Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

For the modern business a lot of time is spent focusing on network security. The theory behind this action is that there are all types of threats that could be trying to get into your computer network. At a college, you’d expect that, since so much sensitive data, including personal, medical, and financial information--as well as intellectual property--is stored on college computers/servers, that the diligence of IT administrators would be even more conspicuous.

With Microsoft betting on Windows 10 to be their #1 OS for the foreseeable future, it is important for them to be able to sufficiently protect their users from the growing threats looking to make life difficult for businesses from all over the world. Today, we will take a look at Windows 10 Enterprise Security, and how it works to protect businesses from harm.

Messaging applications are critical to the success of the modern business, but it’s important that they don’t compromise security in the pursuit of convenience. There is a specific set of criteria involved with ensuring that your chosen messaging applications are secure.

2018 has been the year of the hack. The problem, so was 2017, 2016, and so on… Marriott International has announced that they have had what could be the second largest data leak in history. They are saying that they are responsible for a data breach that leaked some 500 million records over a five-year span.

Data security isn’t the easiest thing in the world to plan for, especially if your organization doesn’t have any dedicated security professionals on-hand. While protecting your data with traditional methods, like passwords, firewalls, and antivirus, is important, what measures are you taking to make sure a thief or hacker isn’t just walking into your office and making off with your technology?

When asked how one can prevent threats from attacking a business’ infrastructure, one of the first answers that we’d give is to ensure that all patches have been applied. Doing so will help to stop an attack from infecting your systems, if a patch has been successfully developed. Unfortunately, the recent spread of the BCMUPnP_Hunter botnet is evidence that not enough people are appropriately patching their systems.

When you think about your data security, what kind of solutions pop into mind? If you’re like many, you probably start thinking about passwords, firewalls, and antivirus, right? While these are all good things to have, you also have to consider the possibility that someone could break into your office and bypass all of these defenses, simply by picking up your server and walking out.

An email’s important, that much is clear fact - but you need to stay safe from an email attack.

If you use a computer today, there’s a fair chance that you have a Google account. The practicality that if offers with its comprehensive service offerings simply can’t be ignored. However, it is also important that a user’s, whether they utilize it for business or personal use, security isn’t ignored either.

Mobile devices - like smartphones, tablets, and the like - are expected to be used by 2.87 billion people by 2020. That’s a lot of devices, with a good portion of them contributing to business operations. Unfortunately, that’s also a lot of potential security issues if the right preparations aren’t taken in advance.

When all is said and done, your business’ success relies in no small part on how secure you keep it, and in order to be secure, you need to know what threats are apt to target your business. Below are four of the biggest concerns that you need to be sure that your security implementations address.

It is no secret that kids these days have more access to technology than any generation before them. While this access can truly help to enrich their lives if leveraged properly, it can also have serious ramifications if it isn’t checked.

With all the stories in the news about data breach after data breach, it’s easy to get the idea that the only threats to your organization are those that are trying to break in. This can be a dangerous oversight--one that could cost your business’ future. If you ignore the possibilities, you could very well be putting your organization in jeopardy. We’ll discuss some of the major internal dangers that your business could face.

By now everyone knows about ransomware, the dastardly strand of malware that encrypts data (or the drives it’s stored on) and sends the user a message demanding payment in a certain amount of time before the data is deleted forever. To add a little more menace to an already stressful situation, the message includes a countdown clock. If it sounds like a bad situation, rest assured it is. How could it get worse you ask? Simple, make it more difficult to stop.

There’s one major reason why email is the preferred method of spreading threats like ransomware and other types of malicious software. The sheer number of messages that can be sent through email on its own increases the odds that a user will click on the wrong link or download the wrong attachment. How can you know the legitimacy of any message you receive in your email inbox?

The 2017 Equifax leak was a disastrous scenario, but recent revelations have discovered that even more victims were affected than was previously thought. Nobody ever wants to hear this kind of news, but there is an upside to this that shouldn’t be ignored - learning from the mistake. We’ll start with a refresher on what happened exactly, and what these new developments mean for your organization.

Here’s the thing about IT security: it requires a little more than a decent firewall and a reasonably-strong password. We talk a lot about how to ensure that your business’ network stays a top priority, and the best way to do that is to implement what we call a Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution. An enterprise security system like a UTM can provide a considerable improvement for the way you protect your organization, but even something as simple as a little bit of user error could bypass these protocols.

The Internal Revenue Service has declared to tax professionals that they must take extra steps toward protecting the information of taxpayers. Certified Public Accountant (CPA) firms, whether they are large organizations or small businesses, hold much information that could be used by hackers and identity thieves, which makes them major targets during tax season.

Data loss, on any scale, is an organizational nightmare. Not only do you have to restore data, any lost productivity that comes as a result of the data loss incident makes it difficult on the budget. That’s only scratching of the surface of how serious data loss can be.

Losing a smartphone can be a problem for anyone. For the modern business, it can really cause issues. Mobile devices are notorious for housing a lot of personal information, which makes them extraordinarily dangerous to lose track of. How much is at stake with mobile devices going missing; and, what kind of information is stored on these devices that makes them so dangerous to misplace?