1. Establish Standards for Clarity and Concision Here?s the thing: while communication is an essential part of your operations, it has the potential to become a massive time-sink if it isn?t utilized appropriately. We?ve all found ourselves in those meetings that seem to go on and on when the important part could have been covered in five minutes. Any of your collaborative solutions could easily be used in the same way? not the ideal situation when working with a remote team. Make sure your team is using the tools you have provided intelligently and subscribing to the keep-it-super-simple rule as much as they are able. You may find it useful to create a company shorthand to use to help clarify the context of a message. For instance, if something is purely informative and doesn?t need to be acknowledged, a quick label of NRN (No Response Needed) would help save the recipient some time. Every business operates a little differently, so figure out what works best for you. 2. Use the Right Tool for the Job Of course, there are almost as many means to communicate within a business as there are things to be communicated (or so it can sometimes seem). This is for a purpose, as different messages and conversations may be better suited to one format than they are another. Have you ever tried to announce something to a group over an instant message? Unless you?ve stuck the aforementioned NRN label to it or directed anyone with questions to reach out separately, your message is bound to be lost in the crowd before long. In this case, an email would be the better option for you to use. Just as often, you?ll need to quickly inform another individual of something, and an IM would allow you to do so more effectively than an email would. This principle extends to any of your business communications, including virtual meetings and other remote-friendly operations. 3. Review What Works and What Doesn?t So, find a tool to help team members communicate, come up with standards, implement it, and done? right? Not so fast. Collaborative processes are just that: processes. This means that there is always room for growth and improvement to take place within them, and that you need to actively and continually figure out how to facilitate this development. It?s just another part of the process. Take the time to review how smoothly your collaborative processes function when they are implemented. Go through each step to see where any inefficiencies presented themselves, whether the process stalled due to unforeseen complications or it wasn?t executed properly. Once these points are identified, figure out what can be done to mitigate the impacts, be it adding another bullet point to the process or providing additional training to the employee involved. After the process has been adjusted, do it again, and stress test until it gets better, or a new solution presents itself as an option. For help with these solutions, please don?t hesitate to reach out to White Mountain IT Services. We understand how trying times can test a business and can do a lot more than just offer tips on how to make the most of things. To find out how we can improve your operations with the right technology in place, give us a call […]
Tip #1 – Use Block Sender Spam is annoying, and it can even be dangerous. While there are ways to reduce spam, there are no tools that can completely eliminate spam. Outlook has its own built-in spam filter that works pretty well, but a little manual action can help teach Outlook to do better. The Block Sender feature will make it so that particular sender?s email automatically goes to Junk moving forward. It?s easy to use, just select and right-click the spam email in question, choose Junk from the dropdown menu, and click Block Sender. Tip #2 – Create Rules Outlook rules are a pretty cool way to make your email work harder for you. Outlook rules are incredibly flexible, and there is so much you can do with them, that we encourage you to take some time to review all of your options. Let?s try a simple one – let?s say you are working on a specific project, and want to funnel all emails about that project into a specific folder in Outlook. You could hunt through your inbox by hand, or you could make a rule that does it for you automatically. Select the first email you want to move into the new folder, and select Home > Rules > Create Rule. Outlook will then ask ?When I get email with the selected conditions (Subject, From, Sent to) do the following. You?ll want to set the conditions so Outlook knows which emails to filter, and then tell it what to do when it finds an email that meets those conditions. For this example, you would tell it to move the email into the desired folder. Outlook has a lot of overlooked features. Keep an eye on our blog for more tips and tricks for getting more out of the technology you already have!
Hosted Email Most businesses today rely on their email for a sizable portion of their business operations, but the way that they support this email is much different than how they once did in the past. Rather than maintaining an on-premise email server and taking on the need for the in-house space, experience, and investment that such an implementation requires, many businesses are now using email solutions that are part of a Software-as-a-Service offering (more on SaaS later). Taking this route has enabled many small and medium-sized businesses to adopt a much more financially feasible means of using email, along with the available benefits of hosting. Hosted VoIP Voice over Internet Protocol is swiftly being adopted as the way businesses and private users alike place phone calls. Much like an email solution, it can be hosted either onsite or in the cloud, with many businesses realizing the inherent benefits of the latter option. For starters, using a hosted VoIP solution means that a business is no longer on the hook for the on-site hardware (very similarly to hosted email, as you may have noticed). As a result, it is easier to scale up and down your solution to meet your needs, and your telephony as a whole is much more mobile. The As-a-Service Model We?re back to SaaS, as well as the other cloud-based services available to a business. Again, by virtue of the cloud-hosted nature of a Software-as-a-Service solution (as can be found in Platform-as-a-Service, Network-as-a-Service, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service) these solutions are a more efficient option for businesses that need access to a given resource, but cannot support these needs independently in a cost-effective way. By delivering these resources via the cloud, providers enable these businesses to put these options into use. If you feel that the cloud would be useful for your business to take advantage of for any of its operational needs or processes, reach out to White Mountain IT Services and talk to one of our seasoned professionals. We can help you determine your best course of action and assist you in following through with it. To learn more, give us a call at (603) 889-0800.
Standardization through Automation To use your network, your users must connect to it with various devices, which will require a few network configurations to be put into place. Putting together standardized configuration templates not only helps to speed up the configuration process, it helps to keep everyone?s devices working in the same way. This centralized uniformity allows better collaboration to be enabled much more efficiently than it would be if you were to configure each device individually. Monitoring and Troubleshooting Of course, a network isn?t infallible, so you will want to make sure you have the tools in place to both detect and resolve any issues that may spring up. Tools are available today that can assist an IT team in identifying the base cause of some negative impact and in efficiently rectifying it, either by removing the issue itself or by mitigating the damage that the issue causes. Patching and Policymaking Just as the rest of your business? IT should be maintained, your network itself needs to be checked periodically for vulnerabilities and bugs. Make sure that your IT administrator is checking for patches and reviewing if your business is at risk. For similar reasons, your provider should also be reviewing network policies to ensure that they benefit both your productivity and your security. Both are essential, especially as compliance standards place certain demands regarding your network?s resilience and the handling of your business? data. Confirming that you are compliant to these standards is necessary if you want to avoid fines and possible business closure. Planning your IT Business technology is always changing, which means you must prepare your IT infrastructure and strategy to accommodate these changes. Otherwise, the decisions that you make now could wind up stifling your business? development and success in the future. Even the most well-optimized network today could become obsolete in an instant, so staying apprised of current and upcoming developments is critical to maintaining your ongoing flexibility and adaptability. If this all sounds like a lot to handle on top of your usual operations, that?s what White Mountain IT Services is here to help with. Our professionals can help you make sure that these standards are met, as well as many others we couldn?t mention here. To learn more, reach out to us at (603) 889-0800.
What are Phishing and Whaling? The first thing to understand is the basics of phishing and whaling. If you’ve heard these terms but are not 100% sure about how it works, then you’re lucky enough to have never been a target. Phishing Phishing is the original practice. It involves sending a fake email address to a targeted employee. The email pretends to be from someone that the employee knows and would trust. A coworker, their boss, or a friend whom they have emailed with at work before. Or it might be a generic message pretending to be from the person’s bank or a social media platform. The email is usually simple and usually involves a request to open an attached file. In the file, of course, is malware that will sneakily download and install itself on the computer the moment the employee clicks the link. Spear-Phishing Spear-phishing, which you also may have heard of, is simply more targeted. It involves the hacker doing more research on the person they’re targeting and the person they’re impersonating. The hacker may research social media to try and type with the same phases and cadence as the person they’re impersonating. They may try to use gleaned personal information to add authenticity. And they are trying to pull on the relationship between the target and whoever they are impersonating. Whaling Whaling is an evolution of spear-phishing in which the targets involved are higher in the authority chain and, therefore, have more power to give the hacker something beyond a malware-infested click. In other words, spearing “bigger fish,” hence whaling. In a whaling scenario, the hacker usually tries to impersonate someone very high up in the business, like the CEO, a VP, or a department head. They study the exec’s social media to learn how they talk, and who they most often talk with. Then the hacker sends an email impersonating this exec to either an employee or another higher-up in the company in order to get something. That ‘something’ is usually either money (as a wire transfer or other online means) or insider information about the company. Phishing is a Threat to Every Business The problem is that most companies underestimate the damage that phishing can do. If you’ve been aware of cybersecurity for some time, you know that phishing is ‘old news.’ It’s also not a very complicated kind of hack, because it relies on human error rather than infiltrating your defenses. But the reason hackers still use it and use it so abundantly, is because it works. No matter how secure your data security infrastructure is, one misguided click from an employee checking their media can get your business network infected and breached. And the worst part of malware-phishing is that usually, the employee has no idea what they’ve done. Whatever they clicked will appear to open a legitimate file. Whatever little question was used to lure them will be answered. But somewhere on your network is ransomware, spyware, or a rootkit waiting to strike. How Whaling Works Now let’s talk about whaling, which is a whole other kettle of fish — so to speak. Unlike phishing, the primary goal of whaling is almost never to spread malware. Instead, the hacker works hard to impersonate someone important and then use the power of that authority […]
