Let?s begin by establishing the real definitions of ?data breach? and ?security incident.? What is a ?Data Breach?? In no uncertain terms, a breach happens when some of your business? data is somehow accessed by someone outside of your organization through their own specific efforts to do so, Trend Micro defines it as ?an incident wherein information is stolen or taken from a system without the knowledge or authorization of the system’s owner.? Basically, a breach is when a business? stored data is accessed by an unauthorized user?which means that, technically speaking, a data breach isn?t an inherently malicious thing. What is a ?Security Incident?? A security incident is the term given to any violation of established security policies regarding a business? technology, at any scale. Again, a security incident isn?t inherently malicious, but should still be seen as a potential threat to an organization?s security and compliance. As a blanket term, ?security incident? covers a wide range of circumstances, including: Malware infection Spam hitting an inbox Physical access to IT equipment and infrastructure A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack Portable storage being misused A brute force attack enabling network access ?I think you get the picture. Security incidents are commonly delineated by their severity: how serious the incident is, and how much of a company?s collective attention will need to be paid to resolve them. Serious incidents?things like data breaches, DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, and advanced persistent threats (APTs)?are all high-priority security incidents, whereas things like a malware infection or someone accessing data without authorization would be considered of medium priority. Low-priority incidents would be things like false alarms. Isn?t This Just a Difference in Semantics? Technically speaking, yes? however, it is an important difference to stay cognizant of. After all, clarity is going to be important if you do face a security incident as to what kind of incident it is, and what needs to be done to resolve it. Encouraging your team members to familiarize themselves with the various warning signs that something is wrong gives you an increased chance of someone spotting an issue. In turn, this gives you the opportunity to catch and resolve a threat before it materializes into a real security incident?breach or otherwise. We Can Help You Prevent Threats from Getting That Far User awareness is a key component of any business? security, for certain, but the trick is that it is only one component of it? one of many. White Mountain IT Services is here to help you attend to the rest of them. Give us a call at (603) 889-0800 to find out more about the security services we offer.

Let?s consider this disconnect, and what might be done as a leader to help reconnect any employees who have these feelings. How Has Remote Work Divided Us? There is a phenomenon in human nature that is frequently seen in business operations, whether they are carried out remotely or in-person. Human beings are instinctively tribal creatures, so we tend to gravitate toward those with whom we share space. This happens a lot within hobbies or belief systems, but one place that it has been seen a lot in recent months is within workplace departments. Microsoft Provides a Perfect Example of This A study, published in Nature Human Behavior, analyzed how 61,000 Microsoft employees would communicate with each other from December of 2019 until June 2020?collecting data from before and after the company’s transition to fully remote work on March 5, 2020. Before this point, about 18 percent of the company’s staff operated remotely.  By aggregating the anonymous data collected from the instant messages, emails, calls, meetings, and the total number of hours worked each week, the study revealed a key pattern. While more time was spent communicating by teams, these communications were primarily within the different teams at the company. On average, 25 percent less time was spent on communications across department lines. Remote work also saw fewer people collaborating with new contacts in the organization. You may have observed similar trends occurring in your own organization during remote work. What Can Be Done About Departmental Silos? There are a few different strategies that can be used to prevent your different departments from eschewing communications with one another. Keep Remote Workers Connected When someone is working remotely, feelings of isolation and disconnect are all too easy to develop. Take the initiative to reach out and maintain their connection to the group as a whole, not just their department or role. Involve More People Another effective way to help stave off remote isolation is by contextualizing an employee’s work on an organization-wide scale. Give each employee a view of their spot in the overall workforce so they can see how their contributions impact everyone else. Push For Outreach Finally, it is important that your team members have the freedom to have the off-topic conversations that lead to improved teamwork. Encourage your employees to talk about shared interests throughout the workday (emphasizing the importance of moderation, of course) and set aside some time for some casual teambuilding. What was once effortless in the office will take some effort with remote team members. We can help by outfitting your team with the communication and collaboration tools they’ll need for both work purposes and interpersonal development. Find out more about what we can offer you by calling (603) 889-0800. 

Let?s explore the strategy that goes into unified communications (commonly known as UC for short), and the benefits your business could see from it. What are Unified Communications? Unified communications refers to the amalgamation of different collaborative tools into a single platform, providing your business with a few significant benefits: Productivity can improve, with your employees able to communicate through a wide variety of tools on an assortment of devices, as there will be nothing in the way to keep your team from collaborating and being productive as a result. Your users? experience can be enhanced, by giving them better tools to collaborate with, reducing the likelihood of employee turnover. Costs can be reduced, thanks to the cost savings that the cloud (where UC solutions are hosted) facilitates, helping organizations more effectively budget their IT. These features are exceptionally useful for the business that puts Unified Communications in place?although we haven?t yet discussed one of the most impressive benefits that UC solutions can bring: mobility. Unified Solutions Can Keep Your Team in Touch, Wherever They?re Working UC solutions, as a cloud-delivered option, are available both in and out of the traditional office space. This means that workplaces of all kinds?including those that require lots of time ?in the field??can greatly benefit from these tools. Initially, UC applications were largely confined to the office. However, more and more UC options are now designed to be used by frontline workers, bringing technology out of the office and benefitting a wider scope of business processes. With this shift, businesses of various kinds can accomplish more for their businesses, in terms of both efficiency and efficacy. Interested in Implementing Unified Communications for Your Team Members? Reach out to our team to learn more about how we can help. Call (603) 889-0800 today.

Ransomware operates by playing a high-level game of keep-away. By applying military-grade encryption to the data on a targeted device, ransomware renders its victims powerless to use this data until a ransom is paid. Only after the demanded funds have changed hands will an attacker allegedly provide the necessary keys to decrypt the data? but whether or not they bother is another question entirely. On the surface, it sounds like a simple problem to solve?the ransom could arguably be just another cost of doing business, right? Wrong. The demanded ransom is typically beyond the means of a small business by multiple decimal points, and again, there is no guarantee that your data will be restored. By paying, you could easily be giving the person responsible for halting your operations the rest of your business’ resources. This is precisely why it is best practice to never pay the ransom? something that hackers make more and more challenging. Some have begun to implement a method called “double-extortion.” In addition to demanding a ransom to decrypt the data, an attacker will then demand that they be paid again, or else they’ll leak a business’ data online. This puts an impacted business between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, not paying could end quite badly for their organization, but on the other, they still have no guarantee the hacker will stay true to their word and they’ll be funding later attacks and improvements to them. It also needs to be said that ransomware introduces a mess of challenges where compliance is concerned. It’s a safe assumption that a lot of your stored data is sensitive in some way, so if it winds up leaked, you could be facing some regulatory fines for breaking compliance. At the end of the day, the best way to protect your business from ransomware is to not be infected in the first place. Along with user education, advanced security measures and multi-factor authentication are useful ways to prevent infection. We can help you put these protections in place. Call (603) 889-0800 to learn more.

With remote monitoring and management tools, you can make your technology solutions a bit more predictable, as you can spot telltale signs of issues long before they impact your business? operations. By monitoring your infrastructure, you can effectively prevent issues from escalating into major, wasteful, and time-consuming problems, like downtime. Large enterprises do this by investing in expensive remote monitoring and management tools, but these capabilities (and the staff to maintain them) are usually out of the scope for smaller organizations. We?ve invested in these tools and work with small businesses, sort of as an outsourced IT department for them.  It used to be the case that small businesses struggled with technology because of their limited capacity to take care of these resources, either due to a lack of trained technicians or a lack of funding. This is simply not the case any longer. All businesses, regardless of size, no longer have an excuse to pass on technology management. This is thanks to outsourcing through a managed service provider. Remote monitoring and management can be done without the physical barriers that plague the traditional office, and it can be done without being on-site at all. If you experience an oddity with your technology, for example, there wouldn?t necessarily need to be a trip to the office to figure things out. Depending on the issue, it can potentially be resolved remotely in a quick and easy fashion. By far the biggest benefit of implementing remote monitoring and management tools is that it saves your business large sums of capital in the long run. Our state-of-the-art RMM tools help you address issues before they become even larger, and the downtime associated with these large problems can be a real budget-breaker. If you can identify and resolve problems before they grow out of control, you can keep your business functioning properly and practically eliminate downtime and its costs. If your business struggles with technology management, White Mountain IT Services can help with our RMM tools. You?ll never have to worry about technology management again. To learn more, reach out to us at (603) 889-0800.