Your business might be growing in such a way that you need to think more about Security. Just so happens that we have four great new products to make your business environment more secure and move your technology Upward.
There are dozens of solutions on the market designed to address the ever-expanding threats to intellectual property. Too often, small and midsize businesses think of cyber threats in outdated, arcane ways. Envisioning “hackers” as nerdy, troublemakers looking to prove their prowess by infiltrating and embarrassing large organizations. In reality, cyber-crime is increasingly focused on small and midsize businesses because they are unprepared and relatively unsophisticated. Instead of carefully targeting a hospital over a long period of time to steal millions of social security records and credit card information, cyber criminals could instead broadly target a million unguarded small businesses with ransomware and reap $8,000 from 10% of them. Targeting a hospital is like an Oceans Eleven team, targeting small businesses is like a smash and grab petty thug. At Upward Technology, we keep our eyes on the latest and greatest solutions on the market, so we can keep our customers apprised of different methodologies for protecting their intellectual property. Here are four great new products to make your business environment more secure:
Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS):
Microsoft will significantly increase their competitive advantage in the market as EMS becomes more widely adopted. It allows companies to sync the credentials each user has across all the applications they use, and to restrict the transfer of data between work and personal apps.
So a user would have one password (with very secure dual-factor authentication) that would allow them to access all the applications in their company ecosystem, for instance SalesForce, Office 365 email, QuickBooks Online, Twitter, DropBox etc. Once using a work application, the user would be unable to accidentally forward a work email with an attachment from their work account to their personal Gmail account. Or copy and paste cells from a work Excel sheet and paste them into a personal Evernote account, etc. In the age of “Bring Your Own Device”, tools like this are game-changers.
Strong passwords are still one of the best ways to prevent cyber threats. Upward recently rolled out AuthAnvil internally. It is a secure password vault that allows us to manage passwords and password policy for all customers. When one of our engineers logs in and pulls a password to open up a clients device, we have a record of it. When an Upward employee leaves the company, we can systematically go through and change all the passwords they might have had access to. Above all, the solution provides a very secure, encrypted Fort Knox to store all company passwords. This solution could easily be deployed for any customers who deal with secure client data and are seeking better security solutions to limit liability.
We talk about SharePoint often as a productivity and scalability solution, but it can also be a security solution. SharePoint is an ideal solution to replace complex and un-wieldy Excel files. SharePoint uses a SQL database, which is a powerful back end to organize and query data. By taking Excel files and processes out of Excel and into SharePoint, a company reaps important security benefits: the data is not portable, so a user can’t forward it along to themselves or someone outside the organization without proper permissions. The data also only becomes accessible with the proper permissions, whereas an Excel file can be typically sent to anyone, anywhere unless it is password protected, which is cumbersome. By limiting portability and controlling access to data, it becomes inherently more secure.
Here are 10 other ways SharePoint can help your organization.
One of the most important security components to any companies strategy is backup and disaster recovery. Sophisticated backup solutions have been around for the better part of 10 years, the problem has been cost for many small and midsize companies. A sophisticated solution from AppAssure or Datto could cost a company $500-$1000 per month easily. With Microsoft Azure backups, a sophisticated solution at a bargain price finally enters the market. The solution makes a complete copy of all data on a company server, and copies it into the Azure cloud. What is powerful about this: if a server dies or fails, the dead server can be almost instantly replicated to Azure, and run indefinitely there. Why is this powerful? Because the customer doesn’t have to pay for the cloud resources to be online 24/7, as they were in the past. Azure is already just sitting there, so much of the backup recovery cost becomes pay as you go!
To learn more about any of these solutions, or to learn how you can partner with an IT leader at the forefront of our industry, reach out to Upward Technology today.
Leave A Comment