Entries from June 12, 2016 - June 18, 2016

Wednesday
Jun152016

SharePoint and OneDrive in the cloud

An important part of Office 365 is the ability to store, manage and share information from a central location in the cloud. Here is a brief video describing some of the enhancements Microsoft has made to these products recently.

Wednesday
Jun152016

SharePoint and Office 365

If you have subscribed to Office 365 with either Microsoft’s Small Business Essentials, Premium or any of their Enterprise Level products then you have SharePoint available to you. The following video gives you some insight into some of the things that you can use SharePoint for and make it another useful tool for your organization.

Tuesday
Jun142016

Have you thought about Cyber Insurance?

SophosHeartbeat_336x280When putting together all of the pieces that you need to be able to recover from a security attack have you left anything out? It might be Cyber insurance.

When we are designing a system to mitigate the harm from a Cyber Attack we look at multiple factors. First you need a solid firewall that is being updated to keep its security functions as current as possible. Secondly you need protection on your workstations with malware/antivirus protection (endpoint protection). If you choose the right vendor and the right products from the right vendor you can have these two security points synchronizing their support. This provides an extra layer of protection that you don’t find in other vendor’s products. Sophos is the only company out their that has this kind of synchronized security and the integration of all the products providing this is just on the horizon.

Second, you need a backup solution that provides a full image of your network. This allows you to dial back time to be able to restore to a point that dates prior to your attack/infection. If you don’t have this some of the attacks can cause you to do a full restore of the system and to then have to recreate your data if you don’t have it backed up.

So how do you pay for all of this labor to get you back to normal after an attack. Along comes Cyber Insurance. What is Cyber Insurance? I was reading an article from TechCrunch that defined it as follows:

Cyber insurance is a sub-category within the general insurance industry, offering products and services designed to protect businesses from internet-based risks. Although forms of cyber insurance policies have been around for the past 10 years, market awareness has recently increased exponentially, in part because of the headline-grabbing cyber breaches that have hit almost every industry.

Asking your Insurance Company about Cyber Insurance may cause you to look into increasing you front line defenses before they will cover you. You will need to comply with their basic security requirements before they write the policy. This will be an additional expense to you to become compliant. So it is important to choose the right products and be doing the right procedures to ensure that you are providing yourself the best security that you can.

This is why security has become one of our main focal points. It is really getting scary out there.

For more information on Sophos Synchronized Security down these papers:

Sunday
Jun122016

How to keep up productivity with cloud computing.

imageWhile the article that I would appoint you to is actually “How to keep up productivity when freelancing, with cloud computing", I think we can all take bits and pieces of this and apply them to our daily work life as well. You don't have to be a freelance worker to see some of the benefits that you would have from leveraging cloud computing components. I think this is a great article to take note of to see how many of the new millennial members of our society probably be working in the future. They are more attuned to using the devices to be connected to each other and it is not a far reach make as part of their work life as well. This is a great lesson on how to be able to be working from anywhere, anytime that suits you. Something as I get older is part of my wish list. I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on this.