Knowing your Office 365 data is backed up by reliable, cloud-to-cloud backup infrastructure, provides you with more time and budget to grow your business. So what exactly does Datto SaaS Protection recover?
OneDrive
Contacts
Calendar
Mail
SharePoint
MS Teams
Want to learn more about maintaining a secure and compliant business environment?
Datto SaaS Protection for Office 365 takes your data security far above and beyond the baseline industry standards to ensure that all business data in Office 365 and cloud apps data is secured, easily recoverable, and continually protected. Key features include:
Three-times daily backups of your business data
Encryption at rest and in transit
Quick and easy restores and exports of data
These features combine to significantly reduce the risk of losing key data, protect the business network from users, ransomware and other vulnerabilities, and support ongoing compliance efforts.
Keeping your team working on the right things
From a productivity point of view, Datto SaaS Protection for Office 365 make it easy to locate backed up files and folders. This is achieved through effective search filters that make their location quick and simple. The solution makes it possible to manage backups, see restores, and monitor all your activity via a clear and simple dashboard.
From this, it’s possible to analyse emails, files, contacts and full folders of data and, if necessary, restore files to users’ specific accounts, or to download them directly.
Do you need help convincing your colleagues about SaaS Protection? Check out this educational ebook, SaaS Protection for Office 365, and understand how to keep your critical business data people proof!
Find out more
You can read more about Datto SaaS data protection in this article.
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.
Modern business data is more than just data – it’s your business. And while it may be tempting to think that it’s safe in cloud applications, relying on cloud storage solutions that aren’t designed as backup or security tools can be risky.
So while we recognise that IT budgets are already under pressure and additional backups are yet another strain on them, in this article we look at the benefits of adding an additional protective layer to your business data in the Office 365 suite, and in other cloud applications such as Google Drive.
What are some of the risks of holding data only in cloud applications?
Among many other risks, these are some of the most common, and all contribute to unwanted levels of business downtime, or at the very least, distracted IT departments and users. To put it another way, is an additional solution worth it? These are the top 5 risks of holding business data exclusively in cloud applications:
Additional costs and potential data loss from needing to keep inactive licenses open (from users that have left the business, but their data is still needed for example)
Data loss due to accidental or malicious deletion by users
Potential data loss when attempting to restore files
Data loss when accidentally overwriting previous file drafts
Ransomware and other cyber attacks
What’s the solution?
Datto SaaS Protection for Office 365 takes your data security far above and beyond the baseline industry standards to ensure that all business data in Office 365 and cloud apps data is secured, easily recoverable, and continually protected. Key features include:
Three-times daily backups of your business data
Encryption at rest and in transit
Quick and easy restores and exports of data
These features combine to significantly reduce the risk of losing key data, protect the business network from users, ransomware and other vulnerabilities, and support ongoing compliance efforts.
Keeping your team working on the right things
From a productivity point of view, Datto SaaS Protection for Office 365 make it easy to locate backed up files and folders. This is achieved through effective search filters that make their location quick and simple. The solution makes it possible to manage backups, see restores, and monitor all your activity via a clear and simple dashboard.
From this, it’s possible to analyse emails, files, contacts and full folders of data and, if necessary, restore files to users’ specific accounts, or to download them directly.
Do you need help convincing your colleagues about SaaS Protection? Check out this educational ebook, SaaS Protection for Office 365, and understand how to keep your critical business data people proof!
Find out more
You can read more about Datto SaaS data protection in this article.
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.
As collaboration tools become more and more fundamental to team collaboration, and by extension, company success, alongside their benefits, cloud solutions for file storage and document or project management can cause many problems for IT departments.
Smaller businesses rarely invest in high-cost collaboration tools, opting instead for cheaper — or, better still, free — utilities. For better or worse, they have plenty of choices. However, failure to consider the security implications of using such tools can end up costing SMBs far more than they budgeted for.
In this article, we share some tips and best practices for making sure that your users can work as productively – and as securely – as possible.
Document collaboration tools
Many services allow small teams to edit documents simultaneously. They’re not just text tools, though; using them, team members can jointly develop graphical interfaces, diagrams, source code, and much more as well. It is handy, after all. However, before using such a service, it is worth understanding exactly how it works: how it stores your information, who has access to it, what security settings are available. Leaving work files publicly accessible is always a bad idea. Even if you are not concerned about information leakage, an intruder could gain access and make their own changes to your project documentation.
Google Docs or Microsoft Teams, OneDrive or Sharepoint provide the most vivid examples. People often share documents through those platforms, using a direct link without any restrictions. That means search engines can index them, and therefore pretty much anyone can see them. Complete strangers have found all sorts of confidential information in those docs: employees’ personal data, lists of customers including contact details, and even payroll records.
What to do: Use only services in which you can hide documents from prying eyes, or that at least give a clear explanation of how documents are stored. Do not forget to configure access rights — the ability to do so is a vital consideration. So, if you use Google Docs for work purposes, restrict access, granting it only to people you share documents with, and do not forget to revoke it if they no longer need it.
Cloud file storage
Another type of service that you should treat with caution is cloud file storage. Need to transfer a large amount of information? No problem — just upload it to the cloud and send the recipient a link. That neatly avoids any e-mail size limits. But many file-sharing services have no protection at all; and, again, files can pop up in the search results of random strangers.
Even if a service has protection, you need to turn security settings up to the max. People often sign up, upload data to the cloud, and forget about it. But passwords can leak. One hackers even stole passwords from Dropbox, not to mention smaller services.
What to do: Choose a reliable file-sharing service that supports two-factor authentication. Once you put data in the cloud, do not forget about it, and if you’re no longer using a file for work, delete it. Settle on one service for sharing files; using more than one invites confusion.
Project-management environments
Overall, these platforms allow workflow participants to communicate, share files, and systematize projects. If you use one to discuss business strategies or transfer files, it is important to know not only who can see them today, but also who might be able to later. Some cloud platforms make everything visible to everyone by default. Users can hide items, but odds are they won’t remember to 100% of the time; the default usually stands. What’s more, if someone gets access to a project, it is likely they will gain access to the entire project history, which is not always desirable.
Companies often grant access to such environments to contractors or freelancers, who may be working for you today and for a competitor tomorrow. Not to mention dismissed employees, who might have time to download an archive before you revoke their permissions.
What to do: Regulate project access rights, restricting those rights to work-related files only, for all parties. Use separate communication environments for employees and external people (contractors, customers). And do not forget to revoke access for former employees and freelancers promptly.
Additional tips
Remember that all services may have vulnerabilities (which might be undiscovered when you start working with them). In addition, many services have client apps with their own problems. Therefore, we recommend that you stick to the following principles:
Before you start working with a service, carefully study its settings and data processing rules, as well as read how people have reviewed it in the context of security.
Your dedicated IT expert or team, if you have one, must clearly understand what services you use, how they are configured, and who is handling their administration.
If you have no dedicated specialist, appoint a responsible party for each service to ensure that the client app is updated promptly any time a vulnerability is found, that passwords are changed in the event of a leak, and that access rights are issued and revoked as and when required.
Any service used to share a link or file can potentially be a malware distribution channel. Therefore, every device on which these tools are used needs a reliable security solution.
What’s the solution?
With Kaspersky Security for Microsoft Office 365, your company can protect Exchange Online, OneDrive files, SharePoint files, and Teams files against malware, phishing, spam, and other threats.
Click here to view the full datasheet, or watch the short video below.
Want to find out more?
As Kaspersky Gold 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.
Although it may be tempting to think that with data in the cloud your business isn’t susceptible to data loss, it’s still vital to add an additional security layer to protect email from spam, phishing, ransomware and other advanced cyber threats. In fact, nowadays malware is usually sent via email and hosted on cloud storage platforms.
Protecting even a cloud-oriented business from known and unknown threats is therefore critical in order to instantly stop the spread of malicious software, phishing, ransomware, spam and business email compromise (BEC) – and best of all requires no high-tech skills.
What’s the solution?
With Kaspersky Security for Microsoft Office 365, your company can protect Exchange Online, OneDrive files, SharePoint files, and Teams files against malware, phishing, spam, and other threats.
Make use of the most sophisticated technologies for your security and at the same time enjoy a quick start thanks to predefined policies and auto configuration.
Get a 6 month FREE trial!
To support remote working in this challenging time, we’re offering 6 months’ FREE protection with the very latest version of Kaspersky Security for Microsoft Office 365. This extends protection for SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams, securing all collaboration and messaging channels within Microsoft Office 365.
Kaspersky Security for Microsoft Office 365 uses advanced heuristics, machine learning and other next-generation technologies to protect your communication and collaboration processes from ransomware, malicious attachments, spam, phishing (including Business Email Compromise) and unknown threats.
Sign up NOW for a FREE 6-month license and take protecting remote workers off your to-do list.
Click here to view the full datasheet, or watch the short video below.
Want to find out more?
As Kaspersky Gold 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.
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.
Using Office 365 for your business productivity tools certainly has many advantages; easy, user-friendly accessibility from anywhere and at anytime, simplified email access, and reduced costs of business operations and management.
However, the migration and use of Office 365 isn’t without security risks. In this article we look at 5 of those risks, and how your organisation can get best in class protection from ourselves and Barracuda solutions.
1) Defend your Office 365 environment against email-borne threats
Barracuda Essentials for Office 365 stops spam, viruses, and known malware using signature-matching that leverages Barracuda’s vast global threat intelligence system, which gathers real-time threat data from millions of collection points around the world. It also includes a subscription to Barracuda Advanced Threat Protection—a cloud-based service that uses a multilayered architecture with a CPU-emulation sandbox to detect and block new (zero-day) and advanced, evasive threats before they touch your deployment.
2) Prevent data loss and theft
Outbound email filtering protects sensitive data against accidental or deliberate leaking. You can define keywords to look for, along with specific types of data (social-security and credit-card numbers, for example). And if your users have inadvertently allowed their systems to be used for botnet spam, Essentials ensures that outgoing spam and viruses are blocked.
Sensitive emails can be manually marked for encryption, or you can set up rules to automatically encrypt emails based on the sender, content, and other criteria. Your Office 365 emails are sent to the Barracuda Message Center for 256-bit encryption in the cloud. They remain encrypted via Transport Layer Security (TLS) until they reach the intended recipients.
3) Discover latent threats in your mailboxes
The email files stored in your Office 365 environment almost certainly include latent threats—malicious URLs and attachments that are just waiting for a single distracted click to launch an attack on your network. Given the volume and variety of threat-bearing emails, it’s not realistic to consider a manual approach to finding and deleting them all.
The Barracuda Email Threat Scanner is a cloud-based service available to anyone, at no charge. It scans your Office 365 email folders using advanced analytic techniques. It then delivers a report that details all the latent threats, including risk levels, affected users, and more. The information not only lets you clear out the latent threats in your environment; it also gives you the insights you need to adjust or improve your email security policies and strategies to reduce the chance of more malicious email getting into your system.
4) Don’t fall victim to phishing, brand hijacking, and domain fraud
The most sophisticated email-based attacks are the ones that personal. Attackers convincingly impersonate legitimate businesses, colleagues and even customers to obtain sensitive data and money. Barracuda Sentinel uses artificial intelligence engine to add real-time defense from email-based fraud.
Barracuda Sentinel automatically learns the unique communication patterns of each individual organisation. It uses this knowledge to find anomalous signals in the attributes of the incoming message’s metadata and content. It also adds DMARC (Domain-Based Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance) to track potentially sensitive emails being sent from your organisation.
5) Turn employees into a line of defence against phishing attacks
Phishing attacks are more convincing than ever, and they can be difficult to spot. To complicate matters, the attackers are targeting unsecured personal mail accounts more than ever. As a last line of defence, employees need to get better at spotting socially engineered spear phishing attacks.
Barracuda PhishLine provides leading-edge user awareness training to counter sophisticated phishing and socially engineered spear phishing attacks. PhishLine helps your users sharpen their anti-phishing skills with advanced phishing simulations along with end-user testing, reporting, and comprehensive metrics that let you take prompt and meaningful action against threats.
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.
No sector has felt the pressure of digital transformation more than financial services. New and emerging technologies fueled by huge private equity investments are challenging centuries-old business models, and existing businesses are rushing to keep up. In our research into digital transformation, a third of financial services executives felt their industry will be disrupted by new entrants (significantly higher than other industries we looked at).
Whether you’re a large, established enterprise, or a small FinTech challenger looking to disrupt the industry, there are three things that your business needs to be able to do effectively: access and interpret data in real time, create agile and collaborative teams, and stay on top of rapidly-changing regulatory compliance. The companies that can do these three things well stand a much better chance of surviving and thriving in a digitally transformed world.
Data is the new currency:
The proliferation of mobile devices and cloud technology has brought about exponential growth in the amount of data we create – everything from an increase in the volume of mobile banking transactions, to the variety of customer service channels for insurance companies.
For many financial services companies, the data of a transaction is becoming as valuable as the pounds and pence themselves. Being able to access, make sense of and collaborate on that data in real-time on any device is essential. Microsoft Excel offers cutting-edge tools like Power Query to gather data and Power Pivot to model, analyze and transform it into meaningful information to make informed decisions. Add-on tool Power BI gives users the ability to pull in data from internal and external sources to build custom dashboards for a near anytime, anywhere view of the health of your business. Because it’s available as part of Office 365, firms of any size have access to powerful analytics capability of Excel.
Agility at the heart of transformation:
As financial services firms ramp up the products and services they offer to customers, the higher the expectations of those customers for quick answers to their questions. The whole industry is speeding up, as traditional, manual processes get replaced by faster and more sophisticated digital solutions. As a result, financial services companies must be able to access and collaborate on information better than they have before. Fortunately Office 365 provides a tightly integrated platform that builds powerful collaborative capabilities into these tools. In addition to file sharing in the cloud, teams can access, edit, manage and share files and data from any device using OneDrive, SharePoint or Skype for Business, and engage in enhanced coauthoring. Users can collaborate with the videoconferencing, messaging and content-sharing tools of Skype for Business. Files and people remain synced.
Compliance is Crucial:
As noted before, organisations are facing significant data overload due to exploding amounts of increasingly complex electronic data. Regulatory compliance is a crucial part of financial services, and it impacts every technology decision your company makes. But with the proliferation of data, it becomes increasingly difficult to make sure your decisions are compliant. Microsoft’s solutions can be invaluable in compliance.
Want to find out more?
As Microsoft Gold 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. This handy infographic from Microsoft also outlines succinctly how its solutions can assist your organisation’s GDPR needs.
Small and Medium Enterprises accounted for 99%* of all businesses in the UK in recent years, with 76%* of those only employing the owner. With increased pressure to deliver a top quality (often immediate) service, the people at the top already have a lot of hats to wear.
Until someone invents a time machine that allows more than 24 hours in any one day, passion and hard work only get you so far. That’s why successful businesses are turning to tech to boost productivity and improve competitiveness – and Complete IT Systems can make the transition even smoother for you.
Make sure you do…before your competitors do!
Base decisions on accurate data
It sounds obvious, but it’s not easy. Entrepreneurs make a lot of good but gut-based decisions. As your business grows, however, so does the need to shift decision-making to base it on solid data.
Fortunately, technology and cloud services can help you turn unfiltered data into useful insights. Free tools such as Microsoft Power BI turns raw data into rich visuals that can help you spot trends, and can pull in data directly from many of today’s popular cloud apps. This can help you understand your market properly and, when it comes to expanding or diversifying, not make assumptions that you’ll later regret.
Maximise your billable time
Audio and web conferencing tools are becoming more sophisticated, making it more acceptable to use apps like Skype for Business to stay in touch with clients without having to travel for face-to-face meetings. That travel time can be turned into productive work that is better for your clients and their customer experience.
Get out from behind your desk
A critical capability for today’s businesses is the need to stay productive away from your desk. The ability to quickly respond to emails, update and share documents and manage calendars wherever, whenever is a game changer for many small businesses.
Technology such as Office 365 gives businesses the freedom to work in whatever way is best for them, while remaining connected to their customers who expect fast and highly digital interactions. It also makes it easier to be part of company-wide conversations. Team chat tools such as Microsoft Teams keep everyone in the loop via the same team workspace – from sales people out in the field to the people responsible for the yes/no decisions. Using virtual workspaces can also help you free up physical desk space, and office overheads too, both of which can stifle growth in the early stages of establishing a business.
Trouble-free transformation
Transformation does not have to equal business disruption and change management challenges. Thanks to the cloud, IT that was formerly the domain of large company budgets is now accessible for SMEs.
Moving to the cloud also cuts the reliance on your own servers, putting you in a better position for backing up data and disaster recovery. A power outage at one of your locations or a stolen laptop no longer means a critical loss of business or security. In the long run, this doesn’t just save money it also improves reliability.
Learn from what they wish they knew
Technology is a great business enabler, whatever your size or maturity. Are you taking advantage of the latest tech innovations? Staying as connected to your customers as your competitors?
As Microsoft Gold 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.
In the era of 
from anywhere and at anytime, simplified email access, and reduced costs of business operations and management.
