Telesys Voice and Data Blog

Your business relies on its data to succeed, which lends itself to the fact that your organization needs to have some sort of security measures put into place to guarantee its safety. 2018 is thought to be the year of ransomware, so it stands to reason that your business should prepare to deal with it. One of the best ways to deal with ransomware is to make sure that your company has a plan to restore data affected by said ransomware.

Email is a solution that needs to be protected, lest you expose important information to any onlookers while messages are in transit. Encryption is one of the key ways you can make sure that your messages are safe, but email hasn’t always used this method to secure messages. In fact, it wasn’t until relatively recently that encryption became a staple of the major email providers.

Social media might make it easy to stay connected, but it comes with a lot of negative side-effects--particularly in regard to security for both personal and professional use. If social media isn’t used properly, it could spell trouble for your organization. How can you foster proper social media usage so that your organization doesn’t suffer from poor security practices? It all starts by spreading awareness.

At the end of the day, do you shut down your computer or do you put it into sleep mode? Depending on what you need from your device the next day, you might want to consider which option benefits you the most. Here are some of the pros and cons of both approaches so that you can pick which one best suits your situation.

Do you have cords, wires, and adapters just sitting in a cupboard or drawer, with no purpose other than taking up space? Of course you do. The average person will replace old or broken devices, and find the new devices aren’t compatible with the old cables, leaving them stuffed in a junk drawer or in a random box that they’ve kept “just in case.” Every home or business has the same scenario going on: lots of wires and cables left over from all the e-waste they have discarded over the years. If you want to get rid of your unwanted cables, here are a couple of tips on how to do so properly.

Chances are you have a Google account, whether it’s for business or personal use. It’s more accessible today than ever before and provides a solid way to gain access to several important features and accounts. Considering how much can be done with a Google account, users forget that they can put their security and personal data at risk. Here are some ways that your Google account is at risk, as well as what you can do to fix it.

Unfortunately, one of the most effective defenses against phishing attacks has suddenly become a lot less dependable. This means that you and your users must be ready to catch these attempts instead. Here, we’ll review a few new attacks that can be included in a phishing attempt, and how you and your users can better identify them for yourselves.

Organizational cybersecurity has to be a priority for every business. These days, companies are getting hacked left and right and being exposed to some of the very worst malware ever created. Today, we will take a look at some cybercrime statistics that will put in perspective just how damaging cybercrime is.

Email is one of modern society’s best ways of staying in contact on both a business and personal level, but only if you’re effectively utilizing it. We’ll help you implement best practices and other methods to get the maximum benefit of your chosen email solution.

Password security is a tricky part of running a business. After all, it’s not just dealing with your own password, but those of the many employees all throughout your organization. In times like this, it’s helpful to provide them with a list of how to make the best passwords possible. Here are a couple of examples for what to do, as well as what you shouldn’t do, when building a proper password.

The traditional computing structure has been under siege by cloud computing for the past several years. More businesses than ever are seeing the value in cloud-hosted applications and infrastructure, and while that may not be a huge surprise, the perceptions that the cloud can solve any of your organizational computing problems depend largely on the needs of that endeavor. Today, we will take a look at successful small business cloud strategies and tell you why they find success.

Cloud for File Sharing
File sharing is the number one reason any small business moves some of their computing to the cloud. Cooperation is essential to small business success, and a cloud-based file sharing solution gives any small business near-ubiquitous access to data. This access allows work to be completed from multiple locations, giving the small businesses great benefit as it makes them competitive with larger organizations who have more people and more resources. This allows small businesses to take charge over more of the market than ever before, increasing revenues and promoting business growth.

Cloud for Communications
Another avenue a lot of small businesses are taking is using cloud-hosted communications services. Like many other cloud-hosted applications, it can save a company quite a bit of money switching to a VoIP system or public-cloud-hosted email solution. What about functionality? Cloud-hosted VoIP is actually a great solution for any organization looking for a feature-rich phone platform and wants to do away with their traditional phone bill. With feature-rich packages, any organization can get the customized VoIP solution that fits in their budget and provides them options for messaging, conferencing, and enterprise-level phone services.

Hosted email can provide a lot of benefits, as well. It eliminates the costs associated with the hosting and management of the email server, while providing users enhanced functionality that includes added message encryption, instant messaging integration, and much more.

Cloud for Storage
When you think about cloud storage, the first thing that must come to mind are the hundreds of gigabytes that many cloud storage providers just give away to anyone that signs up for their services; and the affordable options individual users can explore to gain a substantial amount of cloud storage space. The issue for small businesses is that public cloud hosted storage facilities don’t provide them the control over their data that most of them would like. This is why you see organizations building their own private cloud inhouse or collocate it to a data center where they have full control over the data.

The benefits of cloud storage are that data is accessible from anywhere, giving a business increased mobility that can definitely benefit them over time. The perceived lack of security that some organizations point to is largely in how their employees utilize the cloud interface, not the cloud environment itself, as it is likely highly encrypted. Many organizations have begun to use cloud storage interfaces for redundancy, making cloud-based backup and recovery solutions a fairly attractive option to secure backup files.

Cloud for Security
Nowadays, security is the top line-item for about any IT administrator. Since there is an abundance of threats every organization has to be cognizant of, it only makes sense that cybersecurity firms start offering their comprehensive network and cybersecurity services. In utilizing a SEaaS system IT administrators can leverage some of today’s most potent security solutions from the Internet. This provides a full cache of services to IT administrators.

Once you ascertain what threats you are up against, utilizing a Security as a service software will allow you to remote into any machine and set up high-end security services that can be customized to your organization's needs. These security services go a long way toward keeping software and hardware up to date with latest security permissions. There are options for anti-malware, content filtering, spam blocking, and more, making cloud security a good investment for the organization that depends on the Internet for their business.

The cloud has expanded to include almost any type of computing you can think of. For your business, it can be the answer to all questions your risk assessments have presented. For more information about hosted solutions and utility computing, call the IT professionals at Telesys Voice and Data today at (800) 588-4430.

You’ve used a mouse for years, but do you know of all the neat little tricks that it’s capable of? We’ll show you just how much you can get done with your mouse.

Physical security is more or less what it sounds like: security intended to protect the physical infrastructure that houses your business and your critical data. Many of the pieces of physical security will seem very familiar, even if you didn’t know the right terms for them.

Data security, always an important topic, has been made even more urgent by the Equifax data breach and the fact that 143 million users had their personal information stolen after entrusting it (or not) to Equifax. You need to consider what would happen if your business were on the receiving end of a data breach, and prepare to handle this truly unpleasant circumstance.

Some organizations want to better understand the process that they use to take backups of their data and restore them in the event of an emergency. This is great, because the value of being able to do so cannot (and should not) be understated. A proper data backup and disaster recovery system could be all that stands between prosperity and failure.

Putting together your workforce is something that requires painstaking attention to detail. You found workers who are willing to work as hard as possible to further your organization’s goals. Yet, you have to remember that even the most perfect employees are still human, and that they can make mistakes and can put the organization’s data at risk. User error is a common problem, and it is one of the most important things to keep in mind while you set up your information systems.

With technology being deployed to help businesses solve all manners of operational inefficiency, it’s often difficult to pinpoint what IT will work best for your business. Organizations of all types look to technology; and, at some point you need to ask yourself if your technology is set up to help reach your business’ potential. 

Just over a third (36 percent) of businesses don’t back up business data at all, and apparently this number isn’t keeping some IT providers up at night (not the case for us). Your businesses’ data is precious, irreplaceable, and extremely expensive to lose. Let’s talk about how delicate and dangerous it is to not have it backed up.

Business owners require ubiquitous access to certain information stored on their organization’s infrastructure. Thus, there’s an immediate need to safeguard this data from any sort of impending destruction. We’ll discuss ways that you can prevent the worst when it seems like your data will fall victim to a loss incident.

It’s National Clean Out Your Computer Day! To kick off this important day, we’d like to remind business owners that this is a valuable opportunity to make sure that you’re taking good care of one of your greatest assets: your company’s technology. Let’s go over some of the best ways that you can optimize the performance of your office computers.