IT security is near the top of the agenda for every executive management team. Although IT is not something executive managers are likely to get hands-on with and is best left to qualified practitioners, there are simple spot-checks that executive leaders can make to see if basic security is being implemented.
For many years, the IT industry has used the threat of going out of business as a way of compelling businesses to invest in backup and Disaster Recovery solutions. Essentially, there has been more than a little scaremongering about the risk of failing to back up data properly and putting appropriate plans in place for disaster recovery.
Many firms experience a pre-Christmas rush of finishing off work and projects in early and mid-December. For items in the workflow that are on-going, there is often a sense of ‘parking’ them over the Christmas - New Year transition period until the return to work in January. Many businesses are likely to have reduced workload and staffing numbers.
If we apply maturity modelling to the IT Support function, we are able to produce an effective mapping that overlays the five levels of a traditional maturity model with five different service levels of support.
When it comes to productivity and information security, insider threats are perhaps some of the most unsavoury considerations for a firm. Any business owner or senior executive would prefer to think they can implicitly trust the people that they pay but, unfortunately, it simply isn’t possible to ignore the risk of employee misbehaviour.
User Activity Monitoring (UAM) is a process that is enabled by productivity monitoring software, PMS. These applications are designed to track and record every action performed by a user. The software outputs a log file in plain English (rather than technobabble) and a video file that enables the firm to view each user’s onscreen actions.
Whatever the core business activity of a firm, fast growth is a nice problem to have. Although the doomsayers warn of the problems of rapid uncontrolled growth, such as resourcing gaps and overstretching with too many commitments, these are challenges that should be well within the capability of a company governed with good management practice.
The issue of passwords is something of an evergreen problem for technology users. People often choose obvious, simple passwords that are easy to remember. Research has shown that a group of 10,000 words are used by 98.8% of people as passwords. This means that a hacker with software written for the purpose could automate the process of trying every one of these, something known as a ‘brute force’ attack, and would be certain of being able to hack into almost 99 out of every 100 accounts.
In many firms, IT is a tricky area. It’s complex, costly and impossible to ignore. It needs continual vigilance and good oversight to make sure it functions well. One of the biggest headaches is support.
IT security is a topic of conversation that is likely to be a cause for concern for companies of all sizes. There is a perception that larger businesses have superior security, but this isn’t always true. Just ask telecoms giant TalkTalk who were hacked in 2015 and had significant amounts of data stolen, leading to some customers falling victim to fraud.
This shows that it isn’t necessarily size that determines the vulnerability of a company to an IT security breach. It’s the perceived risk, the culture of the business and the security measures that are in place. Big businesses may be at least as vulnerable as their mid-market and SMB counterparts when they don’t have the right safeguards in place.
Today’s tablets are powerful, flexible and handy computing devices. It’s hard to think that the first tablet to gain popular mainstream acceptance, the original Apple iPad, only debuted on April 3rd 2010.
Since then the market has exploded with devices from the big hardware manufacturers as well as those from hundreds of new market entrant brands. There are a lot of size options and the smallest 3/4G capable ones blur the line between the phone and the tablet – quite literally where does the tablet end and the smartphone begin?
Tablet computers are ubiquitous and seem to have conquered practically all markets. But can you run a business from one?