Why Good IT Security Is Important For Small Businesses.

Why do small businesses need to worry about IT security? We all understand why banks need to have good security … they’ve got our money, and if they get hacked they are probably out of business. What’s the worst that can happen if you don’t have good security as a small business?

The truth is that the damage caused to a small business by poor security may not be as catastrophic as a bank getting hacked, but the consequences of poor security are still painful .. and costly. 

The first thing you’ve got to realise is that security isn’t just about getting your web site hacked. In fact, a good proportion of what we do in managing IT support for our customers involves managing network security. 

How does IT Security impact small businesses?

The problem for small businesses is internet malware. Malware is “bad” software that is unintentionally downloaded from hacked web sites that seeks out bugs in software that is installed on your PC. Unless your PC is kept updated with the latest security updates, malware can use these bugs to upload malicious software which can turn your PC into a spam sender or steal your internet passwords. The first you are likely to know that you have malware on your PC is when things start to grind to a halt, and this is the point at which bad security starts to cost you money. 

Few things are more frustrating than a PC on a go-slow because of a malware infection. It gets in the way of doing your work and causes frustration. You can try running applications such as Malwarebytes to lean it up, but you then lose your PC for the best part of a day while it runs a full scan of your system. Critically all of this is taking place when you want to be getting on dealing with your clients, costing you money with every minute that goes by … and you haven’t even called your IT support company yet!

How to keep internet malware at bay.

The answer is to make sure that your PC’s and servers are kept updated and maintained on a regular basis. If you’re a small business without a dedicated IT Manager that can be a tall order. In reality you are better off outsourcing to a managed service provide who will use automation software to run manage and update your systems remotely. Using automation cuts the cost of keeping your PC’s properly updated and in good working order. More importantly, it’s not your problem!

So don’t discount security just because you’re a small business. It’s just as important to you as it is to bigger businesses. You just see the benefits a different way. For you, IT security translates into reliability of your PC’s and servers.

Web Security – How Do You Know If A Site Is Safe?

The Internet can be a dangerous place! We all love to scour the Internet for a bargain, but beware the bad stuff out there that can steal your credit card details, Paypal login, or turn your PC into a “zombie” that can be used by spammers and password thieves. Web sites that have been hacked and are being used to disseminate malicious software don’t advertise the fact .. in fact the web site owner probably won’t even know about it.

How Big A problem Is Web Security?

If you visit a compromised web site and your PC is missing the latest updates, you stand a good chance of ending up with software on your PC that you didn’t ask for. The problem is that it isn’t going to introduce itself and shake your hand! A bit like the neighbour you didn’t invite to your barbecue, it came along uninvited and it’s going to make a nuisance of itself.

How Do I Know If My PC Is Infected?

You are unlikely to recognise that your PC has been infected straight away. Internet malware can sit there silently waiting for you to connect to your online bank account so that it can steal your login details or send out so much traffic that it clogs up your entire network as we saw with one of our customers recently. Eventually though your PC will become unusable as more malware gets downloaded at which point you need to call your IT support company.

Which Are The Most Dangerous Web Sites

It's not just “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll”  web sites that are potentially dangerous. According to a Symantec study in 2012, 61% of malicious web sites are regular web sites that have been compromised and infected with malicious code.

The Top 5 Most Exploited Web Site Categories - % Of Total Number Of Infected Websites

1.       Blogs / Web Communications - 19.8%

2.       Hosting / Personal Hosted Sites – 15.6%

3.       Business / Economy – 10%

4.       Shopping – 7.7%

5.       Education / Reference – 6.9%

Whilst these figures are based on 2011 data, the percentages won’t have changed much, and new around 9,500 malicious web sites are being found by Google every day.

How To Protect Your Computers Against Internet Malware

Home users need to make sure that their security is kept up-to-date. Make sure that you enable automatic updates for Windows Updates and keep applications such as Java and Adobe Acrobat updated as well. Malware exploits bugs in software that is installed on your PC to upload malicious code to your system, and regular updates are your best defence. There is no  need to shell out large amounts of money for security software though. Microsoft Security Essentials is free and good enough for home use. 

If you are a business, the same principles apply, but you need to take your IT security a little more seriously:

• Make sure that all Windows / Java / Adobe updates are applied to your computers on a weekly basis.
• Make sure you run commercial security software.
• Monitor your PC’s for tell-tale signs of trouble.
• Use web security software to block access to known infected sites as well as pornographic / illegal / non-business material

A little common sense also goes a long way. If you are asked to click on a link in an email, or a Facebook / Twitter post, engage brain before clicking. Is the person that it came from likely to have sent you a link to ”Some hilarious pics of you”? If in doubt, don’t click! 

Is Google Apps for Business Right For Your Company?

“How can I use cloud computing in my business?” is probably the number one IT question that I get asked. It can be a hard  question to answer because the cloud isn’t just one technology, and it all depends on what you need from your IT. Very often, small businesses owners simply want to store files in the cloud and share them with colleagues and clients, and I increasingly find myself suggesting to people that they should at least look at Google Apps for Business.

Google Apps for Business is the cloud equivalent of the Swiss Army knife.  It has a number of components:

Google Mail

Most people know about Google Mail, but many people aren’t aware of Google Apps for Business which works pretty much the same as the personal version of Google Mail, but you use your own domain (e.g. clearview.co.uk) instead of the Google domain of gmail.com.  You can also personalise the system with your company logo (see below).

Google Calendar

Google Apps provides a  calendar to help you organise your time. You can share your calendar with your colleagues and vice versa. In addition to scheduling meetings, Google’s “Tasks” component allows you to create a “To-Do” list which I keep on the right hand side of my screen. It’s no substitute for a CRM system, but it helps me to organise my activity for the day.

Even if all you got was email and calendar, surely Google Apps for Business has to be the cloud’s biggest bargain at £3.30 per user per month for businesses, and absolutely free for non-profit organisations. What’s more, if you have grown attached to using Microsoft Outlook as your email and calendar software, there’s no need to change. You can configure Google Apps to synchronise all of your email and calendar entries with your Outlook client.

But that’s not all! You can also use Google Apps for Business to store documents online and synchronise them with a folder on your laptop / desktop PC using Google Drive.

Google Drive

Google Drive allows you to store and share your files online and integrates neatly with Google Mail. There are two ways to access your Google Drive Files. Firstly, you can download and install an install programme from your Google account which creates a synchronisation folder on your laptop or PC. You can then drag and drop files and folders into your Google Drive folder and synchronise them with your Google Account.

  

Secondly, you can upload files to Google Drive using a web browser. This is a simple “point and click” operation that allows you to upload files to your Google account from any internet connected device.

Once a file or folder has been uploaded to your Google Drive account, you can share it using a right mouse click and clicking on the “Share” menu option. Files and folders can be shared with colleagues in your own organisation as well as with clients and business partners. You get the option to send an email to the person that you have shared the file or folder with.

Word Processing and Spreadsheets for Free!

In addition to email, calendar, file sharing and collaboration, Google Apps also provides you with a basic word processor, spreadsheet and drawing application at no extra cost. They aren’t as sophisticated as the Microsoft applications, or even Open Source suites such as LibreOffice, but if you only need basic word processing and spreadsheet functions, they do the job. I tend to compose everything in my favourite Office suite and just use Google for storage and collaboration. 

Great Value Cloud Computing For Small Businesses

Having moved over from Microsoft Exchange about 18 months ago, I'm a big advocate of Google Apps for Business. It's great value for money and there are ways that you can overlay automatic encryption to ensure data privacy. If you are a start-up and looking for a low cost way to store / back up data files in the cloud, as well as share files with your colleagues and clients, it's hard to fault.

Proper IT Maintenance Is Good For Business.

Don't you just want to tear your hair out when your PC goes all cronky on you? Computers may just be a handful of printed circuit boards, a processor and a disk drive or two, but they sure seem to know the very worst time to embark on a go-slow, or even blue screen if you are one of the unlucky ones hit by a bad Windows update or some malware downloaded from the Internet. According to Brother International’s Small Business Survey, business owners now recognise that IT failure is a real drain on their bottom line profits:

• 75 per cent of small business owners indicate that a computer failure is more disruptive than an employee being taken sick.

• 77 per cent stated that a technical fault has hit their bottom line profits through missed deadlines or lost business opportunities.

• 66 per cent of small business owners say they are frequently confused by the technical tools at their disposal to run their business.

• 86 per cent additionally admitted to losing staff productivity due to technical problems.

• 31 per cent of respondents went so far as to say that they would give up a week’s worth of their hard earned holiday to make sure that they would never be hit by technical malfunctions again .

While business owners who felt the need to safeguard cash to withstand the effect of a further economic downturn increased from 44 to 48%, 52% see that investing in technology can help to give them a competitive advantage in their market.

From my perspective, I see that there are 3 key points for small businesses:

Proper Technology Management Produces Bigger Profits - Technology, and specifically proper management of technology can help businesses to increase their profits. If you can manage your technology properly, it will fundamentally fail less frequently. Taking care of technology will help you to take care of business!

If You’re Not a Tech Whizz, Find Someone Who Is! - As a business person, if you aren’t tech-savvy, you to partner with a company that is. If you can find the right IT support partner, they should be able to advise you on ways that you can use technology to best serve the needs of your business.

Technology Business Wins Start At The Top - 52 percent of people are right! You can use technology to make your business run more efficiently. The desire and the drive to change business processes for the better however needs to come from the business owner, both to make sure that your IT company produces the answer to the right business problem, as well as to promote adoption within the business.

You can download the Brother Small business Survey here:

There should be exciting times ahead for small businesses who have survived the recession, and technology can help you to become a lean, mean business machine. 

Dude - A virus ate my customer's internet connection!

Did you think that viruses were a thing of the past that you don't have to worry about any more? Well here is a story from one of our customers that shows that the Internet really can be a dangerous place even for the most security conscious companies. Understandably, businesses focus on making money rather than IT security. The problem is that when you get a malware infection (which many of you will understand better as viruses), you may not know about it, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t cause problems for your company.

Recently, one of our largest customers was having problems with a web security system that they had bought about a year ago. They have around 2,000 IT users and a sizable internet connection, but something was bringing their system to a grinding halt, and quite a lot of the web connections had very little to do with their line of business!

Since they have a support contract with us we held our hands up to do some investigation as to what was causing the problem, and it soon became obvious that 75% of their network traffic was coming from a single PC which had obviously been infected with malware and was generating huge amounts of network traffic which was clogging up their Internet connection.

The graphs below show you what happened as soon as the infected PC was removed from the network. It’s amazing what one infected PC can do!:

Web connections per hour dropped from 20,000 to 5000.

Blocked connections per hour dropped from 14,000 to 0.

Connections per hour to “malicious” sites dropped from 20,000 to 0.

We will never know how the malware ended up on our client’s PC. They were probably just unlucky and visited a hacked web site that took advantage of a missing security update to infect the PC. What it does demonstrate though is the importance of making sure that your PC’s are kept updated to minimise the likelihood of picking up a malware infection. 

Just imagine the devastating effect that a similar incident could have on your company if you rely on cloud services for your line of business applications. It just goes to show that as you grow more and more reliant on the Internet to run our businesses, you will need to make sure that your security is up to scratch. 

How Managed IT Services Can Reduce The Cost Of Running Your IT

Have you ever wondered why your office administrator is spending more and more time on the telephone to your IT company when they should be dealing with your customer correspondence? Whatever the reason, time spent troubleshooting problems on your IT systems costs you real money, either because your staff are diverted from the jobs that they are meant to be doing, or because you need to pay your IT engineer another couple of hundred pounds to come in and sort the problem out for you.

If you want to cut the real cost of supporting your IT, you need to makes some changes. You need to do a little housekeeping to delete some of the digital clutter that PC’s accumulate as a result of carrying out your day-to-day work. You also need to make sure that your PC’s are kept updated with all of the latest patches to protect you from viruses and trojans that you can download from the internet without even realising it.

Ask yourself a few questions

• When did you last defragment or run disk cleanup on your PC hard drives?
• Would you know if one of your PC’s was running out of Hard disk space?
• How often do you check that Windows Updates are installing properly on all of your PC’s?

These are all straightforward tasks that can help you to spot potential problems before they bite you. Think of it as being the equivalent of a car service. I’ll bet that you take your car in for a service every year because it makes your car run better, and because if you don’t your engine will eventually seize up and cost you ten times more than getting it serviced regularly. Computers are no different, except that computers really need to be checked on a weekly basis.

If that sounds a daunting task, why not outsource your IT Support to a company who can manage your IT for you. Just like your car dealer, they can use automation software to perform the equivalent of a service on your PC’s via the internet. This is by far the least expensive way of performing the regular housekeeping tasks that will keep your PC’s running reliably and virus free, and as a consequence you won't need to call out an engineer to your offices so often. The net result is that your IT keeps running, your employees can get on with the job that you pay them for, and your IT costs are kept as low as possible. 

Let me know if you need an IT tip to make your PC's and Servers work better for you. Where possible, one of my engineers will answer your question on the blog. If we can't we will at least email you back and try to point you in the right direction if we can.

The 7 Secrets Of Successful IT Support

Your business needs expert IT support to keep your business running, and you expect good value for money, but what services should you look for from a potential supplier to keep your systems in good health?

There are a number of components of IT support that need to be costed and catered for to keep your IT running smoothly, protected from internet borne malware, and also to ensure that any IT issues can be rectified as quickly as possible.

1. Hardware Asset Management
By maintaining accurate records of our customers’ installed hardware, we are able to arrive on site ready and prepared to set about the task of repairing or rebuilding the system that has failed. Without this information, it can take an hour or more from the arrival of an engineer on site for them to identify the problem, work out which item needs to be replaced, and then buy a replacement from PC World (the most expensive place to buy replacement parts) before coming back to your office to effect the repair. All this time, the clock is ticking costing you money unnecessarily.

2. Software Asset Management

Software auditing allows us to monitor licence usage within your organisation on your behalf and better manage software upgrades that are required on your systems as old versions of software become unsupported. We can then advise you of recommended upgrades to be undertaken as part of a regular review programme.

3. Antivirus / Antispware Management
Maintaining up-to-date security software is an essential discipline in keeping your IT systems running reliably. Although endpoint security software is self-updating, modern malware can deactivate it in the event that your PC is infected. Indeed, antivirus software that is out of date or deactivated is a warning sign that the PC may have suffered a successful malware attack.

4. Windows Update / Patch Management

Windows and application patches are the front line battleground in combating internet malware that causes your PC’s to run slowly and crash. Sometimes Windows updates fail to install, and it is essential to monitor these events and take corrective action to make sure that the relevant update is installed as soon as possible. Also, when a WIndows patch continues to fail to install, it is a sure sign that something is wrong. When this happens, it’s time for a rebuild, and by catching the problem early we can schedule the support work so that it has a minimal impact on your business.

5. Desktop Policy Management

Your PC’s will run a lot more reliably if you ensure that you only have software that is essential for your business installed on your PC’s. We monitor software that is installed on your PC’s, and identify any unwanted software that we find. We then either agree a change to your policy with you if it is needed to run your business or take action to remove it.

6. Scheduled Maintenance

To keep your PC’s running at peak performance, you have to do a little maintenance on a regular basis. We make sure that routine maintenance is carried out to clear out temporary files and defragment your hard disk to make sure that you get best performance from your systems. We also make sure that a full antivirus scan is run overnight on your PC’s on a weekly basis.

7. Helpdesk Support

All IT Systems fail sometimes, at which point the support process starts and we will employ telephone, remote or onsite support as necessary. The benefit of diligence in undertaking all of the above processes however is that they will minimise the amount of times that your systems fail. The most expensive component of providing IT Support is the cost of sending an engineer to site, and it only makes sense to do whatever is possible to minimise this expensive activity.

Our approach is very different to self employed consultants who may charge cheaper hourly rates because they don't provide these essential preemptive maintenance services. Lower hourly charges may appear attractive initially, until you find that you are regularly writing cheques for £200 for ad-hoc support. Our approach is to do everything possible to avoid onsite callouts which are not only costly, but also result in lost staff productivity for you while your staff wait for an IT repair to be undertaken.

If you would like to know more about our IT Support services, please visit our web site, download our IT Services white paper, or contact us by telephone on 01707 255060 or via email at info@clearview.co.uk.

How To Cut The Cost Of Running Your IT

Have you ever wondered why you still get viruses / malware on your company’s PC’s even though you have purchased security software from a reputable vendor? It’s a good question and one that you need to understand if you want to minimise the operational cost of running your business. After all, every time you need to call an engineer it costs you money, and not just in terms of cheques that you write to your IT support company. In addition, there is the cost of lost employee productivity caused by degraded performance as your system becomes unusable, as well as the time lost while your employee waits for their system to be rebuilt. So what should you do to ensure that you don't waste money on engineer call-outs and lost productivity?

IT Security Is A Process

You have to recognise that IT Security doesn’t just involve installing software. You have to make sure that you perform necessary housekeeping on a regular basis. Specifically, it is essential to keep your systems updated with the latest updates and patches for Microsoft Windows and common applications such as Adobe and Java to protect you against the latest security issues that are discovered.

The reason that regular maintenance is so critical is that newly discovered software bugs (also known as vulnerabilities) are used by hackers and fraudsters to plant malicious software on your PC’s. These are the cracks in your defences that allow your security to be breached even with security software installed.

It is likely if not inevitable that you will suffer malware infections at some point if you allow your employees to access the internet. Hackers and security companies are locked in a constant battle that is played out on your IT systems on a daily basis. When a new bug is found, hackers move quickly to write and distribute code that allows them to exploit it before the security companies react with countermeasures to identify and foil their attempts. Each time a new bug is found, a number of PC’s are infected before the new updates are installed.

To give you some idea of the scale of the problem, in 2012, Secunia (the industry reference point on IT security) issued 124 “Security Advisories” for Windows 7 covering 237 vulnerabilities, of which 5% remain unresolved at the time of writing this article. Internet Explorer 9 was the subject of 14 security advisories covering 70 vulnerabilities of which 7% are not yet resolved. These are just two of the most common items of software installed on your PC’s, yet we are already talking about a new security threat being discovered almost every day.

How To Keep Your Systems Up-To-Date

Your PC’s should prompt you to update Microsoft Windows, as well as applications such as Adobe and Java on a regular basis. If you ever see a message that an update has failed to install, you need to do something about it. The reason that the update has failed is very often that you have unwittingly downloaded some malware from a “hacked” or malicious website. If this is the case, malware can be silently gathering your login credentials and feeding them back to a hacker without you realising it. Very often your PC will start to run more slowly as the malware starts to take up resources. To make things worse, once malware finds a victim it will often send out for its friends, which themselves take up more resources until your PC becomes unusable and needs to be rebuilt.

Do It Yourself Or Call In The Experts?

It is understandable that many small business owners still take a reactive approach to IT security. Taking time to make sure that the latest Windows updates and patches have been successfully applied, or making sure that antivirus software on your workstations hasn’t been disabled by malware takes time and takes you away from running your business. The problem is that unless you do spend time making these checks, you are far more likely to suffer a malware attack.

If you are happy to maintain your own systems, you can buy PC Audit software which will identify systems that aren’t updating properly, or that show other signs that they have been infected by malware. Otherwise, you may be better off outsourcing the process of regular auditing and updating your IT systems to a Managed IT Service Provider who will be able to use automation software to manage the process more efficiently and cost effectively than you are able to do yourself. They will also be able to undertake a number of other essential housekeeping tasks at the same time such as clearing out temporary files and making sure that PC Hard disks are defragmented on a regular basis, which will also boost your system performance.

If you would like to know more about the IT Support or Managed IT Services that we provide, please download our Managed IT Services White Paper, visit our web site, or contact us by telephone on 01707 255060 or via email at info@clearview.co.uk