Best 30 Day List:

VoIP Is a Strong Communications Option

Over the past few years, VoIP has become an extremely popular solution for small businesses. In fact, 30 percent of today’s businesses use some sort of VoIP platform. There are many reasons why businesses are making the switch to VoIP. Today, we’ll explain a few. 

VoIP Saves Money

VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol, is the first real viable alternative to the telephone company’s monopoly over business telephone systems. By switching to VoIP, you eliminate the relationship you have with the traditional telephone company and use bandwidth to place and receive calls. By using a service that your business already relies on, you save on a lot of costs.

VoIP offers many different ways to gain value. Not only does it eliminate the large expense a business would see, it also offers businesses a lot of different options. Businesses that use video and voice conferencing options afforded them by their VoIP provider pay an average of 30 percent less than they would without VoIP.

Business can also gain value by using the soft phone feature. VoIP providers have dedicated smartphone apps that work on all Android and iOS-fueled devices. This gives a business the added mobility that they seek, without the huge hardware costs that are associated with buying mobile devices for your staff. 

Internationally Superior

If your business does business internationally, communications costs can really be a major problem. Finding a communications system that provides affordable international calling is important. VoIP providers have a competitive model for keeping international communication costs down. With VoIP, you can cut down on your communications spend while retaining the reliability and feature-rich system that you use domestically. 

If you are looking to improve your business’ communications, while also saving some pretty serious coin in the process, look no further than VoIP from Net It On. 

Avoiding Cybersecurity Placebos in Your Business

When it comes to your business, especially its technology, some of the buzzwords you hear floating around can be pretty convincing, almost intoxicating. Unfortunately, like most buzzwords, many of these are aggrandized beyond their worth to the average small-to-medium-sized business. Let’s take a look at how this can impact a business’ perception of its cybersecurity, as well as dig into the reality behind these terms.

To begin, let’s examine a phrase coined in the early 2000s by cybersecurity technologist Bruce Schneier: “security theater.”

What is “Security Theater?”

Security theater is a simple shorthand for any security efforts put in place that do little to better ensure one’s security, despite making one much more comfortable, generally for some considerable cost. The idea behind it is that security exists as both a reality based in math and science, and as a perception that is based in emotion.

In a 2007 blog article, Schneier cited a personal anecdote where a friend’s newborn was fitted with an RFID tag to help prevent infant abduction during their stay in the maternity ward. However, the rates of infant abduction were astoundingly low at that point. In his blog post, Schneier posits that these bracelets were a form of security theater, meant more to placate the parents when their bundle of joy was out of sight than it was to help prevent the rare case of infant abduction.

While security theater may have perceived benefits, Schneier says, the true concerns come with the costs that are associated with it.

Let’s return to his example of the tracking tags on newborns. With such a low rate of infant abduction, there was realistically little-to-no practical risk of someone’s child being abducted from the hospital. However, as the low-cost RFID bracelets allowed parents to breathe a little easier when their baby wasn’t in the room with them, hospitals found this investment to be worthwhile. Another example that Schneier gives is the introduction of tamper-resistant packaging on over-the-counter drugs in the 1980s. With poisonings getting some significant coverage by the press in this era, the idea that medications would be tampered with was relieved.

It didn’t matter that the statistical likelihood of a drug being altered was negligible, or even that the tamper-resistant packaging wasn’t all that effective anyways. The theater of the tamper-resistant packaging that companies would use helped align the perceived threat with the practical odds.

The Trade-Offs

However, there is a point at which security theater can become detrimental: when the investment (real or perceived) into your security is generating negative returns—or in other words, when your security measures are actually making you less secure. One glaring example from recent years is the 2013 hack into Target, where numerous security teams dropped the ball as numerous failsafe notifications and procedures were ignored. Let’s go into how you might be “overacting,” so to speak, when it comes to some of the security theater you have in your office.

Excessive Password Updates

Forcing your employees to update their passwords each month has long been established as a counterproductive security measure, as this will only encourage them to adopt other behaviors that will directly undermine your resiliency. Perhaps these passwords will become embarrassingly predictable, or your users will resort to writing them down somewhere to keep track of them all. Instead, use other methods of reinforcing your business security, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) or single sign-on solutions, paired with a more moderate password policy.

That said, we’re not advocating never changing passwords, but the bad habits it causes are much worse than what mandatory password changes do for the greater good.

Alert Overload

A never-ending barrage of security notifications can have a few negative repercussions on your users. Naturally, their workflows will suffer from consistent interruptions, but there is also the fact that these notifications will eventually be tuned out. As a result, if a real issue does eventually present itself, it is more likely to be ignored. An MSP’s services can help to separate the wheat from the chaff, preventing your users from encountering interruption in most cases.

Lacking User Awareness

Think back for a second: when you last had a cybersecurity training session for your users, what was the general format? Was it primarily a lecture, or were your employees involved and engaged in the process? When was your last training initiative? Many companies figure that these seminar-style sessions serve their purpose, but the more effective means of instilling good cybersecurity training is through shorter, more frequent, and (most importantly) more interactive efforts.

Net It On has the tools and resources that can help you to better ensure your security efforts are contributing to your practical security. To find out more about the solutions that we can assist you with, reach out to our team by calling (732) 360-2999 today.

Tip of the Week: Improve Your Management of Remote Workers

For the past few months, a much larger percentage of people have been working from home. This remote workforce has proven to be much more effective than many would have thought, but some companies haven’t had the success getting the production out of their remote workers that others have. Today, we present three tips that will help you get the most out of your remote workforce.

1. Communication Is Extremely Important

When people who work together--and typically see one another--don’t for long periods of time, you may think that collaboration would stall and productivity would wane. This may not be the case for businesses that have the communication tools in place to make it work. To get a jump on this, taking the initiative and using the conferencing tools to have regular virtual meetings is a good way to give and get feedback, give direction, and ensure everyone is on the same page.

2. Provide the Tools Needed for Collaboration

This is basically an extension of the first point, but remote teams absolutely need software solutions that are integrated with the features that allow for solid collaboration. This includes:

• Communication tools - email, instant messaging, VoIP, conferencing
• Productivity software - multi-user word processor, spreadsheets, presentation software
• Collaboration software - project management, task management, customer support

By having the right tools to keep team members motivated and engaged, you will see more higher degrees of productivity and better product and service delivery.  

3. Engage Your Team

One of the biggest challenges for a company when they depend on remote workers is that their staff tends to get less engaged with the company than they otherwise would be. This is natural, but it doesn’t have to be so. Engaging with your remote teams in chat, in an email chain, in virtual meetings, and talking about human things like what people have been eating, what they are feeling, and how they do what they do can go a long way toward getting your business the remote staff that wants to get up and come to work each day.

Remote work is filled with potential pitfalls, but the benefits can be pretty fantastic if it is handled correctly. If you need to talk to someone about how to properly manage your remote workers, or if you need solutions for problems you have surrounding your remote team, call the IT consultants at Net It On today at (732) 360-2999.

How Automation Will Play into the Post-COVID-19 Workplace

As workplaces and offices everywhere have struggled to cope with the restrictions brought on by social distancing mandates, the adoption of automated solutions has surged ahead. Of course, this does open a few important questions to consider. For instance, what this could mean for employment post-pandemic, and how automation may be used in the future to mitigate the impacts we’re currently experiencing.

The Situation

As COVID-19 spread across the world, many businesses suddenly found themselves in a very tough spot—especially those who were not deemed essential and were therefore unable to open to help reduce the risk to their employees. To try and counter this, many businesses have adopted assorted tools to simplify their responsibilities and maximize their output—including automation.

Pharmaceutical companies, for instance, are feeling significant pressure to deliver right now, as many are seeking treatment options for the COVID-19 virus. To assist with the more administrative and record-keeping aspects of their operations, these companies have put solutions in place that can accomplish what would have otherwise taken weeks in mere days. By removing rote responsibilities from an employee’s workflow, this employee’s time can be better spent elsewhere.

The Future

It is likely that these kinds of solutions will be adopted on a wider scale when implementing them can help improve safety within the work environment. Furthermore, counter to the fear many have held that “the machines will take our jobs,” the focus has increasingly been on an approach that emphasizes an optimal end result through the combined efforts of your human workers and the output produced by the tools they have at their disposal.

Calculators didn’t replace accountants, they just made their jobs far more efficient, and there are countless more examples that we could cite.

Of course, this does mean that your employees will need to adapt to these changes as well. By learning new skills and embracing the capabilities of modern technology, your team members can enable themselves to accomplish far greater results than they could previously, without the procedural responsibilities that would once eat up their time.

The real question is how your business will use these trends to innovate and maintain itself, especially during challenging times like the one at hand. We can help you to do so with modern technology solutions and services. Learn more about what we have to offer by calling (732) 360-2999 today.

The Basics of PCI Compliance

Businesses today should be accepting card-based payments, regardless of their size. In addition to the convenience it offers to customers, it’s the most secure means you have of being paid. To protect consumers and their personal and financial information, many card providers have adopted a unified regulation that applies to businesses that accept these payments. Let’s review this regulation and how it impacts the average small-to-medium-sized business.

Understanding PCI

Established in 2006, the Payment Card Index Digital Security Standard (or PCI DSS) was sponsored by the members of the PCI Security Standards Council. This council was founded to help the credit card industry self-regulate and manage the standards for consumer privacy that businesses would be beholden to. You certainly have at least one of the council’s members in your wallet right now: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover.

The standards that this council established apply to any and all businesses that accept payment cards from their customers. If you process or store payment information or process digital payments, PCI compliance is mandatory.

To remain compliant, any business that accepts payment cards needs to: 

1. Change passwords from system default
2. Install sufficient network security tools (antivirus, firewalls, etc.) that will work to protect card data
3. Encrypt transmission of card data across public networks
4. Restrict the transmission of card and cardholder data to a “need to know” basis
5. Assign user ID to all users with server or database access
6. Make efforts to protect physical and digital access to card and cardholder data
7. Monitor and maintain system security
8. Test system security regularly
9. Create written policies and procedures that address the importance of securing cardholder data
10. Train staff on best practices of accepting payment cards

Any business, all businesses, each and every business of any kind that takes credit card payments needs to get these ten things done. Many businesses already accomplish these things as part of their typical routine… if you aren’t one of them, and accept card-based payments, your non-compliance could get you in serious trouble.

PCI and the Size of Your Business

The above checklist were the things that all businesses are responsible for, across the board. Based on what “level” of business you operate (according to the PCI Security Standards Council) there are other needs you must address. As the council defines them, there are four different levels you may fall into:

• Merchant Level #1 - A business that processes over six million payment card transactions per year.
• Merchant Level #2 - A business that processes between one million-to-six million payment card transactions per year.
• Merchant Level #3 - A business that processes between 20,000-to-one million e-commerce payment card transactions per year.
• Merchant Level #4 - A business that processes less than 20,000 e-commerce payment transactions, and fewer than one million overall payment card transactions per year.

As a level one breach will almost certainly have an impact to a larger number of consumers, the focus of the PCI regulatory body tends to be on these larger organizations. The means just aren’t there for every business to be checked constantly. However, that doesn’t mean that small businesses aren’t also facing severe risks. Here are some of the other requirements that businesses must fulfill, based on their Merchant Level:

Merchant Level #1

Considering the scale of these businesses and the reach that they have to consumers both online and in-store, these merchants have much greater responsibility. PCI compliance for Merchant Level 1 requires that merchants:

• Complete a yearly Report on Compliance (ROC) through a Qualified Security Assessor (QSA)
• Undergo a quarterly network scan by an Approved Security Vendor (ASV)
• Complete the Attestation of Compliance Form for PCI Council records

Merchant Level #2

Standards relax as the number of transactions decreases, so Merchant Level 2 dictates that these merchants:

• Perform a yearly Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ)
• Allow an ASV to complete a quarterly network scan
• Complete the Attestation of Compliance Form for PCI Council records

Merchant Level #3

This is where most medium-sized businesses would classify, and also requires that merchants:

• Perform a SAQ
• Allow an ASV to complete a quarterly network scan
• Complete the Attestation of Compliance Form for PCI Council records

Merchant Level #4

This level applies to the vast majority of small businesses. Like the prior two merchant levels, this level requires that all merchants:

• Perform a SAQ
• Allow an ASV to complete a quarterly network scan
• Complete the Attestation of Compliance Form for PCI Council record

Noncompliant businesses can be reviewed, and are generally fined, watched more closely in the future, or even prohibited from accepting payment cards at all. Obviously, this isn’t something you want to happen to your business.

Ubiquiti Amplifi System Home install with Nest Doorbell and Google Home Screen

The Amplifi System went in flawlessly. Configured via Android App.  The mesh extenders took a few minutes to appear and configure in the app.