Yearly Archives: 2020

Your business’ technology is extremely important to your business’ success and ensuring that it is functioning as designed has to be an ongoing priority. This can be harder than you may think. Today, we’ll go over how you can actively confront this challenge and keep your IT running as it should.

Examining the Importance of a Business’ Infrastructure

If you stop and give it some thought, you’d immediately acknowledge just how much you rely on your IT. How many times a day do you use your IT to kick off or complete processes crucial to the ultimate success of your business? Quite a few, and as a result, when your IT isn’t functioning as intended, it can really put a damper on your business’ ability to get things done.

By understanding the relationship between your business’ results and functioning IT, you know that mitigating risks that could stymie your efforts is an important consideration of any business owner. One of the best strategies for the technology-savvy business is monitoring the infrastructure its operations rely on.

Why Monitoring Your IT Infrastructure is Crucial

Think about this, when raising children, do they tend to act up more when you are actively watching them? Absolutely not, and if they do, something can be done to keep them from some type of catastrophe.

The same can be said for watching a business’ IT. By keeping an active eye on your company’s IT, it can allow you to not only control certain situations, but it can allow you to stay on top and in the know of what is going on with your business’ technology. Today’s monitoring tools are state-of-the-art and can present technicians a level of workable automation that can keep them in the know, while also allowing them to actively work on any other projects you may have for them. Today’s monitoring tools take a variety of considerations into account, including:

• The health and functionality of your actual infrastructure
• The capability and security of your network
• The efficacy and availability of your team’s business applications

By having better transparency of how your IT is functioning, you also have more control over your business, and that isn’t ever bad.

Call Point North Networks, Inc.

Our technicians have the experience using modern monitoring tools and leveraging the built-in automation to ensure that every monitored piece of technology you have is patched, up to date, and functioning in a way that prioritizes productivity. To learn more about actively monitoring your business’ technology, call us today at 651-234-0895.

How concerned are you about your data privacy, as a consumer, particularly when you entrust it to another business? If you answered “very”, you aren’t alone… 87 percent of Americans consider their data privacy to be a human right. Having said that, most don’t pay near enough attention to their own security precautions. Let’s take a few moments and examine this trend.

How Consumers View Business Data Practices

A recently released report presented the results of a survey of American consumers to chart their attitudes and expectations regarding corporations and their data privacy. This report—which was compiled by advisory firm KPMG and is available for download on their website—outlined the primary privacy concerns of the everyday user and discusses the statistics around the issue.

Overall, the results showed varying levels of awareness amongst these users and made a few shared concerns very clear. For instance:

• 86 percent of respondents to the survey felt that their data privacy was a rising concern.
• 70 percent claimed to be “generally familiar” with how companies collect their personal data, while 64 percent were familiar with how it was used and stored, 63 percent say they understand how it is protected, and 57 percent say they know how it is sold.
• Having said that, 68 percent don’t trust these companies to sell this data ethically, 54 percent don’t trust it will be used ethically, 53 percent don’t feel it will be collected ethically, and 50 percent don’t trust these companies to protect their data sufficiently.
• Most consumers are concerned about the theft of their social security number, with 83 percent of respondents identifying this concern. Following closely behind come the 69 percent worried about their credit card numbers.
• Surprisingly, only 16 percent are concerned about the theft of their medical records.

How Consumers Treat Their Own Data Practices

Now, while this sounds promising (if not quite at optimal numbers), this concern isn’t reflected in consumers when their own actions are considered. While many—in fact, the majority—of users stated that they would consider it risky to engage in many online behaviors, like repeating passwords across accounts, using public Wi-Fi, and saving a credit card to a website, over 40 percent did these things regardless.

This study also took note of the fact that many users neglected their own security options… 61 percent, in fact.

What This Should Tell Us, as People and Business Owners

Whether you’re considering your own personal data, or you’re thinking about the data you’ve collected as you’ve done business, security needs to be your highest priority. Harvard Business Review Analytic Services conducted a study of their own, and the results were quite telling.

46 percent, essentially half of surveyed consumers, said that they had stopped doing business with a retailer due to discomfort with their privacy statement.

That’s huge. As a consumer, it only shows how much power can potentially be wielded to help improve security for everybody… and how much responsibility that power gives us. As a business, it’s a wakeup call to how important securing data really is. While comprehensive data and information security isn’t a simple process and will ultimately make some of your internal processes more time-consuming, it is better than alienating half of your market.

Fortunately, Point North Networks, Inc. can help make the adoption of improved security solutions and procedures far simpler. To learn more about what we have to offer to help ensure your data security, give us a call at 651-234-0895 today.

If there’s anything that the COVID-19 pandemic has taught businesses, it’s that they need to be (or, in too many cases, should have been) prepared for anything. Disasters don’t keep a nine-to-five schedule, and you generally won’t get much notice that one is going to strike. This is why it is so important to have fully considered your business continuity, and to have prepared your staff to work productively from anywhere.

First, let’s examine the various disasters that your business may have to contend with.

Business Disasters Come in Many Forms

As the old saying goes, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Unfortunately, in this case, the “cat” is your business and its operations.

There are plenty of reasons that you could find your processes interrupted. There are those relatively small frustrations, like an employee being out sick or a workstation demanding a restart at the least opportune time, with an entire spectrum of increasingly bad situations leading up to unmitigated disaster… think your office burning to the ground, or a worldwide pandemic forcing businesses to close for weeks on end.

You know, just to name a few examples.

While these situations all have varying degrees of severity, it is important that you have a plan for each to enable your operations to continue. This is what is known as business continuity.

Traditionally, we usually discuss business continuity in the context of data loss and extreme weather events. However, it has never been more clear that this is not the extent of what makes business continuity so necessary. We are now all first-hand witnesses of the importance of business continuity planning that doesn’t assume that there is anything inherently wrong with the office space or the business’ resources, and instead acknowledges that the human element may be the problematic factor.

When it comes to threats like viruses, businesses should be concerned about all kinds–those that infect computers, and those that infect users. Both need to be addressed in business continuity plans.

How to Address Business Continuity in Terms of Illness

The idea of business continuity is simple: maintaining an acceptable level of business processes, despite some negative consequences that would prevent them from being possible, without proactive planning and preparations. It’s having a playbook, so to speak, of how to survive assorted issues and disastrous circumstances.

While the natural approach is to focus on those events that would impact your business in terms of its operability, with some discussion of lacking human resources, recent events have made it abundantly clear that the opposite also needs to be true. How would your business cope if half of your workforce (or more) suddenly couldn’t safely stay in the office and work for health reasons?

This needs to be a part of your business continuity planning, especially because it’s a very new situation for so many businesses.

What Your Illness-Based Business Continuity Plan Needs

Let’s briefly talk about the components that need to be involved in your continuity plan:

• The Means to Be Productive: As your team members attempt to work from home, you need to ensure that they are capable of still fulfilling their responsibilities. To accomplish this, they are going to need comparable technology solutions to what they are able to access in-house. This can be accomplished through a few means. You could equip your team with laptops that they can take home and work remotely on, with the solutions they need either delivered via cloud services or installed on the device itself. Alternatively, you could also enable them to access their work resources on their own devices in an adapted version of a Bring Your Own Device strategy.
• The Means to Remain Secure: Whenever your team operates remotely, it is important to remember that they are not within the protections you’ve established within your network, and are therefore susceptible to additional cyberattacks and other threats. This makes it important that you not only provide them with the tools they need to help maintain an acceptable level of security–like a virtual private network, firewalls, and antivirus–but that you also educate them on the best practices they should be following.
• The Means to Communicate and Collaborate: Finally, just because your team will be working from home does not mean that they shouldn’t still be working together. You need to make sure that they have sufficient means of communicating with one another. Provide them with solutions like Voice over Internet Protocol solutions, conferencing tools, instant messaging, and email, and make sure they are trained to use them when it is appropriate to do so.

If your business technology is making it more difficult for you to operate with all that is going on, reach out to Point North Networks, Inc.. Our team of professionals can evaluate your needs, design the solution that best addresses these requirements, and provide the support needed to maintain it. Reach out to us at 651-234-0895 to learn more.

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Since the beginning of the COVID-19 situation in March, creating a vaccine has been a major priority. True to form, hackers have begun targeting the very organizations responsible for the vaccine trials. There’s a lesson to be learned, today we’ll discuss it.

Cozy Bear

According to the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, a group with the moniker “APT29” (who is also known as “Cozy Bear” or as “the Dukes”) has started to relentlessly hack organizations tabbed with creating a vaccine for COVID-19. These claims have been corroborated by both US and Canadan authorities, and present a significant roadblock to the progress of COVID-19 vaccine production.

In fact, the National Cyber Security Centre released a report that goes on to describe APT29’s use of several exploits in conjunction with spear phishing attacks to gain access to CSC’s network and infrastructure. Once network security is breached the organization gets busy deploying malware known as WellMess or WellMail.

CSC has been working with software vendors to patch vulnerabilities. Software that has been patched doesn’t provide the exploitable pathways that often lead to problems.

Experts believe that this is not the first time APT29 has struck and that this threat should be taken very seriously. The organization is believed to be behind the 2016 hack that broke into the Democratic National Committee’s systems. The group has also been suspected of attacks against various healthcare, energy, government and other organizations.

Spear Phishing

We relentlessly discuss phishing in our blog, because it is one of the biggest threats to maintaining network security. Most phishing attacks are messages sent randomly, but the spear phishing attack is one that is planned and executed deliberately to target one person. Hackers look for a weak link and try to take advantage of it.

While your organization probably won’t be targeted by major hacking collectives, it is still important that you and your staff know how to identify a phishing attack and what to do if you suspect you are being attacked. Here are a few tips:

• Always check the details. Legitimate emails are sent from legitimate email addresses. Take a look at the email address of suspect emails and you’ll likely see a potential ruse.
• Proofread the message. Most business correspondence is proofread before it is sent. If the spelling and grammar looks as suspect as the email is, it’s likely illegitimate.
• Reach out. If there is any question, reach out to the organization/person sending the message. The more you know, the less likely you will fall for a scam.

Identifying phishing attacks has to be a major point of emphasis for your company. Call Point North Networks today at 651-234-0895 for help with getting the resources you need to properly train your team.

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Work Can Get Done From Home. Who Would Have Guessed?

Skipping the commute, wearing comfortable pants, and foregoing everyday office distractions has become the new norm during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s very likely that the businesses that do well with a remote workforce might continue to keep operating that way even after we’re all able to see each other again.

Before the pandemic, if you were to ask a hundred small business owners what their biggest turn off was when it comes to allowing their staff to work from home, most would tell you that they didn’t have the confidence that their employees would treat their jobs as seriously. Less work would get done. At home, there are pets, television, video games, children, and a number of other distractions that would seemingly fight for the attention of your employees.

At the office, the business owner and managers can march around and make sure everybody is working hard, right?

It reminds me of a Dilbert strip. The exchange goes something like this:

Dilbert: I’d like to work from home so I can be more productive.
Boss: I can’t manage you as easily when you’re out of the office.
Dilbert: That’s why I’d be more productive.
Boss: But you’d be missing out on all of this.

Granted, every manager has their own management style, and every business has their own needs when it comes to keeping things productive, and there are always going to be employees that buck the trends. Still, a lot of employees around the world right now are suddenly discovering the fact that they are able to be as productive, if not more productive, when working from home.

Much of the office workforce is getting very used to wearing those comfy pants, and it’s going to be strange (and a little disappointing) having to go back to the old ways of doing things.

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Some Businesses Figured This Out Years Ago

Telecommuting isn’t anything new, but experts were pretty sure it was going to take a bit longer to catch on. Many organizations have been offering different flavors of remote employment for a while now. Some might have certain departments or employees working from home all the time, or they might offer flexibility to have people work from home a few days every week.

Either way, these organizations are using it as both a perk for prospective employees, and as a way to cut down on costs. It’s not cheap to keep and maintain a working area for employees. Keeping the lights on, the A.C. running, and maintaining a cubicle and workstation adds up.

Look at your office space. Add up the rent/lease costs, utilities, and the snack budget. It’s a big chunk of money. Imagine reducing that down to almost nothing – moving your IT to the cloud, finding a shared space for meetings and interviews (if needed), and ditching the expensive office space might look pretty attractive once you discover you don’t really need it.

Whether You Go Back or Stay Remote, We Can Help

Point North Networks, Inc. has worked with a lot of businesses during this pandemic to help get them set up to allow their workforce to be productive from home. We can help your business implement new technologies to make it easier for your staff to collaborate and work from home (or anywhere) for the long term.

Whether you need immediate help or you are looking to plan out strategies to keep things running smoothly for the long run, give us a call at (651) 234-0895 to discuss all the options.

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Wherever there is money, there are scammers….

So it may not be a big surprise that scammers are out en masse trying to get between you and your federally mandated stimulus money. It’s bad enough that we’ve already seen a couple of phishing scams using the COVID-19 pandemic that are designed to help hackers get into accounts they have no business in, now that these scammers know that people are getting cash, the scams are kicked up a notch.

This is not the first time that the U.S. government has distributed checks to everyone, but with online banking being more prevalent now, scammers have a more complete opportunity to steal money. Let’s go through the ways you can ensure that you get your stimulus money:

Avoid anything that has you sign up for stimulus money – Unless you haven’t filed a tax return in the past two years, you will not have to do much to get your stimulus money. If someone wants you to fill out a form to get your stimulus money, you are definitely being scammed.

Scammers don’t just act online – Like traditional phishing, you need to be aware everywhere. Whether you get postcards in the mail with a password printed on it or you get messages over social media, you need to know that being asked to take action to gain “access” or to “verify” your payment information is almost assuredly a scam.

You can’t get your money faster – Some scammers have concocted a scam that “for a small fee” they can get people their stimulus check faster. With tens of millions of people already receiving their check, it’s a sign that your money is on its way if you haven’t received it already. No service can help you get your money faster.

No, you aren’t getting more – What’s better than getting $1,200 tax-free money from your government? Getting more money. Some scammers are actually sending checks for two or three times the amount of the stimulus, the scammer will then apologize for the discrepancy and ask the recipient to reimburse them. The check and their strategy are completely false and should be ignored.

IRS correspondence – It’s true that some people have had to fill out forms on the IRS website in order to get their checks sent to them or deposited in their bank accounts. Of course, scammers have set up forms that look like it. If the form you filled out isn’t on the IRS’ website, you shouldn’t fill it out.

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Knowing what you are up against is the best defense against scammers. If you haven’t yet received your CARES Act stimulus money, you need to go to the official IRS website to find out why (or more likely when) you will receive your stimulus check.

What scams have you been seeing lately? Let us know in the comments section below and return to our blog for more great technology-related information.

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Learn more about Managed IT

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10 Reasons you need Managed IT

Break Away from the traditional “Break it. Fix it.” model.

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Rethink Your Operations

With the COVID-19 pandemic causing businesses to rethink their operational strategies, many businesses have had to make a quick digital transformation. Many businesses have accomplished this before the stay-at-home orders, but with employees working from home, we thought this was the perfect time to take a look at four tools businesses can use to improve their work-from-home strategies.

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Analysis, In Real Time

Making prudent and qualified decisions is more important now that it has ever been before. To be able to make informed decisions, many SMBs are looking to their analytics platforms. By being able to look at how aspects of your businesses are functioning in real time, you can quickly change strategies that need to be changed in order to keep your business running efficiently.

Additionally, many analytic systems can be structured near the edge of an organization’s computing network, giving them more insight into how data is flowing in and out of their network.

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Included Benefits

Other benefits include:

• Managing location data – Directs decision makers’ strategies by determining the relevant data for multiple locations.
• Anomaly detection – Helps decision makers detect outlying data sets to avoid impulsive decision making.
• Improved marketing – Assists decision makers to make decisions based on demand when it otherwise wouldn’t be noticed.

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Voice Over Internet Protocol

VoIP is one of the most useful tools for teleworkers. It provides strong communication options, highlighted by an enterprise-grade telephone system, for pennies on the proverbial dollar. Additional available options that can help remote workers such as instant messaging, text messaging, and audio and video conferencing make VoIP a powerful tool for businesses looking to sustain levels of productivity with workers out of the office.

Automation

One of the best tools for cutting costs is process automation. A lot of businesses are trying to effectively identify processes within their workflow where they can automate mundane or repetitive tasks. By having the type of consistency automation brings to these types of tasks, businesses can utilize their human resources on more revenue-building assignments.

Tasks that can be automated include:

• Tasks that involve moving information around
• Frequent and mundane, but necessary tasks
• Tasks that frequently interrupt focus on business-critical tasks

Making the investment to automate parts of your business will assuredly save your organization money. Best yet, by automating these tasks now, once operations return to normal, you will keep seeing the cost savings you do today.

Online Sales

There are a lot of businesses that have implemented some semblance of ecommerce prior to this event, but if you haven’t, or if you have a limited ecommerce platform, you could see a major bump in revenue from investing in your ecommerce platform. In retail, companies are seeing double and even triple times the sales through their ecommerce solution than they did only a few short weeks ago. Prioritizing your online sales will go a long way toward keeping revenues up while your storefront is closed.

For the small business these can be lean times. Knowing what technologies and strategies to implement will go a long way toward getting you through this period. For more information about technology and how it can work for your business during the COVID-19 period, call Point North Networks, Inc. today at (651) 234-0895.

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