Network Innovation Solutions Blog

Best Practices to Protect Your Business This Season

As the holiday season approacheds, businesses face increased cyber threats. Cybercriminals often take advantage of heightened e-commerce activity, distracted employees, and outdated systems. Amidst all the holiday rush, those in IT work tirelessly to safeguard the systems that keep businesses
running smoothly. This guide will highlight some essential cybersecurity practices to help your IT team protect your business during this season of increased risks.

Implement Regular Patch Management

Cyber attackers constantly exploit known vulnerabilities in outdated software. Ensuring timely patch updates and system maintenance is one of the simplest yet most effective ways to enhance security.
According to Gartner, 70% of breaches exploit known vulnerabilities that could have been patched. By prioritizing patch management, you help your IT team protect critical systems.

Prioritize Data Backups

Data loss can be catastrophic, especially during the busy holiday season when operational downtime impacts both revenue and customer trust. By maintaining consistent data backups, you can ensure that you can recover operations quickly from any potential attacks. IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report indicates that businesses

Enforce Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

Human error remains one of the top causes of security breaches. Regular security awareness training can reduce the risk of employees falling victim to phishing scams or malware. According to Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report, 85% of data breaches involve a human element, including phishing or mistakes. Empower your employees with knowledge, and you empower your business as well. with proper backup and disaster recovery plans save an average of $1.23 million per breach.

Monitor Systems with Proactive Tools

Real-time monitoring tools help identify and neutralize threats before they become critical. Automated monitoring provides insights into suspicious activities and network anomalies. As stated by Forrester Research, businesses that use proactive monitoring tools experience 40% fewer security incidents. Investing in these tools is a way to show gratitude to your IT team, helping them protect your business better.

Prioritizing your business starts with digital security. This holiday season, one of the best ways to enhance your business's security is by partnering with a trusted expert in IT security. By providing the tools and resources they need, you empower your team to protect your business from potential threats. Implementing these best practices and investing in effective security solutions can significantly reduce risks and safeguard your operations during the busy season. To learn more or discuss how our expertise can strengthen your IT support and security, reach out to us today

Building Awareness to Strengthen Your Digital Defenses

Every October, individuals and organizations around the world observe Cybersecurity Awareness Month, a campaign designed to promote the importance of online safety and cybersecurity best practices. Since its inception in 2004 by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the National Cyber Security Alliance, Cybersecurity Awareness Month has grown into a global movement. The goal is to empower all people to protect their digital platforms through the sharing of knowledge.

Why Cybersecurity Awareness Matters

Nowadays, nearly every aspect of our lives depends on some sort of computing. Whether it be online banking or health care services, social media, or shopping, keeping your digital world secure has to be a priority. This isn’t always easy. The more people use online resources to work, communicate, and play, the more opportunists will look to get between people and steal and corrupt data. Phishing, ransomware, data breaches, and identity theft are just a few examples of the methods cybercriminals use.

Cybersecurity Awareness Month has become an important part of the shared responsibilities we all have to do our best to keep information safe. The fact is cyberthreats can target anyone, anywhere, making it essential for everyone to do their best to learn, and adhere to, solid cybersecurity strategies. This includes building and using strong passwords to implement multi-factor authentication, every small action can collectively add to the overall security of people all around the world.

How to Better “Secure Our World”

This year’s theme is Secure Our World and focuses on these four steps to improve the security of accounts:

• Enable strong authentication - Users will want to deploy multi-factor authentication (MFA) wherever possible. This extra layer of protection ensures that even if a password is compromised, attackers cannot easily access your accounts.
• Recognize and report phishing - Phishing attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated. It’s important to recognize suspicious correspondence and report them if you are in a position to do so.
• Update software regularly - Outdated software can leave you vulnerable to cyberattacks. Make sure your operating systems, apps, and antivirus programs are up to date.
• Create strong passwords - Probably the most important step is to create and use unique, complex passwords for each account and avoid using easily identifiable information in those passwords.

The Future of Cybersecurity

Unfortunately, even as security technology and strategies evolve, so do the methods used by cybercriminals. This is why ongoing education, training, and testing have become extremely important. Cybersecurity Awareness Month serves as an annual reminder that cyberthreats are real, and staying informed and proactive is the best defense against being a victim of hackers, scammers, and other opportunists.

If your business is at the point where you’re thinking about hiring a fulltime IT tech, congratulations! Having enough consistent needs to fill this role means you’ve worked hard and made good decisions that drove business growth. Our best advice? Don’t stop now!

Moving forward with hiring requires a lot of analysis to avoid major consequences down the line, though. One of the biggest decisions whether you’ll hire someone directly or use a third-party MSP (Managed Service Provider). In this article, we’ll get into the specifics of both scenarios.

Cyber criminals don’t just slip into your network with the help of some serious hacking skills.  In fact, there’s a much simpler way to do that... through your employees. 

Social engineering is a tactic hackers are using more and more frequently to infiltrate systems.  It involves a variety of approaches that focus on manipulating employees to drop standard security protocols.  And if you expect to protect your data these days, then you’ll have to take the necessary steps to educate and train your employees on how to detect and avoid these approaches. 

At this point, it’s simply a matter of time before some company somewhere asks you to change your password because something somewhere down the line got hacked. In fact, in June of 2016, Fortune Magazine said, “It’s almost fashionable to become the victim of a data breach these days, or at least you’d think so, given the who’s-who list of companies announcing them.” In other words, everyone from Fortune 500 companies and hospitals to small businesses and tech giants are experiencing the rippling impact of a data breach. 

The password isn’t nearly as secure as it used to be. Hackers have begun to take advantage of extremely powerful solutions designed to brute force their way into accounts by using software to rapidly guessing thousands of passwords per second, making it extraordinarily difficult to prepare yourself for them.

What’s the best way to guarantee that passwords aren’t going to be the downfall of your company? A great start is by taking a close look at password best practices and two-factor authentication.

How much does your business rely on technology to keep your organization running forward? As business technology becomes more complex, it’s becoming increasingly popular for organizations to have their own internal IT departments to manage and maintain it. Yet, small businesses don’t often have the necessary funds for such a feat. How can your company afford quality IT service? You can start by pursuing managed IT solutions from a managed service provider.

Despite what detractors say, regulations are in place for good reason. They typically protect individuals from organizational malfeasance. Many of these regulations are actual laws passed by a governing body and cover the entire spectrum of the issue, not just the data involved. The ones that have data protection regulations written into them mostly deal with the handling and protection of sensitive information. For organizations that work in industries covered by these regulations there are very visible costs that go into compliance. Today, we look at the costs incurred by these organizations as a result of these regulations, and how to ascertain how they affect your business.

Profitability is less the measure of being able to turn a profit, and more the measure of how much profit you can make. For the successful small business, the integration of technology can dictate what kind of annual margins you are looking at. For the new company, however, it can be something even more critical: the difference between setting a course for success, or wallowing in failure. Today we analyze the cost difference between hosting your IT in-house, or choosing to host it in the cloud.

The late American author Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.” Written in the 20th century, it has been put in practice by 21st century businesses. As the Internet has grown, the amount of companies expanded, and the amount of data that those companies collect has grown exponentially, especially now that there is a market for such data.

Data security isn’t a matter to be taken lightly, as too many businesses have found out the hard way. Unfortunately, there are far too many simple ways to correct common security issues - enough that it’s foolish not to do so. We’ll review a few ways to fix security issues, after discussing one of, if not the, most egregious security failings in modern history.

The cloud has proven to be an extremely useful tool for the modern business. Not only does it provide anywhere-anytime access to applications, processing, storage, et al; it also delivers those products as a service, allowing you to budget for recurring costs rather than major upfront ones. This provides your organization with functional, supported, and secure computing environments that eliminate a lot of the support costs that traditional computing environments require. It sounds like a perfect scenario for small and large businesses alike, but things aren’t always what they seem, as a lot of cloud users have found that they have incurred several hidden costs by using cloud platforms. Today, we take a look at these hidden costs.

There is no question that a small business can benefit from technology, as has been proven time and time again. However, an issue can arise if a business bites off more than it can chew, so to speak, and ultimately creates a spike in costs. A responsible business owner will resist this temptation and prioritize the solutions they need over the ones they want - building profitability and generating capital needed to make other improvements.

In this blog, we’ll examine some of the implementations that can deliver a good return on investment to a small business.

Keeping Sensitive Data Secured is a Responsibility Businesses Can’t Take Lightly

Businesses collect and are asked to protect more data than ever before, and in many cases, they are responsible for maintaining all this data. The more data a business handles, the more risk it takes on, as it also needs to keep that data secure. At Network Innovation Solutions, we can present strategies to improve data security and prioritize organizational and individual data privacy.

When it comes to personal or business data security, you must know how to spot bogus links. Recognizing fake email links that might lead to fraudulent pages is a challenge for many people. The fact that hackers are using more advanced methods makes it worse for all of us. That is why beefing up your communication security is very important for your business data.

When it comes to IT security solutions, there are a large number of threats facing us. Modern-day communication technology has opened up a massive amount of potential for people; however, it also poses a significant threat in terms of security. Threats are increasingly advanced as time passes by, and this is endangering the safety and security of our data and private information. That’s why we have come up with this blog. We want to bring light to the dangers of modern security and how you can get professional support to avoid these risks. 

Take the opportunity to prepare your business and team to prevent cyberattacks.

When it comes to using the internet, you know how things can go wrong. We all like to think that our online activities are safe and protected. However, the reality is that hacking methods are increasingly creative to get people to clicking fake links. As such, today, we're here to draw attention to the horror stories that occur when people fall for bogus email links and the best tips for fake link prevention. 

You’re ready to purchase a BDR. You’ve done all of the research, found a company you’re confident in and are excited to finally have peace of mind. Now, you start thinking about exactly what you need to back up. Is all of your data necessary or should you salvage a little server room? Most businesses want to back up everything - you never know when you’ll need it, but sometimes that is cost prohibitive.   

Should’ve seen it coming…

You’ve invested in a BDR and now sleep more soundly at night, but the hardware itself is really only part of the solution. You want to ensure your provider does preventative maintenance, periodic testing, multi-location storage, and staff training. Having these things in place will help avoid downtime if the worst happens.