How Does Thinking Critically Provide Business Advantages? When referring to your business, critical thinking is defined as the capability to gather information and data and use it to make better decisions and solve problems more effectively. This ultimately leads to greater productivity with fewer errors made. Not only does thinking critically help solve challenges and better utilize the data you have at your disposal, it helps to promote communication skills and open-mindedness amongst your team. Let?s explore a process that helps promote critical thinking skills that you can encourage your team to do. How to Encourage Critical Thinking Skills in Your Business Operations The following procedure is an effective way to solve business challenges in a way that acquaints your team with the concept of applying critical thinking to everyday processes. Step One: Identify the problem so you have a goal to focus on.By singling out the root cause of the issue you are presented with, you can more effectively direct your thoughts toward resolving it. Is this predictable? Yes?but no less of an important step for it. Being able to identify the source of an issue, rather than its symptoms, is key to resolving it and will require you to practice critical thinking. Step Two: Come up with a bunch of solutions, and narrow it down to the best.Start brainstorming potential ways to solve the problem, starting by accepting any and all suggestions. This not only helps you be more open-minded, it can help introduce new viewpoints to the conversation. Once you?ve managed to land on a few that the team involved can get behind, focus on those and critique them, adjusting them to better suit your needs until you find which of them has the optimal potential outcome. Step Three: Create a strategy to put your proposed solution in place.Once you?ve selected your approach to your given challenge, put together a team to tackle it based on their capabilities and skill sets. It is important that this strategy should be based on the value that you are aiming for, and that each team member understands how their role contributes to the ultimate goal of the strategy. Trust Us to Think Critically About Your Business Technology As a managed service provider, our job is to do exactly this as we manage the IT your business relies on. Find out more about what we have to offer by giving us a call at (603) 889-0800.
Essential Cybersecurity Investments for Businesses Nowadays, businesses have dozens of options when it comes to protecting their operations. For simplicity, we?ve taken three that we feel can be used most effectively to catch the majority of threats. This is not an exhaustive list and you should absolutely implement more than just these options, mind you, these are just the ones we are highlighting today. Endpoint Management Businesses have many more endpoints at their disposal nowadays than they did in the past. Where there were once only workstations to consider, mobile devices and the Internet of Things can also provide inroads into your business? network. This is even more the case with remote work having exploded in the recent past. By better taking stock and managing your endpoints, security can be improved upon considerably. Network Monitoring Risk mitigation is generally the overall goal of any form of monitoring, because it just makes sense that the closer something is being watched there?s a smaller chance of something happening without you being aware of it. Today?s cybercriminals are going to do whatever they can to hide their attacks, so you need to understand your network infrastructure and have better visibility into how it works. This makes monitoring your network essential. Threat Detection On a related note, it?s important to have a plan on how to catch and handle any threats that do make it onto your network. It doesn?t matter how much you invest, all it takes is one mistake or one bit of code that lets in ransomware for it all to come crumbling down. Millions of threats are swirling around every year?you aren?t going to have a 100% success rate in stopping them. There?s just no way. That?s why threat detection and remediation is so critical. If your business isn?t prepared to manage the threats against it, it won?t be nearly as successful as it could be. White Mountain IT Services can help you make these preparations. Give us a call at (603) 889-0800 to learn more.
Four Variables of Phishing Before we outline the four things you should be looking for to identify a phishing message, we wanted to say that these attacks can happen over any type of communication. You can just as easily be phished over the phone or through the mail as you can over email or through instant message. Most phishing messages are delivered through email, but they can come from any direction. Let?s go through four variables of a phishing message: #1 – There is a Real Sense of Urgency While a lot of the messages that we get in business are demanding, there is something extraordinary about a phishing message. Essentially, phishing messages will urge the reader to take immediate action. This action could be in the form of clicking on links, downloading attachments, or giving over credentials that the hacker will then use to infiltrate organizational computing networks and steal data, deploy malware, or other negative situations. #2 – Poor Grammar and Spelling Many of these messages are created with the notion that the reader will be fooled by the overall legitimacy of the message. Many times they are sent as being from financial institutions or insurance companies. Typically, however, there are signs within the message itself that can signal its illegitimacy. Variables like misspelled words, poor use of grammar, and other red flags can tip users that the message is not legitimate. #3 – The Domain Is Not Right When someone sends an official email from a business, typically the domain name of the email address that is sending the email will represent the organization that the message is coming from. If the address doesn?t come from the organization that is sending the message, that is a giant red flag. Most reputable organizations pay good money to host their own domain and if the address you are getting a message from doesn?t represent that, you have to believe that it is a scam. #4 – Suspicious Aura of the Message You know the type of messages that you typically get. If a message you receive doesn?t meet the criteria of ?normal? you, at the very least, need to verify with the presumed sender of the message that it is legitimate. If it feels off, it probably is. Make sure you get this confirmation through a different means of communication. Phishing messages are the most common way that hackers gain access to systems and deliver malware. As a result, you need to make sure that your staff is thoroughly trained on what variables to look for so they don?t put your whole organization in danger. For more information about phishing or to get some help implementing a training strategy at your place of business, give the IT professionals at White Mountain IT Services a call today at (603) 889-0800.
First, Let?s Review What Blockchain Is Blockchain technology, also known as distributed ledger technology, is a method of computing where an entire P2P network of computer systems?thousands of computers in total?share the responsibility for storing data. Every process or transaction is recorded by every participating system?s ledger, creating a decentralized and implicitly trustworthy chain of immutable records. This Decentralized Nature is Key to the Idea of Improved Security The concept of this idea is as follows: Centralized servers are the keystone to many, many organizations? infrastructure strategies. Naturally, any of these organizations could be targeted by cybercrime, whether that?s through a phishing attack, a Distributed Denial of Service attack, whatever the perpetrator has determined to use. With the blockchain in play, however, the person or group attempting the hack has a much higher bar to clear. Instead of just attacking one server, the attacker now has to get control over effectively the entire blockchain in order to do anything. Otherwise, the rest of the blockchain will see the change in the attacked node?s ledger and reject it?blocking an attacker?s attempt to exfiltrate data. So, with it laid out in language like this, what do you think? Could this potentially be the next big thing in blockchain? We?d be interested in finding out, that?s for sure. However, this is all still a hypothetical, posed by Internet privacy advocate Jenelle Fulton-Brown, a security architect based in Toronto. In the meantime, White Mountain IT Services can help outfit your business with the best cybersecurity infrastructure available to New Hampshire businesses, while also helping to educate your team on the behaviors they need to follow to keep your business safe. Give us a call at (603) 889-0800 to learn more.
The ?Disaster? Every disaster doesn?t need to ruin your workplace. Sure, you might be the victim of an ?act of God? like a fire or a flood, but the reality is that most of the time, if you lose data, it is the result of something a little more subtle. There?s nothing subtle about millions of gallons of water seeping up from the ground and overtaking your workspace, of course, but there is when a component on your seven-year-old server fails and you are left without all the data and applications that it hosts. The point is that disasters come in all shapes and sizes, and if your business isn?t ready for every single one of them, chances are that it will be the one you aren?t ready for that you will be hit with. Let?s go through some of the considerations you will have to make when strategizing your data recovery platform and how recovery impacts businesses. SMBs and Data Loss It has been proven that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are the companies hurt the most by data loss. Larger businesses typically have the means to build their data redundancy and the ability to recover this data when needed. Smaller companies don?t have that luxury, so it is important to realize just how important data backup and recovery are. 60 percent of SMBs will shut down within six months if they have a dramatic data loss incident, so it is a situation that needs immediate attention. Here are some tips to help you build a more robust backup and recovery strategy. Recovery Planning out data recovery is crucial. If you were to have a backup plan and you end up losing data with no plan on how to recover it, you could have a problem maintaining business continuity. You can use a service (like our BDR) or there is software you can use that will help you manage your backup and recovery processes yourself, but make sure you have an idea of how your business can get back up and running quickest and then prioritize that strategy. With so many threats out there to your business? computing, having a backup plan that works to get you back up and running quickly is important. Testing Backups Not only should you concoct a consistent backup schedule, you should always test your backups to ensure that they are working properly. Nothing is worse for a small business than having to go through a data loss disaster and have a backup in place that wasn?t working for days or weeks. Be sure to log your tests so that any IT administrator can know when data was backed up and how to recover it should the need arise. 3-2-1 The 3-2-1 rule is a policy that builds stable redundancy of a company?s data and computing assets. Essentially, the business keeps three copies of data, two of which are kept onsite, with one copy stored offsite. We suggest the offsite storage be in the cloud, as with our backup and disaster recovery (BDR) service, but it can be as simple as taking a hard drive with your backed-up data offsite when you leave for the day. Either way, having three copies of your data can go a long way toward building data security. Leave […]
