Are your employees “phish prone”?

Did you know that 91% of successful data breaches started with a spear phishing attack?

Find out what percentage of your employees are Phish-prone™ with your free phishing security test. Plus, see how you stack up against your peers with the new phishing Industry Benchmarks!

IT pros have realised that simulated phishing tests are urgently needed as an additional security layer. Today, phishing your own users is just as important as having antivirus and a firewall. It is a fun and an effective cybersecurity best practice to patch your last line of defence: USERS!

Here’s how it works:

  • Immediately start your test for up to 100 users (no need to talk to anyone)
  • Customise the phishing test template based on your environment
  • Choose the landing page your users see after they click
  • Show users which red flags they missed, or a 404 page
  • Get a PDF emailed to you in 24 hours with your Phish-prone % and charts to share with management
  • See how your organisation compares to others in your industry

The Phish-prone percentage is usually higher than you expect and is great ammo to get budget.

Start phishing your users now. Fill out the form, and get started immediately!

Want to learn more?

Complete IT Systems have a team of KnowBe4 specialists on hand to demo the solution, discuss business benefits and help you understand how the technology works for your organisation.

To get in touch or request a demo please contact us.

 

What you need to know about migrating to Windows 11

Upgrading your users to a new operating system may seem like one job too far for overstretched IT teams. 

This article outlines the what, why and when of making the move to Windows 11.

📅 Windows 10 will be retiring on 14th October 2023. It’s time to start thinking about your migration plan!

About Windows 11

Windows 11 offers new productivity features and functionality to enable users to work safely and securely on the go.

🏃‍♂️ Here’s some of the key changes over Windows 10:

  • Universal search: Taskbar search function to find what users need from files, photos, contacts, emails, and the web.
  • Accessibility: Move to new ways of working with voice recognition1, live captions, and on-screen text read aloud by a narrator in a natural, human voice.
  • Easy setup and personalisation for users to tailor their workspaces.
  • Snap assist to organise screens in an easy manner
  • Desktop groups to silo work and business
  • Optimised working: Microsoft Phone Link is now available for iPhone® devices and Android™ to view notifications, read messages, and dial calls from your PC
Keeping devices and data more secure

🔐 For IT, it’s also easier to keep users and data safe with new performance and security features

From start up, Windows 11 is on guard. It works in combination with your hardware and was designed with multiple layers of protection to help keep your apps, information, and privacy secure.

Devices are also protected with SmartApp Control, meaning Windows 11 will only run reputable apps that won’t compromise your data. In addition to giving your users control over their data and defending against malware, Microsoft Edge can also scan the web to check if your passwords have been compromised.

Find out more

❔ Contact us today to find out how we can help you migrate your users to Windows 11.

A successful data strategy

In a recent customer survey conducted with Tintri, we asked some of our customers what would make their team successful in 2023. 

We’ll be looking into the results in much more detail over the coming weeks. But when starting to analyse the results, it is interesting to note that the top success criteria (38% of respondents) was to achieve a faster application performance for their users in new, hybrid ways of working.

Easy in practice, but the trick is designing a strategy to achieve it. Tintri’s predictive analytics enable ongoing workload optimisation for all sizes of virtual machine infrastructures – and all manageable with a single click by IT teams.

▶ Download the DCIG Technology Report to find out more.

 

What’s storage’s role in cyber resilience?

Data’s role as a transformational business asset continues to grow. This article helps you understand its value further, and some insights in how to protect it.

Thanks to increasing investments in application development; modern DevOps practices; and heightened business intelligence, analytics, and machine learning demands, nearly all businesses are accelerating data creation and usage. They are also scaling the number of locations that leverage data. This proliferation of data combined with mounting pressure to accelerate operations has led to an increase in the complexity of both IT infrastructure and IT operations.

Such factors put organisations and their infrastructures at great risk of experiencing malicious attacks, human error, and negligent behaviour. Unfortunately, legacy strategies cannot adequately ensure that business operations will continue during and after these types of incidents. Companies can try to weave together capabilities in an attempt to prevent attacks and other breaches, but functional gaps, poor integration, and management complexity make meeting security objectives time-consuming and difficult.

Changing organisational mindsets from prevention to incident preparation—e.g., implementing storage solutions with built-in cyber resilience—is key to safeguarding critical data assets and being able to quickly respond to and recover from ransomware and other cyberattacks.

So what’s next?

This analyst report from ESG outlines how to shift from Cybersecurity to Cyber Resilience with IBM.

▶ Download the analyst report.

 

The energy crisis and your business

In energy terms, the UK and the rest of Europe is still facing deep uncertainty regards to price and supply.

This unsettling scenario is as a result of major current geopolitical events, a rebound from the economic slowdown created by COVID-19, and the long-term decision of many European countries to reduce their dependency on fossil fuels, while slowly transitioning to renewable energy sources.

While it’s true to say that each country within Europe has a unique profile in terms of reliance across the energy-mix, and different levels of energy supply resilience, the region is in a precarious position, where it cannot guarantee sufficient levels of energy to power itself. Bloomberg Europe recently reported that power outages are ‘the next threat for the continent’. Even as we move out of winter and into the warmer months, businesses still need to be sure of supply and cost.

The UK’s National Grid is talking about ‘three-hour power cuts ’, while Norway is ‘set to curb its electricity exports’ . So, with already stretched energy supplies and such uncertainty in the energy sector, it’s no wonder our region is bracing itself for volatility.

What does this mean for businesses that rely on IT resilience – for safety, comfort and business continuity to keep IT environments running? The impact of power outages is not to be understated, with power fluctuations resulting from an unstable power grid capable of causing disruption and even damage to office computing devices, and critical IT applications within small and large businesses.

A full power outage could cause disruption to critical smart home functionality for example, as well as
severely hamper critical IT applications that businesses rely on in their daily operations. Simply put, power quality and availability ensures comfort and safety for homes, and business continuity for businesses of all sizes.

What’s the solution?

Implementing an uninterruptable power supply strategy can underpin your business operations and give your customers, staff and shareholders the confidence of business uptime. Schneider Electric is a leading UPS manufacturer that gives IT professionals access to a broad portfolio of UPS solutions all designed to protect critical IT appliances and data in homes and across businesses. Customers can also benefit from Schneider’s Green Premium™ certification guarantee, meaning complete compliance, transparency and higher environmental performance.

Here’s a short introduction into how you can ensure clean, efficient power at all times, improve productivity and resilience, and pay less for your power.

Cybersecurity advice for SMBs

Cybersecurity can feel overwhelming for SMBs, for they have to manage issues related to data security and integrity, avoid breaches, and understand and implement the protection measures required to efficiently deal with cyber threats.

Sometimes, this responsibility falls on SMB owners, who often must fill several roles at once. Otherwise it falls on overstretched IT teams looking for support to manage issues related to data security and integrity, avoid breaches, and understand and implement the protection measures required to efficiently deal with cyber threats.

This whitepaper provides guidance on the latest cyber security dangers, defence strategies, and best practices, with a particular focus on prevention rather than remediation, that should be followed by SMB leaders and their employees from all over the world.

▶ Read more in this whitepaper from our partners Heimdal

Assess your organisation’s cyber resilience

With cyber threats increasing in number and quality, it’s important to know how prepared you are. Find out where your organisation stands on threat prevention, detection and response by answering a few questions and then in only 7 minutes, download your free personalised guide with recommendations from the experts at Bitdefender.

How does it work?
  1. The interactive questions will help assess your level of cyber resilience maturity and identify the security gaps based on the following criteria: risk management, prevention, detection and response.
  2. After taking the assessment, you will receive a dynamic and personalised report to identify your security pain points along with recommendations from our experts. Share it with your team and management to communicate how you can become more cyber resilient.
  3. Your personalised report will help you understand where you are in your journey to improve your cyber resilience. It identifies your cybersecurity blind spots, provides recommendations on how to address them, and shares guidance on how to address your overall cyber security challenges.

 

Want to find out more?

As Bitdefender Partners, Complete IT Systems can offer you expert advice on the solutions and how they could be effectively deployed in your business.

To find out more please call us on 01274 396 213 or use our contact form and we’ll arrange a good time to call you back.

Patch management best practices

Patch management (aka update management) is the process of distributing and deploying software updates. Here’s everything you need to know about it, and how to use it to best secure your business.

Patch management involves the acquisition, review, and deployment of patches to an IT infrastructure. A patch is a piece of software code that improves an installed program – you can literally think about it as a “bandage” applied to software.

Every time a security flaw or bug is discovered or the program’s functionality needs to be enhanced, software developers create a patch to address these aspects. Patches can be deployed to your entire infrastructure including software/operating systems, routers, IoT equipment, servers, and more.

▶ Read more in this blog from our partners Heimdal

5 steps to securing remote users’ devices

Although remote work offers flexibility and productivity advantages, it can also pose significant security challenges to IT teams. These concerns cover the technology and applications themselves and users’ security awareness – not to mention cyber attacks themselves.

Worse still, sophisticated attackers often need to breach only one device to access an entire organisation’s network. This can be achieved through a phishing attack, or via a vulnerability in an unpatched network. In this event, cyber attacks can lead to exposure across the organisation’s whole network before a full-scale data breach ensues.

Five remote work security & usability challenges

These are some of the top challenges facing our customers and UK firms in general.

Connecting to an office network
  • Potential company network exposure (if connecting unknowingly with a compromised device).
  • Connectivity and speed challenges taking a toll on productivity.
Device security challenges
  • Outdated device’s operating system (OS) version is more prone to known and exploitable vulnerabilities.
  • Jailbroken or compromised devices.
Network security challenges
  • Lack of visibility into who’s accessing what set of resources, using which devices from where and how long.
  • Compromised devices can “teleport” to the network. Lack of remediation steps upon failed access. Challenges supporting multi-cloud connection to access resources.
Phishing and other cyber threats
  • Aims to steal personal data, work or financial account credentials, or any other valuable data.
  • It appears to be sent from a reliable source and usually contains malicious links or attachments.
  • This leads to clicking on links that steal accounts credentials or installing fraudulent software.
VPN challenges
  • VPNs are struggling to meet the demands of remote and hybrid working. They:
  • Do not enforce corporate device security and compliance requirements.
  • Expose company network by providing access not only to an intended resource but to the entire company network.
  • Do not support role-based access.
  • Don’t protect from web-based attacks such as credential theft, phishing, drive-by downloads, or malvertising.

For remote work and employees to thrive, it’s essential to ensure fast and secure access to company data and resources. Innovative rather than outdated security practices are critical to support the new way of work, where security empowers employees and companies by enhancing productivity and collaboration.

📄This eBook from Barracuda shows the way.

Want to learn more?

Complete IT Systems have a team of Barracuda specialists on hand to demo the solution, discuss business benefits and help you understand how the technology works for your organisation.

To get in touch or request a demo please contact us.

How modern is your workspace?

Companies are continuously innovating to win new customers and drive growth. But are the tangible aspects of your business culture keeping pace? Can you effectively improve workplace culture and support hybrid working with technology?

UMA was built in response to the need for workplaces to innovate and digitally transform to improve employee user experiences, support hybrid working strategies, connect workforce collaboration tools, reduce real estate costs and drive operational efficiency.

To do so, you need to consider the following questions:
  • How can you simplify employee access to information, or the day-to-day processes such as getting a meeting organised?
  • How can you better understand how your workplace resources are being utilised and optimise your real estate effectively using data?
  • How can you ensure your employees are healthy and productive in the work environment?
  • How can you connect and manage existing and new workplace audio visual device and internet-of-things sensors across all of your offices?

In short, you can build a safe, flexible, managed workspace fit for the modern era. It can integrate managing hybrid working, manage car parking, improved environmental monitoring and other important information about your premises. Why? Improved employee experience, staff retention, and return on investment on your facilities.

How it works

UMA is a PropTech that helps workplaces digitally transform, improve user experiences, collaboration, reduce costs and carbon footprint.

The software addresses all these questions – and more. The UMA team is passionate about user experience and human-centered design, the use of automation, data-driven business intelligence to improve the spaces for employees and employers, and importantly to deliver a tangible return on investment. Find out more at #askUMA, or view this short video:

Want to learn more?

Complete IT Systems have a team of UMA specialists on hand to demo the solution, discuss business benefits and help you understand how the technology works for your organisation.

To get in touch or request a demo please contact us.

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