regions kept shrinking. Some people decided to combat this costly system by reverse engineering the system of tones used to route long-distance calls, thus routing their own calls without the massive per-minute charges demanded by long-distance providers. These people were called Phreakers, and they were, in effect, the first hackers.

When you hear us speak the world “cloud,” it’s not the fluffy white forms soaring overhead. The cloud that we refer to are computing systems that are delivered to you through an Internet connection. The popularity and demand for cloud services has led both ordinary consumers and businesses alike to seek them out. Despite this demand, in the United States alone, there are over 500,000 IT jobs available. This suggests that there may be a shortage of workers with the requisite skillset and can provide a unique incentive to join the industry as to take advantage of such massive growth.

They say that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and matters of cyber security are no exception. Threats will often follow trends, and so by reviewing what has happened in the past, we may be able to glean some insight into what will be important in the future.

If 2016 was any indication, there are a few things that will be of most concern to IT professionals and end users.

Ensuring All Endpoints Have Appropriate Security Measures
It’s staggering to consider how many end points any given business could have, each providing a route in for threat actors. Between company-provided devices, personal mobile devices, and Internet of Things devices, there are plenty of opportunities for a company to be attacked.

As a result, as 2017 progresses, businesses must be aware of what threats exist, as well as better prepared to protect themselves against them. This includes strategies that ensure your organization’s digital protections are properly maintained while remaining cognizant of physical security best practices. Pairing encryption and access control, as well as mobile device management, can create a much safer environment for your data.

Getting Back to Basics With Security and End User Education
While it may sometimes be tempting to focus on the massive attacks and breaches that too-often dominate the headlines, no business can afford to devote their full attention to those vulnerabilities and overlook the more common threats. This is primarily because once they do, they become exponentially more vulnerable to these attacks through their lack of awareness and preparation.

Part of being prepared for the threats of the coming weeks and months is to make sure that your employees are also up to speed where security is concerned. Educating them on best practices before enforcing these practices can help to shore up any vulnerabilities you may have and maintain your network security. This includes restricting employee access to certain websites, requiring passwords of appropriate strength, and encouraging your employees to be mindful of exactly what they’re clicking on.

Continuing to Improve Security Measures
Finally, it is important to remember that implementing security features isn’t a one-time activity. Threats will grow and improve in order to overcome existing security measures, and so if they are going to remain effective, these security measures must be improved as well.

While regulatory requirements can provide an idea of what security a network should feature, they shouldn’t be seen as the endpoint. Instead, those requirements should be the bare minimum that you implement, along with additional measures to supplement them.

2016 saw many IT security issues. The Connection, Inc is out to ensure a safer 2017 with comprehensive solutions to alleviate you network security concerns. For more information, reach out to us at (732) 291-5938.

If you have an internal IT department, chances are that they’re functioning in a similar manner to a help desk team. They provide technology support for your less-adept employees, or those who encounter errors that they’re unable to resolve. Chances are that your IT department could use a hand every now and then, so here are a few ways you can lighten their help desk workload to free up time for more efficient purposes.

Invest in Employee Education
Have you ever encountered the problem of employees not knowing how to use a new solution so they end up asking IT too many questions? This can eat up a significant amount of time and resources that you can’t afford to waste. Yet, you can’t let your team handle their own IT issues; not without first educating them about how to best approach the problem.

One way that you can address this problem is by educating your employees on basic best practices, including email inbox management, network security, and so on. The more time that you invest in training your employees on how to be autonomous--without the help of IT--the more time that you can save in the long run. Plus, this kind of professional development is beneficial for your employees, too.

Set Up A Documentation Center
Have you ever resolved a problem that’s been asked multiple times, to the point where it just gets frustrating and time-consuming to answer the same question over and over again? This is often the case with IT support. In times like this, it would be helpful if you had a center where you can direct users who might be having trouble with basic issues that are frequently encountered. This is what we call a documentation center. If you have one, your techs can simply send a link to the file containing instructions on how to fix a basic problem.

Outsource IT Support
One of the easiest ways that your business can help your help desk is by outsourcing some responsibilities to a managed service provider. In most cases, your organization will have to focus on one of two responsibilities. You will either focus on management and maintenance of your IT, like applying patches and security updates, or you will focus on keeping operations moving forward. Yet, you’ll probably only have time for one of these, so you’ll be presented with a dilemma that’s not easy to resolve. Which one is more important?

In situations like these, The Connection, Inc is happy to help. Our trusted technicians can work with your team to ensure that they’re not held back by minor IT hiccups, while your in-house team can work toward implementing new and innovative solutions designed to improve operations. Or, if your in-house team wants to focus on providing support, we’re happy to innovate for you.

To learn more about our managed IT services, reach out to us at (732) 291-5938.