Remote working that doesn’t feel remote

In the era of accidental homeworking, it’s vital to give your users the tools to enable them to remain productive, creative and efficient from remote locations – the trick is combining this flexibility with the requisite levels of security to prevent your customers’ data from falling into the wrong hands, or your core IT systems to be hacked.

The trick during the COVID-19 crisis (and for effective homeworking strategies in general) is to provide the right portfolio of collaboration tools to ensure that teams don’t become remote and isolated from one another, and that customers, prospects, suppliers and partners can be managed effectively.

Remote working that doesn’t feel remote…

The best initiatives come from meeting, talking and sharing ideas, so it’s crucial that your users working from different locations doesn’t mean that teams drift apart and become more siloed.

It’s therefore crucial that your users can connect, chat, collaborate and produce just as productively than they can in a face-to-face environment in an office.

Collaboration, virtual meetings and file sharing with Office 365

The Microsoft Office 365 portfolio provides the perfect way of handling these challenges of remote work – and in some ways make for an even more productive environment than that of an office environment!

The power of Microsoft combines to provide a best-in-class operating system, enterprise level security safeguards, and seamless integration between applications for optimal user efficiency.

Where to start?

We know that the Office 365 portfolio can be a bit daunting due to the number of options and variables. But that’s where the licensing experts at Complete IT Systems come in, and we can guide you on where to start based on your priorities and composition of your teams and users. We can also help you choose, deploy, use and maintain your solutions.

There’s no “off the shelf” fit for any business, but in short the Microsoft tools can be summarised into the following business needs:

  • Work hub: Teams provides a central “place” where employees, contractors and partners can talk, chat, hold meetings, and share files and apps for a fully collaborative working experience
  • Securely sharing and editing documents: OneDrive for Business and SharePoint enable seamless sharing and collaboration on presentations and other documents
  • Email and calendars: Online and offline with Outlook

Need some help quickly deploying homeworking for your business?

The expert team at Complete IT Systems are publishing a series of guidance and tips to help you and your business through this situation. This takes in all aspects of quickly providing safe, comfortable and efficient home offices for your users, including data security, collaboration tools, laptops, desktops, print and consumables, support for critical IT tasks, and more. Read more in our central COVID-19 crisis hub.

Talk to us – we’re just at the end of a phone

Complete IT Systems Ltd have been providing these services to our customers for over 10 years and have many satisfied clients. For more information on how we can help, or just to get some general advice on IT and business supplies during the crisis, please call us on 01274 396 213. You can also see the full range of products and services we offer, or read more about our support services here.

Get set for virtual meetings with the right headset for homeworking

In these times when your teams will likely be spending a lot of time on calls and virtual meetings, it’s important to give them the right tools for the job. One of these is a business-class headset for homeworking.

Why it’s a great fit for homeworking

The JEDEL JD-032 gaming headset is a fantastic choice and is certainly great value for money. Comfortable to wear all day long and includes an in-line volume control with 3.5mm Audio Jack connectivity.

The headset comes with two large 40mm magnetic neodymium driver to deliver high-fidelity audio and ensure excellent clarity through the entire frequency range, ideal for playing games, watching movies, listening to music or making calls.

Fully adjustable padded headband ensures perfect fit with different head sizes (both adults and kids) and wearing comfort. Breathable earpads reduce heat and moisture build-up to keep your ears comfortable during long, intense gaming sessions, they also block ambient noises to ensure full concentration.

The boom microphone with noise reduction function can be freely positioned to pick up your voice or keep silent when you do not want to be heard. The in-line volume control is attached to the cable at you hand for quick operation.

Resources for COVID-19 homeworking

The team at Complete IT Systems are publishing a series of guidance and tips to help you and your business through this situation with everything from IT security to collaboration tools – you can read more here.

Talk to us – we’re just at the end of a phone

Complete IT Systems Ltd have been providing these services to our customers for over 10 years and have many satisfied clients. For more information on how we can help, or just to get some general advice on IT and business supplies during the crisis, please call us on 01274 396 213. You can also see the full range of products and services we offer, or read more about our support services here.

COVID-19 homeworking for business: Quick guide

With the government publishing its coronavirus action plan earlier in March, and the more stringent measures that have come in since to enforce COVID-19 homeworking where possible, it’s quickly become vital for businesses to adopt homeworking arrangements for users. If your organisation isn’t familiar with this, it can be a daunting task, especially in a short space of time!

To help UK businesses prepare as effectively as possible , we’ve put together a short guide and a COVID-19 resources page that outlines some key points for adopting temporary homeworking – and making it work for your business and users.

Our experience

We’ve done this based on over 10 years experience helping our customers with remote workforces working in a secure, productive and efficient manner. So we’ve summarised some of the main IT considerations for COVID-19 homeworking into a simple checklist – addressing these before (or very quickly after) homeworking starts will ensure all parties are happy and comfortable with the new working arrangements, and ensures that business can function as smoothly as possible during the COVID-19 crisis.

COVID-19 homeworking checklist

  • Do your users have the right hardware for working remotely – high spec laptop, mobile, comfortable workstation, printer, etc?
  • How will you and your team collaborate for group meetings, workshops, customer demos, etc? Should you consider collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams? This means you can get together for formal meetings, but also have daily coffee breaks in front of your screens to catch up more informally
  • Can confidentiality and compliance with data protection regulations be satisfied from a homeworking environment?
  • Don’t forget to update email signatures with mobile numbers instead of office landlines if they will go unanswered while the office is closed (IT can do this centrally across all signatures in Outlook)
  • Are users able to work at home securely with access to servers, VPN, etc?
  • Have you provided the right file sharing, collaboration and filing tools such as SharePoint and OneDrive

Further guidance about work duties and how to support your homeworkers with tasks, breaks, regulations and so on can be found here.

Find out more

Complete IT Systems Ltd have been providing these services to our customers for over 10 years and have many satisfied clients. For more information on how we can help, please call us on 01274 396 213 or read more about our support services here.

Printers & consumables for home workers during the COVID-19 crisis

Home office

Whether you’re looking for a quick solution for printers for homeworking during COVID-19 crisis, or you’re looking to deploy a more strategic print refresh, Complete IT Systems provide full range and expertise on printers and consumables.

We offer competitive prices, expertise on many lines of printers, inks and toners from all the major brands, in addition re-manufactured and compatible cartridges to fit all budgets and requirements – most lines are stocked and available on a next-day business delivery service.

From small desk based ink jet systems up to the high end departmental multi-function lasers, we have your requirements covered.

Find out more

Complete IT Systems Ltd have been providing these services to our customers for over 10 years and have many satisfied clients. For more information on how we can help, please call us on 01274 396 213 or read more about the print and consumables brands we carry here.

More guidance for businesses trying to quickly setup to enable homeworking is available here, and we’ll be publishing many more tips and guidance over the coming days and weeks.

Enable remote work while securing data during the COVID-19 pandemic

During this crisis, many office-based employees have become remote workers, and especially so now that confinement restrictions are in place across the UK.

As well as bringing up challenges for users such as how to juggle children, meals, and work and home life, remote working brings new security risks and productivity challenges for IT departments.

Over the coming days and weeks the team at Complete IT Systems will be publishing a series of guidance and tips to help you through this situation. In our first article, we focus on how Barracuda can help secure your data and infrastructure while ensuring reliable connections to maintain employee productivity.

How to secure your remote users in 3 easy steps:

  1. Reliable remote connectivity – Provide remote users with VPN access from any device with better performance than traditional IPsec-based VPNs.
  2. Zero touch provisioning – Centrally manage large deployments with minimal IT resources. Users can download and access apps without elevated privileges on their device.
  3. Support – The team at Complete IT Systems are committed to helping you in this challenging time by being a full partner in your business security. Find out about our support options for Barracuda and other solutions here.

Whitepaper: Advanced Secure Access for Remote and Mobile Workers

Barracuda CloudGen Firewalls incorporate advanced client-to-site VPN capabilities to ensure remote employees secure access to the network. Read more about how in this whitepaper.

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.

Extended IT Support Cover

Are you having issues around support & deployment during the Covid-19 crisis? If you have new users working from home or remote locations to contend with, engineers off sick or self-isolating, or are unable to access your office location, then flexible IT support is a great way of ensuring your organisation’s core IT systems remain up and running.

How can we help?

Complete IT Systems have skilled technicians available to help business of all sizes and types remotely at the end of the phone.

We can provide support with VPN, Connectivity, Remote working as well as Server configuration issues be that Virtual or Physical.

Our credentials

Complete IT Systems Ltd carry accreditations from all major vendors including VMware, Microsoft, HP, Dell, Datto, Barracuda, Sophos and Kaspersky to name just a few. We can support systems running all Windows variants and Software revisions, we have specialists covering Office 365/Teams/Exchange.

Find out more

Complete IT Systems Ltd have been providing these services to our customers for over 10 years and have many satisfied clients. For more information on how we can help, please call us on 01274 396 213 or read more about our support services here.

Ransomware in numbers for UK SMBs

ransomware

With the recent spate of ransomware attacks in the UK proving that the threat hasn’t subsided, it is likely a good time to re-think your company’s IT security plan. To this end, we’ll be blogging over the coming weeks about the extent of the problem, the increasing creativity of hackers, the risks and exposure businesses face if ill-prepared, and some practical measures you can adopt to asses and safeguard your business against such a scenario.

What’s the impact of ransomware?

To kick off our series, we start with 10 key stats about how ransomware affects small businesses in the UK.

  1. Ransomware remains the most prominent malware threat to SMBs, with 83% reporting it as the most common security threat
  2. In the first half of 2019 alone, 61% of MSPs report attacks on their clients, with 19% reporting multiple attacks in a single day.
  3. On average, 2 in 5 SMBs report that they’ve fallen victim to a ransomware attack. SMBs with in-house IT teams are at greater risk
  4. When it comes to the ransomware threat, there is a disconnect between service providers and SMBs. 82% of MSPs are “very concerned” about the ransomware threat and 8% report their SMB clients feel the same.
  5. Phishing emails are the leading cause of successful ransomware attacks.
  6. Lack of cyber security education, weak passwords, and poor user practices are among the other top causes of attacks
  7. The aftermath of a ransomware attack can be a nightmare for any business. Almost 50% of victimised clients experienced business-threatening downtime.
  8. The average ransom requested by hackers is increasing. The average requested ransom for SMBs is now £1,990.
  9. And this as downtime costs are up by 300% year-over-year, and the cost of downtime is 53X greater than the average ransom requested in 2019.
  10. 81% of SMBs with backup and disaster recovery (BCDR) solutions in place are less likely to experience significant downtime during a ransomware attack. And victimised SMBs with BCDR in place recovered from the attack in 24 hours, or less.

This data is taken from a 2019 Datto study into how ransomware is affecting SMBs in the UK.

In our next article, we’ll look in more at how UK SMBs can plan for and prevent ransomware attacks.

How can I find out more?

As Datto 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.

Datto

Backup vs archiving: when, why and how

There is often confusion between the two complementary processes of data backup and information archiving. In this article, we compare them and discuss the specific needs addressed by each one.

We also review why organisations continue to need both a backup and an archiving solution even after they have moved to Microsoft Office 365.

Comparing Backup and Archiving

Backups and archives both store copies of data from the production environment, but the use cases for each are different, which means that different solutions are appropriate for each. A backup enables recovery from a situation where data has been lost, corrupted or becomes inaccessible, so it’s primarily a safeguard to facilitate data recovery. A backup stores multiple copies that are each associated with a specific revision of data, and it provides recovery back to a known good state from a specific point of time.

An archive enables compliance with legal and business data retention policies, as well as supporting eDiscovery. An archive preserves a single copy in secure immutable storage for a finite time period and provides ongoing end user access to historical business information.

This table summarises some of the key differences between backup and archiving:

For effective data protection and preservation, organisations need both a backup and an archiving strategy. They may attempt to use a backup solution as an archive (and vice versa), but as will be discussed below, there are significant limitations and deficiencies with this approach that make it inadvisable.

Backup is for Recovery

The primary purpose of backup is to allow recovery from the situation where the original version of data is lost due to unintentional or accidental deletion, or where files have been corrupted in some way to make it unusable.

A backup system achieves this by taking copies of the data on a regular basis to create a series of revisions. Each one of these revisions reflects the data at a specified point in time and can be restored back as needed.

Most backup copies are retained only for a few days or weeks with later copies superseding previous versions. However, it is common for one version to be retained semi-permanently on a weekly or monthly basis to allow data to be recovered from a much earlier point in time. For email data in particular, backup solutions are typically used to protect the most recent data, as this tends to be the most relevant for end users.

I have Office 365, why do I need to back it up?

Accidental deletion by users is the most frequent cause of data loss in a SaaS environment such as Microsoft Office 365; however, there are other ways where data can be lost. Application errors or mistakes in processing can cause data to be lost or overwritten, and there is always the risk of malicious deletion by employees with access to the data. A threat that has come to prominence recently is ransomware, which encrypts data and renders it inaccessible. Office 365 itself focuses primarily on ensuring that service and data availability is not disrupted, but Microsoft does provide customers two options for data recovery:

  1. Recycle Bin: Data that has been recently deleted by users can be recovered from the Recycle Bin (for OneDrive), or the Deleted Items and Recoverable Items folders (for Exchange Online). However, these are subject to retention periods as listed below, after which data is permanently deleted and no longer available.
  2. Document Versioning: If the Document Versioning feature is turned on, OneDrive for Business will retain a number of previous versions of each document that has been amended, and end users are then able to restore back to any of these previous versions. However, this does not provide protection against unintentional or accidental deletion, as all versions of a document are removed when the current version is deleted.

Organisations adopting Office 365 should recognise that there are serious limitations inherent in both of these options:

  • These options operate at an individual item level, so they are not suitable for the recovery of
    larger quantities of data such as entire folders or mailboxes.
  • It is not feasible to do a point in time data restore using either of these options without
    considerable additional processing.

In our next article, we’ll look in more detail at the problems of using backup as an archive.

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.

The evolution of spear phishing – is your business prepared?

Why is phishing spelt with a ph? What makes spear phishing different? Who’s a potential target?

Spear phishing is a huge concern to organisations around the world. It’s therefore crucial to understand that the evolution of spear phishing, key targets, and best practices to prevent these pervasive attacks.

Many people think that spear phishing is just another term for phishing, but it’s actually a very different type of attack. And while IT may well be familiar with the risks and dangers, your users may not be.

Whereas phishers send emails in bulk to large numbers of people, spear phishers do extensive research before starting their illegal campaigns. They send highly personalised messages to targeted people within an organisation, often relying on impersonation techniques.

For example, they may pretend to be the CEO, CFO, or another trusted executive from within your own organisation. Because of the economics, spear phishers are willing to invest a significant amount of time and effort in targeting a particular person, engaging in conversation through multiple emails to build trust. The aim is to get the victim to do something that benefits the spear phisher, such as wire transfer funds into the criminal’s account. Often the victim has no idea they have been tricked as they believe they have transferred funds to pay a legitimate bill—making it even harder to get the lost funds back.

How can I find out more?

Read Barracuda’s white paper on the subject, The Evolution of Spear Phishing. It’s something that all businesses must take seriously—attacks so far total almost £4Bn. In it you’ll learn all about spear phishing, and most critically, how to stay safe.

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.

Guaranteed peace of mind with email security

The bad news? A single security strategy won’t protect your business while threats are evolving, improving, and growing in sophistication. But the good news is that there are solutions.

The polymorphic nature of modern cyber threats renders traditional signature-based defence mechanisms inadequate. On the other hand, in-depth defence techniques like sandboxing are expensive and come with performance overheads.

Comprehensive, reliable protection against attacks like ransomware and advanced persistent threats require a layered approach with progressively sophisticated defence techniques that balance accurate threat detection with fast response times.

Also, the architecture should provide protection from all threats across all the threat vectors and across multiple deployment surfaces like physical and virtual infrastructures, SaaS services, and public cloud platforms.

So what’s the solution?

You need one that stays effective over time. One that’s agile and able to detect rapidly changing dangers.

Barracuda’s Advanced Threat Protection for Email Security Gateway includes it all, from link protection to security training, defending you against all known and unknown threats.

Find out more

Click here to read how Evolution Recruitment Solutions guaranteed peace of mind with email security.

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.