Recent Blog Posts
?I Resolve to Put Security First.? Cybersecurity is nothing to take lightly. Today?s threats range from mild annoyances to company-ending data breaches and everything in between. As a result, a business that doesn?t prioritize its cybersecurity awareness and preparedness is working on borrowed time. Fortunately, there are a few relatively simple ways that a business? security can be vastly improved. First, there?s implementing and maintaining basic cybersecurity protections, like keeping your firewall and antivirus and other defenses up to date. Secondly, but just as importantly, you need to ensure your team understands how an attack might be directed towards them and what they need to do to stop it. Phishing and other methods of targeting the end user are still popular. Third, your team also needs to realize that some of their own behaviors could easily leave your business more vulnerable, so they need to be trained up on best practices to avoid these kinds of behaviors. ?I Resolve to Make the Most of My Technology.? Your team will primarily rely on two sets of technologies: what you are currently using, and what you will adopt in the future. With the right mindset now, it is possible for your business to maximize both. For your current IT solutions, having them is only part of using them to their fullest potential. You also need to be sure that your team knows how to do so, which will require them to be trained properly with them. By identifying your core software and applications and committing time to team training and user education, your employees will be all the more capable of accomplishing improved outcomes through the use of their software. Looking to the future, it always pays off to watch for the newest innovations and promising technologies to adopt if and when the time is right. By embracing new technologies and methodologies as they come, you can help your team maximize the value of their time spent. ?I Resolve to Encourage My Team?s Collaboration.? It should come as no surprise that, considering collaboration is seen as a priority for many, bringing your team to practice it more is an excellent priority for a business to take. Many modern applications are now built with collaboration as a major feature, making it relatively simple to give your team the tools to follow through. You just need to enforce the behaviors you want to see from them. Regardless of what your priorities are in the coming weeks and months of this year, we?re here to offer our assistance in achieving them through our comprehensive IT services. Start a conversation to find out how we can help by calling (603) 889-0800 today.
With Remote Work, Departments Have Become Somewhat Moot Here?s the hard fact of the matter: the concept of a department is unnecessary when people are no longer working side-by-side in a shared environment. Rather, the unified workforce somewhat dissolves into individual people working on their tasks and communicating with each other as needed. Of course, this is not to say that the tasks and responsibilities that each department assigns to its members have gone away. Sales and customer service will still need to interact with prospects and clients, while HR will still need to act as the bridge between management and the workforce. However, remote work has done a lot to remove some of the barriers that the concept of departments once erected between the members of a given organization. In fact, studies have shown that the businesses that have performed the best throughout their remote response to the pandemic were the ones that relied on cross-silo teams (groups of employees from different departments) and shifted their focus from how busy each employee was to how successful these employees were at achieving their desired outcomes. Other companies reported that the furloughs that many saw required them to adapt, with their remaining employees taking on new responsibilities and collaborating with coworkers they wouldn?t have otherwise. This has been exacerbated by the adoption of automated solutions and the need to create new roles that these new technologies bring with them. All in all, remote work and the conditions that encourage it have all contributed to teams that have more diverse skill sets and are therefore more useful in a flexible work environment. Of Course, Technology is Needed to Make Remote Work a Feasible Option Whether you want to encourage your team members to embrace the benefits of remote work on a regular basis, or simply want to enable your team members to work remotely when the need arises, we can help equip your business to sustain it. Give us a call at (603) 889-0800 to get started today.
It?s simply not enough to have technology without having someone who can effectively manage it. Let?s take a look at how transitioning to a managed service provider model can improve the way you use technology. Traditional Technology Management in the Office Your business? approach to technology management might be dependent on its size. Some companies on the larger side have a dedicated CIO who makes all of the important decisions regarding technology. Others have network administrators who handle this responsibility. Some businesses don?t have any dedicated IT support resources and instead have their employees perform necessary maintenance and management, but this is not the right way to approach IT maintenance. If you have unqualified and untrained employees performing maintenance, you might make potential problems even worse. Companies that need IT resources can choose to outsource the responsibility of managing their IT infrastructure to a managed service provider (MSP). Managed Service Providers A managed service provider is a great way to take care of your technology, especially if you don?t have internal IT resources. You essentially outsource the care of your infrastructure to trained professionals. Some organizations center their entire business model around this concept. You basically get an entire IT department without paying for multiple salaries or going through the hiring process, instead opting for easy-to-manage monthly payments. The Benefits of MSP Offerings We can?t possibly list all of the benefits of working with an MSP here, but you should know that some of the most notable ones include a hands-off approach to IT management, more manageable monthly payments, and genuine peace of mind. You can also rest assured that your organization has access to IT expertise as it?s needed. Our goal is to make working with your IT as easy as possible so that you can focus on your own business? operations. Get Started Today! Managing technology can be stressful, so don?t let it get the better of you. Let White Mountain IT Services help. To learn more about what we can do for your business, contact us at (603) 889-0800.
Anytime, Anywhere Access Many workers are still remote, and this trend is not going to dissolve anytime soon. Therefore, employers need to invest in anytime, anywhere access. The cloud is a great environment that allows for this kind of access, as you are essentially storing your infrastructure in an online environment where it can be accessed through a web browser or connected application. This allows employees to work in their own way on their own devices. Unified Communications The amount of communication solutions you implement for your business will inevitably grow over time, eventually reaching the point where they can become overwhelming. If these solutions don?t talk well to each other, then you will run into compatibility issues that complicate operations. A unified communications solution will give you access to several solutions that play nice with each other and are built to work around each other. All of these applications will also be found in the same location, making things much easier and more efficient from a workflow perspective. Voice-over-IP Solutions The office phone will never quite become a thing of the past, but the traditional handset has been on its way out the door for some time. Where businesses once relied on telephone providers for phone services, they are now focusing on consolidating services and eliminating costs by working with Voice over IP solutions. Companies can use their Internet connections and phone software installed on their devices to perform the same role as the office phone, making for a better way to get work done and communicate. White Mountain IT Services can help your organization implement any and all of the above solutions for maximum communication efficiency. To learn more, reach out to us at (603) 889-0800.
The Increasing Severity of Ransomware Ransomware isn?t new, even though most of us would just like it to go the way of the Wooly Mammoth. Unfortunately, it seems to be going the way of the pigeon, showing up everywhere you look. In 2021, there were nearly three-quarters of a billion attempted ransomware attacks and over 100 different strains circulating around the globe. If that isn?t something to be concerned about I?m not sure what is. There is no question that the use of ransomware is growing. In fact, one metric cites that there were three times as many ransomware attacks in the first quarter of 2021 than there were in the entirety of 2019. It?s getting so bad that some hackers aren?t even bothering locking down data and files, they just put the ransomware screen up and collect the ransom. This is extremely troubling. Most of the time, ransomware is deployed through phishing attacks. This social engineering tactic allows hackers and scammers to avoid all the high-powered encryption and other technology designed to protect organizational data and systems, by systemically tricking a person who has authentication credentials to hand them over, allowing for access to the network. Ultimately, this access is used for the most nefarious purpose: extortion. To get the best of hackers looking to deploy ransomware, you need the people who have access to your business? network to be thoroughly trained and tested. It is really the only way to ensure that these threats can be completely mitigated. A staff that is well-trained and has acute awareness of what phishing attacks look like is the best defense against it. Establishment of Artificial Intelligence for Cybersecurity This has been mentioned several times, but 2022 is the year that you are going to see concepts that financial services companies use in fraud prevention used to enhance organizational cybersecurity. By now, most people have an idea of what artificial intelligence (AI) is used for: to automate tasks that have different results based on relatively small numbers of variables. By ?relatively small? we mean many more than the average human can compute, but small enough where it doesn?t require massive amounts of computational power. For cybersecurity, the main benefits are from the predictive powers of AI. Hackers and scammers are also starting to use AI-powered tools for their nefarious purposes, however, making threats even more dangerous. The benefit of AI for cybersecurity is that it only takes one slip up by infiltrators to be thwarted and using smarter automated tools can help human technicians find and eliminate threats. What is really remarkable about AI-powered security is how much the perception of the technology has changed in a short time. Five years ago, people were dismissing AI as a possible tool that could be leveraged to keep threats off computing infrastructures, while a recent poll conducted by Capgemini suggested that nearly 65 percent of all business security professionals consider AI to be essential for the future of cybersecurity. Shifts in Regulation For the past couple of years there has been a significant push to consider individual?s data privacy. Not so much for the U.S. Congress to pass anything definitive, but the EU (GDPR) and some individual U.S. states have ratified legislation aiming to help people keep ownership over sensitive data. When the latest […]
