Telesys Voice and Data Blog

There is a lot on the line for any business when disaster strikes. Is your business ready for a data loss incident? Every year people from all over the world make resolutions as the new year commences; and, this year will be no different. For the business owner hoping to mitigate their exposure to downtime and client backlash in the face of an event like this, having a plan in place is essential to seeing a positive resolution to a bad situation. We’ll go through what constitutes a good backup solution, and what goals you need to prioritize to get your business in a position to succeed if it is put in a tight spot.

When people find new reasons to collaborate, it typically results in something positive. There is some new software that is now making collaboration easier, while still providing people the tools they need to stay productive. These collaboration tools are changing the face of business. Today, we take a look at them and how your organization can use these new collaboration tools to move business ahead faster.

These days, many businesses turn to hosted solutions to take advantage of services that they haven’t been able to use in the past. Whether it’s because they don’t have the staff to properly look after the services or they don’t have the in-house infrastructure for it, organizations continue to take advantage of hosted solutions to varying degrees. We’ll walk you through your options for whether you should build, rent, or buy your hosted solutions to best fit your business’ needs.

For those who don’t know, the term information technology is an encompassment of the technology used in the facilitation of rendering, sharing, and storing data. Any piece of technology that is used to process, keep, send, and secure digital information, is considered IT. Today, we will look at some of the emerging technologies presenting solutions for businesses and individuals, alike, heading into 2019.

Any project manager will tell you that there are countless issues that can get in the way of a successful implementation. To nobody’s surprise, business technology can aid project management by streamlining operations and making the entire process much easier for everyone involved. We’ll dig into the details about how project management software and value-based managed IT services can help you complete projects on-time and on-budget.

The cloud helps many organizations expand their territories beyond simply the physical workplace. Employees can now access data and applications on any connected device. Your office can benefit considerably from cloud-based resources, with email in particular being a standout solution for the cloud.

Many small and midsize companies are forced into spreading their resources out in order to compete with larger organizations. For those that are searching for a way to manage all the moving parts of business, having the means to communicate has to be at the top of the list. What makes it more difficult are that many organizations have a reliance on workers that work remotely. For times like this, a comprehensive conferencing strategy is important. We’ll take a look at what makes up today’s powerful conferencing solutions, and how you can use them to find more success.

Information technology has always been a hotbed for future predictions. Whether it was Marconi’s grand plans for wireless communications or the bold prediction that every person would be carrying around a computer that fits in the palm of their hand, the future always looks bright when new technologies are considered. But, what does the immediate future of information technology hold?

Disasters are a very real possibility that businesses have to deal with, but not all disasters come in the form of a flood or fire. You can predict weather effects that can create problems for your business, like thunderstorms and ice storms that bring down power lines, but you can’t possibly predict when and how your organization will suffer from a data loss incident. We’ll discuss in-depth how your business can save itself the trouble of dealing with cyberattacks and user error--particularly in regard to data backup and disaster recovery.

Each year there are changes that need to be made in the way that organizations manage their IT security. In 2017, ransomware burst on the scene in full force, and cyber security strategies reacted, coming up with fully managed security platform that remediate issues better, and cost organizations far more than they would have spent on IT security just a short time ago. In 2018, the same problems persist, while other developing technologies threaten the natural order of things. Today, we will look at how cybersecurity is being approached in 2018.

Spam is a major hindrance when running a business that relies on email, but it’s easy to protect your employee’s time from the average spam messages with the right technological support. Unfortunately, hackers have adapted to this change and made it more difficult to identify scam emails. More specifically, they have turned to customizing their spam messages to hit specific individuals within organizations.

The business landscape can be unforgiving. It can be filled with landmines that slow progress to a crawl and blitzes that send your head spinning. If you were to compare the business world to history's great battles, technology solutions are a business’ weapons. They are the tools used to make the everyday grind possible. The more advanced an army’s technology, the bigger the edge they have over outfits that don’t have that technology...as long as it works as intended.

As technologies emerge and trends change, organizations face massive paradigm shifts involving the tools and methods they use to conduct business. Right now, we’re in the middle of one of the most significant shifts in decades; more and more businesses are relying on cloud computing.

Every business has some sort of management tasks that requires foresight, and staying up on them can keep headache-inducing situations from constantly causing downtime and costing you time; and, make no mistake, time is money. Being more proactive not only provides sound strategies, it can really mitigate the amount of problems you have to deal with. As we describe what it means to be proactive, and how that strategy will almost always help you save money, consider how you are implementing a proactive approach to your business.

Did you know that prior to this past January, the last big update to Wi-Fi occurred in 2004, when WPA2 was released? The Wi-Fi alliance has introduced a new type of wireless connection called WPA3--one that can dramatically improve security. In reality, it was created with the intention of shoring up weaknesses found as a result of the KRACK vulnerability, which exposed serious issues with WPA2 that needed to be addressed.

Network security for small businesses is far from simple. There are countless threats out there that want to see your business fall, and it only takes one to see this come to fruition. Unless you take action now to protect your organization, you risk the future of your business. But what is it that businesses need to protect from, and what measures are out there that can accomplish this feat?

The price of fuel per gallon is one of the many ways individuals are affected by the constantly shifting industry costs, and for those who commute to the office, it can become a considerable expense. For distributors, the changes in gas prices can be the difference between sitting on a gold mine or losing valuable resources. For the small distributor, changes in gas prices can make all the difference in determining how much it costs to truck goods across the area. How can smaller businesses take advantage of IT solutions to keep costs down while gas prices increase?

The Internet of Things means a lot more than just enhanced connectivity. In particular, you’ll have a considerable security risk associated with the Internet of Things. It’s clear that the more devices accessing a network, the more risk will be associated with that network, which is where the inherent risk of the Internet of Things comes into play. How can you control the number of devices accessing your network, and thus secure your business from the Internet of Things?

Understanding why security is such an issue for Internet of Things devices is critical to keeping your business secure from these devices.

Too Many Devices
The more threats are associated with a particular industry, the more likely you’ll encounter a threat. This is not conjecture--it’s reality. When you consider how many devices now have connectivity compared to the past, you might realize that these fears regarding the Internet of Things aren’t unfounded. You should go about organizing your business’ security by imagining what you would do in a worst-case scenario in which at least one of these devices makes it past your organization’s defenses. All it takes is a single weakness to bring down an entire network.

The issue with these devices is that they are often those that you wouldn’t expect to traditionally have such connectivity. For example, you might not immediately think of cars, kitchen appliances, watches, or thermostats to have such functionality. These can be difficult to plan for if you’re not careful.

Patches and Updates
When there are a lot of devices accessing a network, chances are that at least one of them won’t be up to snuff with its updates and patches. The incredible vastness of the Internet of Things all but guarantees that at least one of these devices is going to be out of date, placing your organization at risk. To make things even worse, some Internet of Things devices are created based off a trend that could very well be obsolete soon afterward, meaning that developers might not see the need to support the device beyond that timeframe. For example, if a device sells poorly and was created only to meet a specific need in the industry at the time, the developer may choose not to support it anymore as the investment simply isn’t worth the return.

Even if you can’t control the devices of others, you can control the ones that access your organization’s sensitive data. You can start by taking a look at the specific permissions of your business’ users and their devices. A good practice is to never give employees access to information that they don’t need to do their jobs properly. After all, the more people who can access data, the more likely that a device could be compromised and expose that data to threats.

Telesys Voice and Data can help your business manage devices and access control on its network. To learn more, reach out to us at (800) 588-4430.

Data backup. Nobody wants to think about it until it’s too late to do anything about it. While no business ever hopes that they will be struck by a data loss incident, no business will ever regret implementing a backup on the off-chance that they ever suffer from a worst-case scenario. What are some of the most important parts of a data backup and business continuity system? We’ll start with Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective.

While they might sound similar, RPO and RTO are two very different things that work toward the same ultimate goal of sustaining your business’ continuity in the event of some catastrophe.

Recovery Point Objective
When you picture your business suffering from a data loss incident, just how much data do you see yourself losing? Whether it’s a considerable amount of data or just a couple of files, we want you under the impression that no amount of data loss is acceptable for your business--particularly because you can never know if that information will be restored again or not in the future. Your ultimate goal should be to minimize data loss by any means necessary, which leads us into the recovery point objective.

Basically, the Recovery Point Objective is a designated amount of data that your organization aims to restore in the event of a disaster. It’s ideally 100%, and most modern backup solutions will help you reach this threshold. Incremental backups like those taken with a comprehensive Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution can help you toward this end.

Recovery Time Objective
The other half of BDR consists of the recovery time objective. How long does it take your business to recover in the event of a disaster? The idea is to minimize this time, as downtime can be both expensive and risky for your organization. Any time when your business isn’t functioning as intended due to data loss or otherwise constitutes downtime, and situations like these are costly--meaning that you should minimize them as often as possible.

Business continuity needs a minimal recovery time objective so that you can get right back in action following a data loss incident. The best way to accomplish this is through a Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution from Telesys Voice and Data. You can minimize data loss and restore your data backups directly to a temporary device so that your business doesn’t have to wait any longer than needed to get back in action. To learn more, reach out to us at (800) 588-4430.

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.