Take, for instance, Microsoft. But First? What is Passwordless Authentication? Passwordless authentication is precisely what it sounds like. Instead of requiring a person to authenticate their identity by inputting a predetermined passcode, passwordless authentication looks to other measures to confirm validity. Does the user have access to a verification application? Do they possess a security token? Do their biometrics match the reference data? Have they already been authenticated by another service or application? If your phone unlocks when it recognizes your face or fingerprint, you?ve used passwordless authentication before, or if you?ve received an access code via text message or email. While not all forms of passwordless authentication are equally secure, they generally resist the weaknesses that the traditional password is prone to: Insufficient strength, making brute-force attempts much simpler for cybercriminals Without a password, users cannot reuse passwords across different accounts Brute force attacks require a password to be present to work, which passwordless authentication negates The Benefits of Passwordless Authentication Cost Efficacy Passwords can be shockingly expensive to maintain. Forrester Research has estimated that each password reset costs the company $70, finding that large organizations spent $1 million in staffing and infrastructure alone to handle them in 2018. However, if there is no password to reset, there will be no cost associated with resetting it. Improved Convenience in the User Experience When the average user nowadays is expected to remember literally dozens of passwords, there?s little wonder that so many users resort to just picking one and recycling it over and over. From the user?s perspective, it?s more convenient, which means they can access what they need and get down to business more efficiently. Of course, this doesn?t encompass the full reality of the situation. Therefore, to ensure that your security is maintained, it makes sense to make the most secure option the most convenient one as well. Passwordless authentication removes all the pressure of remembering all those credentials. As a result, your employees will both be under less stress and in a position to securely work towards your organizational goals. Security Finally, and most crucially, passwordless authentication is safer. Think about it: cybercriminals are targeting the human element more and more frequently as they leverage their attacks. Phishing is a common means for a cybercriminal to gain access to your business? data, and there are plenty of other attacks that target your authentication measures anyways, like credential stuffing and brute force attacks. Each of these attacks relies on a set, concrete password being the key to the castle, so passwordless authentication measures can minimize the threat they pose. Reasons like these are why Microsoft is putting so much effort into passwordless technologies. What Microsoft is Doing with Passwordless Authentication In no uncertain terms, quite a bit. In addition to 150 million consumer and enterprise accounts using passwordless authentication measures as of May 2020, Microsoft itself has effectively made an internal transition to passwordless. Up to 90 percent of their own 150 thousand employees have opted into passwordless authentications?saving Microsoft 80 percent of the support costs that once went to internal password management. Microsoft has accomplished this by pairing passwordless measures with secure multi-factor authentication. Their strategy now can be summed up as saying, ?Okay, so this user appears to be who they?re supposed to be. Let?s make […]

One of the major problems a business owner needs to confront is the situation surrounding sustained downtime. Business continuity demands a lot of assessment and a whole lot of action be taken in a short amount of time. After all, downtime is a business killer. The establishment of a continuity plan not only solves the immediate problems (e.g. a server failure), they return your business to a productive state, fast. All businesses struggle with hiccups of continuity. Something as simple as a cloud application being down for 20 minutes can cost a company a lot of money. When downtime is sustained, however, the costs add up by the second. A business that is forced into stagnation by downtime can fail within days.  Modern Continuity Today?s business continuity plan is not much different than it was 50 years ago. The assets have just changed. Today, most of the assets that need to be protected are through reliable digital means. This means that if you want to look for a place to start, look at your organization?s IT. Like you would have done with established business continuity methods, you will want to make a list of the people who need to know if continuity is broken, and who is in charge of relaying that information down the corporate tree. Typically, there will be one person that is tasked with relaying information to department heads, and they will take it from there. Ensuring that there is a plan in place to mitigate cost in the case of sustained downtime is essential to mitigating problematic situations. Take Action In business continuity, action is the name of the game. Depending on the situation, after your people are informed of a breach of continuity, the next step is to mitigate the problem. Some situations are more difficult to rebound from than others, but ultimately a solid business continuity plan is an incremental approach to getting your business back up and running properly. It could take a minute or a couple of weeks, but ensuring that every mission-critical resource is covered under your plan, and that there are defined actions that need to take place will work to return operations to normal more effectively. All continuity tasks should be assigned a specific timeline for completion, with the highest priority tasks coming first. Customer Relations Customer care is a big part of a business? continuity strategy. In fact, if you are dealing with a major outage, keeping your customers supported can work to stem service mutiny. You?ll need to contact your suppliers and vendors to keep other company?s supply chains from grinding to a halt. Keeping your relationships solid will alleviate one big headache if you are dealing with sustained downtime. Technology and Data You will want to have identified what hardware and software are essential, as well as have a good idea about how long it will take to restore your data and other systems into working condition. This also applies to any equipment that is necessary to restore operations. You?ll want to make sure that you know exactly what tools you need and the length of time that it will take to get things back up and running. You will also want to have identified your data needs and have a data backup and recovery platform […]

The ?Work First? Mentality For many, the very concept of a break is itself a dirty word. In fact, many North American employees (20 percent of them) think that taking a lunch break will negatively impact their boss? view of them, while some (13 percent) are concerned that their coworkers will think less of them. A lunch break. The thing that many states legally require them to take. For goodness sake, 38 percent don?t feel encouraged to take a lunch break? and no wonder, when 22 percent of North American bosses say that taking a lunch break makes them ?less hardworking.? Of course, there is evidence to support that the exact opposite is the case. One survey measured that 90 percent (a clear majority) of North American workers cite their lunch break as the reason that they work as well as they do in the afternoon, refreshed by their respite. Of course, the half-hour-to-an-hour that an employee is granted to eat lunch (and run whatever errands they need to run) isn?t the only time that an employee can?or should?take a break. The average workday presents many opportunities for a break to become an asset to the business? organizational productivity. The Length of the Break Doesn?t Always Matter When you think of a ?break? in the workday sense, it?s safe to assume that you are thinking of a 15-minute increment of time. For our purposes, let?s agree upon that measurement. Not many people take what are referred to as ?microbreaks? into consideration. As their name would suggest, these breaks are much shorter than the 15 minutes we?ve established that breaks are best known to take. These microbreaks could range from 15 seconds to 5 minutes, from the quick second to clear your head to the moment it takes to refill your water bottle. Breaks like these have shown to improve mental acuity and sharpness by 13 percent each?and taking a few seconds every ten minutes to look away from your screen to clear your head? Doing so can halve the fatigue you feel. These microbreaks have shown to have various benefits to users, not the least of which being considerable advances to productivity. Do you have pain in your hands, wrists, and/or forearms? Taking five minutes each hour to recover can help get rid of that pain. So, it?s clear that breaks can benefit your team, and?as counterintuitive as it may seem?they have clear benefits to your operational productivity. Therefore, it only makes sense that you encourage your team to ease back every so often to collect themselves. For the solutions that enable your team to work even more productively when they aren?t breaking, reach out to White Mountain IT Services. We offer solutions that can keep your IT in tip-top shape, and your employees working efficiently. Reach out to White Mountain IT Services to learn more about what we have to offer.

When you last were at the office, you had everything that you needed to do your job: your work PC, all the accessories, access to the Internet, printers, and other internal resources. During the pandemic?s stay-at-home orders, you didn?t have access. You may be back at your office today, but if you aren?t you are probably using the mandatory COVID-19 home office technology. Let?s take a look at it. Laptop The home office isn?t like the real office. First of all, going into March 2-in-3 people didn?t have a dedicated workspace. If you tried to work from the couch, your favorite chair, or worse yet, your bed, you may have found productivity hard to come by. Once it was clear that nobody was going back to the office for a while, most people made a solid effort to dedicate a small part of their living quarters into a makeshift office. If you are like millions of other people that had to work from home (or are still working from home), having a PC was essential to getting your work done; but, if you don?t have a lot of room, a laptop is perfect. Not only can you take it with you, but many laptops are more powerful than the typical workstation that your company would give you.  Smartphone For a sudden shift to telework, no piece of technology has been as important as the smartphone. At first, many companies were just trying to figure out if they could run their businesses remotely. The mobility provided by smartphones largely made the shift possible. Not only could the smartphone be used as a business phone (through a VoIP platform and its softphone app), it can be great for collaboration. Today, most smartphones can be configured with work profiles, which provides a dedicated app drawer for all your business apps. This not only allows the company to manage their data better, it also is advantageous for users who can turn access to work on and off with a tap of their finger.  Collaboration Apps Software is important for almost every business, but for the business relying on remote workers, it is quite literally a business? saving grace. With a remote staff, collaboration becomes even more crucial and software of all kinds are adding in cooperative options. Productivity software like Microsoft 365 or Google?s G Suite have collaborative options baked right in; management software like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), or Professional Services Automation (PSA) provides end-to-end operations management, supply chain management, and support options; and, collaboration platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams provide communication options and software integrations to keep teams on-point. COVID-19 has put a big damper on business, but if you can have the right tools, you can still get your job done. If you would like to talk to one of our expert technicians about getting the right technology to keep your business profitable while the new normal forms, call White Mountain IT Services today at (603) 889-0800. 

Why This is a Concern Here?s the issue in a nutshell? Let?s say that you?re a reporter, and you get a news bulletin from an overseas country. This bulletin reports that a different country has committed horrible atrocities against its neighboring nations. What do you do? Well, if you trust the source, you take it as fact and run the story. This is how propaganda works. It twists public and private beliefs based on purported evidence supplied by a source that the intended audience trusts. This exact scenario was used in World War I. The United States press was reporting on the events overseas based on falsified reports sent over by the British government. To build support against the other side, these reports fabricated tales of the German army taking despicable actions against their European neighbors. Modern Applications Today, the same process has been adopted, taking advantage of the latent trust so many have in online information (especially that which lines up to one?s personal beliefs). Rather than feeding information to news outlets and other established media figures, however, social media gives those responsible for bending the facts to their favor a direct line to their audience. These capabilities now give people, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, an underhanded way to amplify their own agenda? but over time, and at great cost, some people have taken notice. This has led to increased and more intense scrutiny of these online platforms and their policies. Many social media platforms and online services have reacted by taking steps to better ensure the validity of political information that their audience members share and consume. Let?s look at some of these steps and how they might make the political discourse?as well as the overall process?more fact-driven and secure. Facebook Facebook has been at the epicenter of many of these controversies. They were arguably responsible for the attention that all mainstream online platforms are now receiving. Lately, Facebook has seen pressure from both sides of the political aisle and has needed to also focus on the validity of the information it helps to amplify. To do so, Facebook has begun a few initiatives. The Election Information Hub The most obvious one is the online hub that was launched on both Facebook and its acquired photo-sharing platform, Instagram. Intended to minimize the impacts of shared election misinformation, this tool is supposed to help potential voters find the information they need to participate in the process. Adding to this complexity, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has caused no shortage of concern and confusion in recent months, and the election is now only exacerbating the concerns. The social network has been the focus of quite a bit of criticism based on the COVID-19 content that has appeared on its platform, primarily due to the misinformation that has spread as a result. Similar issues with political content have also been present in the past. Depending on the political affiliation of who you ask, Facebook has either been amplifying misinformation shared to the benefit of a certain party or has been actively censoring the speech of certain political ideologies. So, it stands to reason that Facebook would be particularly concerned with election security this year. In addition to past events, Facebook now must deal with other highly politicized […]