Category Archives: Uncategorized

Preventing Domain Hacks: A Guide for Business Owners

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Domain Hacks

One precious possession a person can own is their name. It identifies who you are—everything from private to financial to legal matters requires this information. As we all know, a business domain name is a vital representation of the company on the Internet. That is why we must do our best to prevent domain hacks.

Unfortunately, domain security is one vulnerability that businesses face in the current IT landscape. Your ‘simple’ online address does so much more than guiding prospects to your website. An impactful domain name enhances your visibility and brand reputation, boosting your company’s credibility.

The issue is that criminals can seize and desecrate your domain name. Are you vulnerable to domain hacks? Does your strategy include protective measures to guard your website? How capable is your cybersecurity team that you need to prevent domain hacks?

This guide gives you valuable information regarding IT domain protection and what you can do to secure your business.

Why Domain Hacks Happen on Business Domains

At first, you might think, it’s just a name – what can hackers do with it?

Well, a lot. Some hackers target business domains mainly for the fun of it. Absurd as it may sound, this type of cyber theft is a fun challenge for some malicious attackers. More serious hackers, however, practice domain hacks for money.

When a hacker gains control over your domain name, the negative effects can snowball into irreversible losses. They can get into your communication network, send fake emails to your customers, and even access confidential data. Some hackers do domain name transfers, where they redirect your traffic to a different website, usually one that has offensive content.

Domain hacks typically also engage in phishing. After gaining control over your communication channels, they send phishing emails to your customers. They can freely obtain passwords, credit card information, social security data, and other sensitive information. Isn’t it a nightmare to think that you could lose your business because of inadequate domain security?

Effective Ways to Protect Your Domain from Hacks

Seeing how damaging this issue is, you need robust IT domain protection right now. However, how do you identify which domain security measures to implement? Are you aware of any methods to prevent domain hacks? Protecting your DNS is not as difficult as you might think.

Choose a Secure Registrar

When registering a domain name, most business owners just look at cost and privacy. The more important element, though, is security. The registrar you choose should use multi-factor authentication and have a responsive support team you can reach 24/7.

Use Separate Accounts for Domain and Web Hosting

Do you use the same account for domain and web hosting? You may need to create these accounts separately to protect your business, much better if you get different hosts. Managing multiple accounts for your domain is a challenge, but not if you have co-managed IT solutions in place.

Always Renew on Time to Prevent Domain Hacks

When did you last check the expiry of your domain name? Hijackers are always looking out for expired domain names they can easily get with no need to steal them. If a hacker successfully registers your domain under their name, it’s difficult for you to reclaim it.

Co-Managed IT Services Can Help with Domain Hacks

Lucky for businesses, there is a host of other methods for IT domain protection. If you want to leverage them all for your security, the best way is to sign up for co-managed IT services. With this IT strategy, an MSP can work together with your internal IT team to ensure that your business domain name will never fall into the wrong hands.

We can tell you more about domain security if you call us. Also, you can download this free Cyber Risk Infographic. It contains a wealth of information about domain security and other ways of protecting your business from cyber threats. Remember, knowledge is power!

Introducing Microsoft Copilot: Robust AI Assistant for Work

Cybersecurity, Data Backup, Security, Uncategorized, , ,

Microsoft Copilot

What happens when AI-powered technology weighs into how companies do business? Now, you can stop imagining and start discovering with Microsoft Copilot, the premier smart assistant. It steadily emerges as a vital tool for firms and organizations across a broad range of industries.

Microsoft Copilot is a multi-faceted product with a boatload of features that fit every type of need or requirement. Do you want to learn how this versatile tool can help your day-to-day work? Here’s a quick guide for you.

What is Microsoft Copilot?

Since time immemorial, humans have sought to innovate processes and systems to make work easier. There’s the invention of the wheel, for example. Back in the day, transporting heavy stuff was next to impossible until wheeled carts came into use.

Could you live in a world where you had to lift and carry your luggage when traveling? Thankfully, wheeled equipment and transportation quite literally ease this huge burden off people’s shoulders.

In the same manner, Microsoft Copilot is the latest innovation from the powerhouse that provides revolutionary digital platforms. This latest AI assistant is the convergence of large language models or LLMs and the power of 365 apps.

It’s simply magic—your everyday work is made even more manageable with its existence. Here is an overview of how you can make the most of this AI tool for various Microsoft applications.

Copilot in Word

Microsoft Copilot for Word can take your breath away with how many tasks it can handle for you. It can create, comprehend, analyze, and summarize your documents within seconds. Does formatting tables take too much of your time? Copilot can visualize and transform text to create tables in Word for you.

Copilot in Outlook

Is email marketing a large chunk of your management and marketing strategy? Now, Copilot can organize your inbox and create professionally made emails for your business. It can take information from messages to suggest action items, meetings, and replies that consequently make your job easier.

Copilot in Teams

Here’s another incredible quality that will make you want to get Copilot—smart integration to Microsoft Teams! The AI tool can give you updates on ongoing meetings in real time. You can type, “What are the key points of the meeting so far,” and it will reiterate your information. It can also recap discussions you may have missed. Now, isn’t that impressive?

Should you get Microsoft Copilot for your business?

Copilot is the robust AI assistant that you would want on your lineup. It can reinforce your teams from virtually every level, from data entry to marketing to sales and more.

With powerful machine learning and natural language capabilities, this tool is everything you need to boost your team’s productivity! Call us today for more information!

10 Benefits to Digitizing Your Business Documents

Data Backup, Security, Uncategorized
Digitizing your business documents shown with filing cabinet drawers on a computer screen

Reduce physical storage needs and documents readily available are just a few reasons to go all digital

Running a business is a constant process of optimization. Everyone wants to provide better goods and services, improve efficiency behind the scenes, and ultimately generate greater profits each year by lowering overhead and increasing revenue. However, if you’re still working with paper documents then your business is missing out on a major optimization opportunity. Digital document storage has come a very long way in the last 10 years and with the addition of the cloud to the available network infrastructure, there’s never been a better time to digitize.

Not sure about whether it’s the right choice? A lot of businesses are hesitant to change a major aspect of their internal process like how paperwork is managed for fear of damaging office efficiency. However, let us assure that once you make the switch to a self-organizing digital document management system, your efficiency will not only recover quickly, it will blow the top off your charts as employees gain back hours every week that would normally be spent filing, searching for files, or even just collating and stapling paper documents. Here are ten of the best benefits of going digital.

1) Reclaiming Office Space

How much space do paper documents take up in your office? A storeroom? Two store rooms and a supply closet? Then there’s the possibility of rented storage space for archived folders not to mention all the filing cabinets and in/out boxes taking up space in the employee office space. Once you’ve digitized, you might be surprised how much open space is created both in storage rooms, and on employee desks.

2) Saving on Auditor Fees

When the auditor comes to call, you pay their hefty hourly fees but they also expect you to bring them all the documents to be audited. With a paperwork system, this means paying them for the half hour or more per visit that your staff spends searching and fetching specific paper documents. All this paid-for time is regained with a document management system as your auditor can quickly and easily access everything they need in seconds, not minutes or hours.

3) Instant Document Retrieval

Speaking of fast document retrieval, how much time do your employees spend each week essentially shuffling paper or seeking desperately for misplaced documents? A single mis-file into an adjacent folder can cost hours of lost employee time, especially if you simply must have a specific copy or filled form. With an online document management system (DMS), files can be found instantly. Even if they’re in the wrong digital folder, a simple keyword or category search will quickly locate any specific document that’s needed no matter when it was scanned or how it was filed. Even mistakes can be fixed with a few clicks or taps.

4) Access from Anywhere

Running back to the office for a document is no one’s idea of a good day, especially when a project or deal was almost complete except for one missing sheet of paper. When your documents are stored on the cloud through a handy online management platform, they can be reached from anywhere. Employees and clients alike can log in and access any document they are authorized to view or edit making those last minute trips to the office for paperwork a thing of the past.

5) Cutting Edge Security

How secure are your sensitive business and customer documents? Do you keep them under lock and key in a filing cabinet, or more likely, do they sit on an employee’s desk for days or weeks at a time? While there’s a certain amount of security in physical documents, the best way to protect important data is to lock it away under the highest-tech procedures possible. With cloud document management, that’s exactly what you get.

6) Share, Collaborate, and Sign

When dealing with paper documents, the process of collaboration can be tedious and you can forget about collecting signatures quickly. Waiting on paper documents to be snail-mailed, signed, and returned or even delivered to and from via couriers can add hours, days, and even weeks to a project schedule. With online documents, you can quickly and easily share anything with anyone, invite them to edit the document with you, or shoot over a copy for a digital signature which can return to you in minutes if the recipient is ready for the transaction.

7) Open to Analytics

One of the most powerful tools any business can employ today is high-end computer analytics. AIs and similar programs can scan thousands of data points to produce interesting statistics like the average amount of time customer are active, the demographics of your existing customer base or the most popular account type. Once your documents are digitized, you could much more easily feed any information you have into an analytics program to get back useful business data.

8) Regulation Compliance Maintenance

Every business has to comply with regulations, whether it’s about how you store customer data or how you store leftover food. There are always documents to help you stay compliant and there is always an audit every year or so. Having a live, easy to access and edit documents not only make staying compliant easier, it also makes updating compliance with new rules and providing information to auditors go more smoothly.

9) Disaster Recovery Guaranteed

If something happens to your building or storage facility, so too does this thing happen to all your paper documents. Fire and flood can destroy them completely and even an earthquake can make it very hard to retrieve your paperwork and start again. With cloud-stored documents, you could disaster recover with laptops in a tent if that’s what it took and every document would be perfectly preserved for the purpose.

10) Green Without the Recycle Bin

The final benefit of digitizing those heaps of paper documents is the environmentally friendly aspect. Here is your opportunity to recycle reams, stacks, and mountains of paperwork and then never need to use up that many trees worth of paper again. You can stop buying pallets of printer paper and you can even tone down the big green bin in the office because from here on out, your paperwork will be made of electrons, not actual paper.

Digital transformation is something that every business and department is taking on this decade. Even if you are in an industry that traditionally works with physical paperwork, it’s important to digitize to back up, edit, manage, and secure your documents. For more information about the digital transformation and how your team can streamline digitization, contact us today!

Hosting your own Microsoft Exchange Server: The Pros and Cons

Manage Service, Uncategorized, , , , ,
20170525

Hosting Exchange in-house

Whether or not you should host your company’s Microsoft Exchange Server in-house depends on a number of key considerations. These include your company’s budget; data security concerns; and need for flexibility, just to name a few. With these factors in mind, let’s have a look at the potential pros and cons of hosting Exchange in-house:

 

 

The Pros

Greater control over your data

When you host your own Exchange server, your company’s data is under your company’s control and no one else’s. If you’re uncomfortable with a remote third party potentially having access to, and control over, your company’s data in the cloud, then you may want to host your server in-house.

Flexibility with your configuration

If you host your Exchange server in-house, you can configure it to your precise specifications. However, with a hosted solution, you will probably find yourself limited to the packages and options the host provides. Of course, they may offer a completely customizable solution, but this may come at a substantially higher cost.

Saving money on bandwidth

With an in-house solution, the emails and attachments your employees send one another will bypass the Internet, as long as everyone shares the same LAN. This can translate to significant savings on Internet bandwidth.

Performance

Large attachments, especially those that contain audio or video, may suffer a delay in transmission if your employees are sending them through a hosted Exchange server. In this case, every email attachment essentially becomes an upload or a download to your Internet-based server. Given this constraint, if your company’s communications are especially media-intensive, an in-house solution could save you time and frustration.

Using email attachments to store files

If you are hosting your Exchange server in-house, your staff can easily store files by adding them as attachments to their emails. However, this common practice is much more difficult, impractical and expensive when using a hosted server. After all, you are now sending your file attachments over the Internet, and storing them in the cloud, costing you bandwidth and storage space.

Less exposure to Internet outages

If you have an in-house Exchange server, any employees on your LAN can continue to send emails to one another during an Internet outage.

The Cons

Requires vigilance

A hosted solution will generally have systems in place for handling all the responsibilities, ongoing tasks and potential issues surrounding Exchange server management. These include handling outages; performing scheduled backups; updating your version of Exchange; and any number of other server-management tasks and concerns. On the other hand, when you are hosting your own Exchange server, your in-house or hired networking specialist will need to be vigilant to stay on top of all of these same issues.

Requires IT expertise

Hosting and managing your own Exchange server requires either in-house or hired networking expertise. If you don’t have the trained expertise in-house, be sure to hire a highly-qualified networking specialist or team in your area. However, only hire networking professionals that are specifically trained in setting up and managing Exchange servers. You will also want reassurance that your hired specialists will make themselves readily available to respond to any outages; answer any questions or concerns; and take the time to properly train any members of your staff that will work with your Exchange server.

Potentially higher cost

Hosting your server in-house will require an investment in equipment, setup, expertise, and maintenance. Depending on the size of your company, your chosen server configuration, and a number of other factors, an in-house solution could potentially cost more than a hosted solution. However, if you are saving money on bandwidth by hosting your server in-house, you might find that your savings can more than offset any potentially higher costs of in-house hosting.

Making your decision

Whether or not to host your own Exchange server is an important decision that depends on a number of key trade-offs. Before making your decision, be sure to carefully consider your need for control over your data; your budget; your access to in-house or local networking expertise; your employees’ use of large file attachments; your need for flexibility; and any other concerns you may have. Contact us to help you decide whether hosting your Exchange server in-house is right for you.