Is your print solution enhancing your business’s resilience?

Following a year no one could have anticipated, many businesses are operating in a vastly different environment to the one they faced little over 12 months ago.

While this period has seen enormous digital transformation, as the pace of change begins to relent, now is the time for IT managers and decision makers to reflect on the technologies they have in place and turn their focus to the future to ensure it is enabling them to operate agilely, safely and flexibly.

We spoke to Sara Diggle, Head of SMB print business unit at Brother UK about how the right print solution can enhance business resilience in any environment and what businesses should be looking for.

With more and more employees adopting hybrid working practices, it’s vital that any print solution is optimised to perform in every environment. Ensuring employees can continue working effectively and efficiently from anywhere keeps productivity levels high and simplifies working practices, helping businesses to remain agile and able to cope with whatever challenges they face.

Supporting business resilience

Here are five key things that your print solution should be providing if it’s designed to support business resilience:

1. Comprehensive device options

Any print solution that is truly going to deliver for every environment needs to offer a comprehensive range of device options that are designed to support the employee whether they are working from home, office, a co-working space or a blend of all three.

Brother’s industry-leading devices range from scalable, robust SMB laser printers for the office to compact multifunction desktop devices for the home, enabling reliable, simple and secure printing and scanning everywhere.

2. Remote support

With a seemingly ever-expanding network of devices and locations, managing technical issues and providing support is becoming increasingly challenging for IT managers and their teams.

Solutions such as Brother’s remote panel, give service providers the means of quickly diagnosing and solving printer problems without the need to send out an engineer, easing pressures on the team and ensuring minimal disruption to employees.

3. Managed print service (MPS)

Implementing an MPS is one of the most impactful ways IT teams can transform how they manage their print network.

Managed print services can easily be rolled out across a business’s network of offices, as well as among home workers, while still allowing full oversight by IT managers. Not only does an MPS enable easy remote management, it also improves reliability of the network and productivity of employees by ensuring every office and employee has an up-to-date device with the latest software and can reduce costs and downtime with the automated delivery of toner and ink cartridges.

4. Enhanced security

A security breach compromises a business and often halts all activity, putting it in a potentially precarious position. According to research from Quocirca in 2019, more than one in ten of all security incidents that affected a business involved a printer, 59 per cent of which resulted in data being lost.

The number of entry points hackers can use to access company networks has grown exponentially and home printing can increase network vulnerability. Businesses need a print solution that proactively tackles these security blind spots at home and the office.

Remote management can help ensure home devices remain up to date with the latest software reducing risk, while solutions such as Brother’s Secure Print+ can protect devices in the office, with access to devices and the network limited to the authenticated user.

5. Touch free printing

Employee safety in the office is an ongoing concern and while the focus for many will be social distancing through one-way systems and re-worked seating plans, the shared usage of office technology will also present a challenge.

Decentralising print and the balanced deployment of machines will help reduce the need for users to move around the office to retrieve documents and limit the number of people congregating at devices. Additionally, to ensure people don’t need to physically engage with a device, solutions such as Brother’s Secure Print+ enables touch-free printing, using card-based authentication.

Find out more

Get in touch to find out how Brother solutions can help you improve your business’s resilience.

The implications of cyber attacks on backup data

Cybercriminals are desperate to collect their ransoms and are finding stealthy ways to corrupt backup data that are often missed by detection tools. This causes prolonged downtimes, financial hardships, and loss of consumer trust.

Veeam backups stored locally on Microsoft environments lack any native immutability for Veeam Backup and Disaster Recovery volumes.

Blocky for Veeam solves this problem by locking backup volumes to any process other than fingerprinted Veeam Software application executables.

In addition, any unauthorised attempts to access backup volumes are notified by Blocky for Veeam providing valuable intelligence that could provide warning of an active cyber attack.

Read more

In this article for Toolbox for IT, see why organisations should strive for data resiliency using a 3-prong approach that combines isolation, immutability, and intelligence.

Want to learn more?

As Blocky for Veeam Certified Partners, Complete IT Systems have a team of specialists on hand to demo the solution. We can discuss business benefits and help you understand how the technology works for your organisation. We also offer FREE trials.

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

blocky for veeam

Ten emerging fintech trends to watch in 2021 – and beyond

The way we interact with our money changed forever in 2020.

One of the social and technological transformations caused – or at least accelerated – by the Covid-19 pandemic was the unprecedented growth in the use of financial technology.

This surge in demand meant the fintech industry had to step up and scale fast, creating new solutions for consumers and businesses that worked for the online world, and that will go on to thrive in the new normality.

Many fintech trends were already well underway; they simply moved further along their growth curve during the pandemic.

Since then, a wave of new financial services providers has stepped in to fill that space and acquire an ever-growing market share.

Further Investment

The June 2020 AI in Fintech Market – Growth, Trends, Forecasts (2020-2025) from Research and Markets valued the global AI-in-fintech market at around £4.8 billion in 2019 and expected it to grow to over £16 billion by 2025 at a compound annual growth rate of 23.37% (2020-2025).

Initially, the small matter of a global pandemic acted a bit of a speedbump to these growth projections.

It quickly bounced back, though. According to a KPMG industry report, fintech investment doubled in H1’20 to H2’20 from £24 billion to nearly £52 billion, with global fintech-focused VC investment reaching over £30 billion in 2020.

Traditional brick-and-mortar banks as we know them may be withering (see below), but some of the institutions behind them are quietly investing in fintech: developing new brands, often through an internal startup approach, emulating the agility of the new upstart competitors in the challenger and neo banking world.

As well as acting as VCs to their internal projects, some are joining broader industry consortia to pursue more ambitious long-term goals and tackle legal and compliance issues.

Growth of Digital-only Banks

Trust in traditional financial institutions and banks never really recovered from the 2008 financial crisis.

Thanks to fintech, traditional banking is in serious decline, as a new generation of digitally native customers are turning their backs on their parents’ trusted choices.

Instead, they’re seeking solutions to their unique situations, such as a mortgage lender who understands the realities of a gig worker’s income.

Rather than turning to a big ‘high street’ bank for future services, smart consumers increasingly shop around for the best fit, because these days that can be as simple as downloading a new app.

A Boston Consulting Group survey across 15 countries showed that 44 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds had enrolled in online banking for the first time during the early weeks of the COVID-19 lockdowns.

And they’re borrowing too, from peer-to-peer micro-loans in developing nations to streamlined mortgage applications in the US.

Going Mainstream – Accessing Untapped Markets

Startups in fintech are unbundling offerings to create niche new markets, addressing inclusion issues, and often cutting costs for users through efficient use of technology.

By offering services to formerly unbanked or underbanked populations around the world, they’re growing the pie for all providers.

And with interest rates for savers so low everywhere, the perks and bonuses on offer are more attractive as a result: why wouldn’t you choose a credit or debit card with cashback or discounts at your favorite store?

Closer Regulator Scrutiny

While legislative change always lags behind technological advances, regulators are taking a growing interest in many fintech hotspots such as blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies.

Globally the response is fragmented, with smaller and nimbler jurisdictions moving faster, while others are setting up sandboxes to test scenarios and encourage innovation.

Lawmakers are taking a keen interest in the lending side too, with growing concerns over consumer credit apps, which may encourage shoppers to spread the cost of fast fashion items over a longer period than the lifetime of the garment itself.

Embedded Finance

Powered by the Open Banking movement, embedded finance is already radically reforming the way businesses generate revenue and interact with consumers.

The ‘buy-now-pay-later’ shopping trend is obviously the most visible of these embedded finance developments. But the possibilities for disruption – and revenue generation – are virtually limitless.

Other examples range from e-wallets and instant merchant payments, to services that allow landlords and their would-be tenants to agree upon and close deals, and purchase and insurance funding in the automotive industry… to name but a few.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning cut costs, accelerate administration, and assist fraud prevention, all of which remove friction from each transaction.

The growth of technologies such as natural language processing and self-service for financial products can improve financial awareness and control for informed consumers. But it can equally be used to target naïve stock traders or reckless bargain hunters.

Autonomous Finance & the Opening Up of Financial Services

Beyond developments in embedded finance, fintech startups continue their tendency to democratise accessibility to typically gate-kept financial services, like day trading and forex.

Today, consumers around the world are now trading stocks, exchanging currencies, sending remittances, and contracting for retirement investments, all without involving traditional financial institutions in any way.

In parts of the world suffering financial crises – from credit crunches to hyperinflation – these tools are already providing a lifeline to tech-savvy consumers.

In more financially privileged environments, furloughed workers get to dabble in new things to do with their stimulus payments.

For better or worse, we will doubtless see further Gamestop scenarios playing out, as fintech puts powerful financial tools in the hands of every smartphone holder.

The rise of RPA

As with so many other developing areas of technology, robotic process automation (to give it its full name) is set to bring root and branch disruption to fintech in the coming years.

Whether it’s customer onboarding, data entry or reporting, or even insurance claim checks or processing an individual’s suitability for a loan application, if it’s a task that’s repetitive in nature, then the chances are that RPA will be stepping into the breach before too long.

The Central Role of Cybersecurity

With far-reaching disruption and ever-increasing digitalisation – from machine learning and AI to 5G and IoT – cybersecurity threats have never been greater.

As a result, the cybersecurity market is projected to grow from £118bn in 2021 to over £266bn in 2028.

Central Bank Digital Currencies

Contactless payments exploded in 2020, moving out of the e-commerce realm into face-to-face transactions for all generations, as everyone tried not to touch anything.

This cash decline coincides not only with all-time highs for bitcoin, but also a high level of interest in central bank digital currencies, and other far more ‘alternative’ digital options.

With its digitalisation of the renminbi in April 2021, China was the first of the major global economies to break cover and make the jump into the unknown world of CBDCs.

One thing’s for sure: it certainly won’t be the last – particularly as there’s already excited talk of the move hastening the “decline of the dollar’s dominance as the world’s leading reserve currency”.

The End of Cash?

The way we pay for things has irreversibly changed, and fintechs are jumping on this trend, again responding to changes in the social environment.

Even as far back as 2018, Pew Research found that just over a third of US adults under the age of 50 made no weekly cash purchases.

More recently, the National Retail Federation and Forrester Research indicated 19% of US consumers made a contactless digital payment for the first time in May 2020.

Usage of apps like PayPal, Square and Apple Pay has surged as consumers increasingly looked to reduce their cash usage in the wake of COVID-19.

Combined with further mainstream uptake of decentralised cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, and the rise of CBDCs (see above), it’s fair to say that the writing’s on the wall for cash.

Now we just need smartphone facial recognition technology that recognises you through a face mask when you get to the checkout… but that will come soon.

In Conclusion

So as with almost everything else the present and future of finance – in 2021 and beyond – is tech.

It’s a fragmented, competitive, and not always well-regulated world of alternatives, where consumers will have more choice to navigate a fast-changing fintech landscape.

In the process, they’ll be equipped to take charge of their money management like never before.

About the Author:

As a market research veteran and founder of NYC-based B2B market research consultancy firm, Adience, Chris Wells has worked with hundreds of fintech companies over the years.

Links:

https://assets.kpmg/content/dam/kpmg/xx/pdf/2021/02/pulse-of-fintech-h2-2020.pdf

https://www.bcg.com/en-es/publications/2020/covid-19-causes-a-new-outlook-on-pricing-and-revenue-for-banks

https://www.marketdataforecast.com/market-reports/ai-in-fintech-market

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/12/12/more-americans-are-making-no-weekly-purchases-with-cash/

https://www.ft.com/content/3fe905e7-8b9b-4782-bf2d-fc4f45496915

https://www.hello-adience.com/fintech/

Veeam named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions 2021

The NEW Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions 2021 has been released, and Veeam has been named as a Magic Quadrant Leader for the fifth time. This award is based on its highest ability to execute and completeness of vision.

The report gives you:

  • A full overview of backup and recovery functionality, technology and market trends
  • Guidance on choosing a vendor, including requirements, pricing, strengths and cautions
  • Ratings of leading backup and recovery vendors

Download the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions 2021 now to find out more.

Find out more

As Veeam Silver partners, Complete IT Systems have the skills and resources to help your business. For more information on how Complete IT Systems and Veeam can help, call 01274 396 213 or email .

 

Top tips for securing Veeam backups – part 1

Keeping all aspects of your IT secure can seem daunting. Even backups are at risk, despite trying to provide a safe haven for your data. This is where Complete IT Systems and Blocky for Veeam can help. By applying a systematic approach to your security, you can protect data-at-rest and data-in-transit.

In a series of articles over the coming weeks, we will outline how to secure your backed-up data, and how to adopt a pragmatic, practical apprach to doing so.

In this article, part one, we look at how to understand cyber criminals’ motivations, the role of backups in limiting the impact of ransom attacks, and how Veeam backup encryption helps.

Knowing your enemy

The first step to knowing how to protect your backups is to understand your enemy. Cyber attackers target backed-up data for two main reasons. First, preventing an organisation from operating means there is no revenue coming in. Customers are uncertain, and this uncertainty almost guarantees some lost income.

Hackers stop businesses from functioning by locking firms out of their own data. They also extract sensitive personal data (PII) which can be a serious problem in the wrong hands.

The role of backups

Backing up data is a funadmental to good business practice. They also offer a good safeguard against ransom attacks by enabling a restore to the most recent point in time prior to an attack. Applying the 3-2-1 principle to backup means that you avoid placing all your eggs in one basket by storing data on different types of storage.

In the event of a ransom attack that encrypts an organisation’s data against them, with good backups in place IT teams can restore to a known point in time before the attack took place. For these reasons, it is not only essential to take regular backups, but to protect the data as it moves between locations and when it is in its final destination.

Encrypting Veeam backups

Encryption is a vital compont of protecting data. It is also a common trick cyber criminals use to lock organisations out of their own data.

With Veeam, you automatically have inbuilt encryption with the Backup & Replication solution. This enables you to switch on encryption on multiple levels:

  • Backup jobs
  • Backup copy jobs
  • VeeamZIP
  • Tapes

But there are some important considerations to keeping your backups completely secure.

If Veeam’s encryption has not been enabled for an existing backup job, the previous chain is not captured in the backup for that job. In other words, Veeam Backup & Replication’s encryption is not applied retrospectively.

To solve this, it is possible to start a new chain to enable the previously unencrypted chain to be siloed and then secured separately. Enabling encryption for an existing job then allows the in-built Veeam solution to create a full backup file.

What about deduplication?

Using a deduplicating storage appliance as the target for backed-up data means encryption can have a negative impact on deduplication ratios.

Since a separate encryption key is used for every job session, blocks that may be the same can appear to be different despite contaning the same data. By disabling data encryption, higher de-duplication rates can be achieved. The downside of this is that security is reduced.

Risk assessments therefore need to be conducted to balance deduplication with security.

Look out for our next blogs where we will go into more detail on this topic.

Find out more

Read more about Blocky for Veeam and view a short introduction video.

As Blocky for Veeam Certified Partners, Complete IT Systems have a team of specialists on hand to demo the solution. We can discuss business benefits and help you understand how the technology works for your organisation. We also offer exclusive 30-day FREE trials.

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

Protect Veeam backups

School cyber attacks in the UK – why?

School cyber attacks

School cyber attacks are rising in the UK, and schools are no exception. The National Cyber Security Centre recently modified its guidelines to reflect this growing threat.

In this three-part series with our partners Barracuda, Complete IT Systems look at why schools are targeted, how schools are exposed, and practical steps for safeguarding them.

Part 1: School cyber attacks – why are they targeted?

Schools may seem like less obvious targets for cyber criminals. Pupils are not likely to be carrying credit cards or phones, and exam results are unlikely to attract as big payouts as bank account details for instance.

The reality is that schools are a common target of hackers for two reasons. Firstly, they are often soft targets with inadequate security provisions in place. There can also be some potentially lucrative rewards for a successful attack.

What are the rewards?

Schools actually have a lot of data that can be valuable in the wrong hands. Childrens’ identity data is a valuable commodity in criminal circles. It is used by fraudsters to open bank accounts for money laundering. It can also be used to open new credit lines.

And the best part for cyber criminals? Children are much less likely to realise wrongdoing than adults. Some studies have found that twice as many children are subject to identity theft than adults for this reason.

State schools’ IT systems also contain an abundance of data attractive to criminals. This includes names, DOB, phone numbers, email addresses and health data. Private schools also hold financial and insurance information. On top of this, schools also hold payroll information for teachers.

With 8.9 million pupils attending almost 33,000 schools in the UK, the potential is clear.

Ransomware

Although state schools are not flush with funds, around 10% of the schools in the UK are private. That means there are well over 3,000 schools that could be susceptible to paying ransoms on pupils’ coursework, financial data and health information such as COVID-19 testing.

In part two of our blog, we will look at how private schools can be exposed.

How can I find out more?

As Barracuda 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.

How to protect Veeam backups

Protect Veeam backups

Backups should be your organisation’s insurance policy against ransomware attacks. They provide the ability to restore your production environment to a stable state at an appropriate point in time. It is vital to protect Veeam backups are also an insurance policy against malware attacks because data can always be recovered.

In theory.

Hackers are now looking for different routes to infiltrate corporate networks.  It comes as no surprise that sophisticated malware attacks are now heading straight for backups. Attacks on backups compromise all the data there before heading for live systems.

It does not help that Veeam V11 running under Microsoft Windows offers no native immutability feature for local backups. Veeam does have the option of a hardened Linux based backup repository with V11, but many organisations lack Linux expertise in-house, or have no desire to add Linux to their Windows-dominated environment.

Cybersecurity provision needs to be strengthened and adapted to keep up to speed. Protecting Veeam backup objects is vital. However, traditional security measures are often not practical for cloud-based online backups in branch or remote offices. This can be because of limited resources or skills onsite, bandwidth restrictions or other practical obstacles.

Blocky for Veeam protects remote office data from malware attacks on backed-up data with 7 simple steps:

  1. Simple installation: Blocky is easy to install with a filter driver tightly coupled to the Windows OS, but only requiring minimal system resources
  2. 85% of Ransomware attacks target Windows systems: Blocky turns the Windows NTFS/ReFS volumes(s) of the Veeam Repository Server into a protected device.
  3. Protect Veeam backups even if compromised: Blocky will continue to protect against Malware even if a virus has entered the program and damaged the Blocky software.
  4. Rapid attack recovery: Unlike solutions based on offsite storage media or cloud-based strategies, Blocky protects your local archives for the fastest possible recovery time.
  5. Cost effective insurance: Blocky for Veeam is priced based on the total backup disk volume capacity and insignificant compared to the costs of a successful Ransomware attack.
  6. Instant alerts: Blocky will send alerts of ANY unauthorised application or processes that try to access a protected backup volume. This can be very useful in the early detection of a malware or ransomware attack. Even the hardened Linux solution under Veeam V11 does not provide this.
  7. Quicker recovery times: Local backups offer the fastest possible recovery time and will typically incur far lower costs than offline backups such as tape or cloud-based object storage.

Find out more

Read more about Blocky for Veeam and view a short introduction video.

As Blocky for Veeam Certified Partners, Complete IT Systems have a team of specialists on hand to demo the solution. We can discuss business benefits and help you understand how the technology works for your organisation. We also offer FREE trials.

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

Protect Veeam backups
Protect Veeam backups

Survey results: The top endpoint security challenges for UK businesses

We recently asked around 3,000 of our customers and prospects to tell us about some of their biggest endpoint security concerns. Specifically, we wanted to know how secure these IT professionals felt about the data on their users’ endpoint devices.

Most organisations indicated they were using some kind of endpoint backup provider. However, this did not stop them from expressing concerns, and in many cases indicating their intention to look for a more complete data protection solution at the device level.

Cybersecurity and compliance

The main pain point the respondents identified was the threat of compliance issues, fines, or threats to their business’ reputation from security incidents.

Other recurring themes in respondents answers were:

  • Inability to deal with the latest evasive threats
  • Limited visibility into what’s happening on my endpoints

Most of our respondents indicated that they did not lack the specialist technical skills or capacity needed to deal with escalated threats within their teams. Instead, the concerns were focused on the ability of endpoint providers to stay ahead of threats, and having the visibility to deal with them.

The right cybersecurity tools

Our survey results indicate that SMBs and mid-size enterprises in the UK know they are at risk from new, unknown, and evasive threats such as unknown malware, ransomware, financial, and other spyware that can bypass automated security barriers. Having best-in-class tools in place to quickly identify, analyse, and respond to known, unknown, and evasive threats – all without straining your limited time and resource – is vital.

Your business can maximise its levels of cybersecurity preparedness with Kaspersky Optimum Security.

Find out more

If you would like to speak with a member of the team with further questions about user cybersecurity awareness or Kaspersky’s solutions in the meantime, please call your account manager or 01274 396 213 and we will be able to help you.

 

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Get a FREE Endpoint Security and Security Awareness Review

SMBs and mid-size enterprises are at risk from new, unknown, and evasive threats such as unknown malware, ransomware, financial, and other spyware that can bypass automated security barriers. Organisations must have the tools in place to quickly identify, analyse, and respond to known, unknown, and evasive threats, all without straining your limited time and resource.

Your business can maximise its levels of cybersecurity preparedness with Kaspersky Optimum Security.

Get a FREE Endpoint Security and Security Awareness review

The first step is to understand your existing cybersecurity provisions. Take our short Kaspersky Optimum Security Survey to begin.

 

Find out more

If you would like to speak with a member of the team with further questions about user cybersecurity awareness or Kaspersky’s solutions in the meantime, please call your account manager or 01274 396 213 and we will be able to help you.

Unleash your network’s full potential with secure SD-WAN

UK organisations are moving workloads to the cloud. And suddenly, backhauling traffic through a central datacentre or uplink slows you down, and robs you of some of your cloud migration’s benefits.

Watch this video and see exactly how you can unleash your network’s full potential with secure SD-WAN—and get the industry’s most advanced security. Discover Barracuda Cloud Generation Firewall – purpose-built for the era of dispersed networks, SaaS applications, and public cloud deployments.

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.