Recent Blog Posts

Let?s explore the strategy that goes into unified communications (commonly known as UC for short), and the benefits your business could see from it. What are Unified Communications? Unified communications refers to the amalgamation of different collaborative tools into a single platform, providing your business with a few significant benefits: Productivity can improve, with your employees able to communicate through a wide variety of tools on an assortment of devices, as there will be nothing in the way to keep your team from collaborating and being productive as a result. Your users? experience can be enhanced, by giving them better tools to collaborate with, reducing the likelihood of employee turnover. Costs can be reduced, thanks to the cost savings that the cloud (where UC solutions are hosted) facilitates, helping organizations more effectively budget their IT. These features are exceptionally useful for the business that puts Unified Communications in place?although we haven?t yet discussed one of the most impressive benefits that UC solutions can bring: mobility. Unified Solutions Can Keep Your Team in Touch, Wherever They?re Working UC solutions, as a cloud-delivered option, are available both in and out of the traditional office space. This means that workplaces of all kinds?including those that require lots of time ?in the field??can greatly benefit from these tools. Initially, UC applications were largely confined to the office. However, more and more UC options are now designed to be used by frontline workers, bringing technology out of the office and benefitting a wider scope of business processes. With this shift, businesses of various kinds can accomplish more for their businesses, in terms of both efficiency and efficacy. Interested in Implementing Unified Communications for Your Team Members? Reach out to our team to learn more about how we can help. Call (603) 889-0800 today.

Ransomware operates by playing a high-level game of keep-away. By applying military-grade encryption to the data on a targeted device, ransomware renders its victims powerless to use this data until a ransom is paid. Only after the demanded funds have changed hands will an attacker allegedly provide the necessary keys to decrypt the data? but whether or not they bother is another question entirely. On the surface, it sounds like a simple problem to solve?the ransom could arguably be just another cost of doing business, right? Wrong. The demanded ransom is typically beyond the means of a small business by multiple decimal points, and again, there is no guarantee that your data will be restored. By paying, you could easily be giving the person responsible for halting your operations the rest of your business’ resources. This is precisely why it is best practice to never pay the ransom? something that hackers make more and more challenging. Some have begun to implement a method called “double-extortion.” In addition to demanding a ransom to decrypt the data, an attacker will then demand that they be paid again, or else they’ll leak a business’ data online. This puts an impacted business between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, not paying could end quite badly for their organization, but on the other, they still have no guarantee the hacker will stay true to their word and they’ll be funding later attacks and improvements to them. It also needs to be said that ransomware introduces a mess of challenges where compliance is concerned. It’s a safe assumption that a lot of your stored data is sensitive in some way, so if it winds up leaked, you could be facing some regulatory fines for breaking compliance. At the end of the day, the best way to protect your business from ransomware is to not be infected in the first place. Along with user education, advanced security measures and multi-factor authentication are useful ways to prevent infection. We can help you put these protections in place. Call (603) 889-0800 to learn more.

With remote monitoring and management tools, you can make your technology solutions a bit more predictable, as you can spot telltale signs of issues long before they impact your business? operations. By monitoring your infrastructure, you can effectively prevent issues from escalating into major, wasteful, and time-consuming problems, like downtime. Large enterprises do this by investing in expensive remote monitoring and management tools, but these capabilities (and the staff to maintain them) are usually out of the scope for smaller organizations. We?ve invested in these tools and work with small businesses, sort of as an outsourced IT department for them.  It used to be the case that small businesses struggled with technology because of their limited capacity to take care of these resources, either due to a lack of trained technicians or a lack of funding. This is simply not the case any longer. All businesses, regardless of size, no longer have an excuse to pass on technology management. This is thanks to outsourcing through a managed service provider. Remote monitoring and management can be done without the physical barriers that plague the traditional office, and it can be done without being on-site at all. If you experience an oddity with your technology, for example, there wouldn?t necessarily need to be a trip to the office to figure things out. Depending on the issue, it can potentially be resolved remotely in a quick and easy fashion. By far the biggest benefit of implementing remote monitoring and management tools is that it saves your business large sums of capital in the long run. Our state-of-the-art RMM tools help you address issues before they become even larger, and the downtime associated with these large problems can be a real budget-breaker. If you can identify and resolve problems before they grow out of control, you can keep your business functioning properly and practically eliminate downtime and its costs. If your business struggles with technology management, White Mountain IT Services can help with our RMM tools. You?ll never have to worry about technology management again. To learn more, reach out to us at (603) 889-0800.

Let’s explore how this may be changing in the near future. The Projections for the IoT With 127 new IoT devices connected to the Internet each second, it should come as no surprise that estimates place their numbers at around 75 billion in total by 2025. This means that there are plenty of new opportunities for a cybercriminal to find and exploit a vulnerability? both in commercial IoT devices and in the devices classified as the Industrial Internet of Things. There are already too many examples of how Internet-connected devices have been used to a hacker’s advantage. In 2017, the UK’s National Health Service was hobbled by a ransomware attack that affected, amongst other things, Internet-connected medical equipment. Video doorbells often stream data without any protections, and other smart home devices have been found to store Wi-Fi passwords in a similar fashion.  As the IoT continues to grow, it only stands to reason that efforts to take advantage of such weaknesses will increase along with it. What Can Be Done to Secure the IoT? Fortunately, things are already in motion to help ensure the IoT is made to be more secure. For example, the signing of the Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020 in the US and the Australian government’s introduction of an IoT industry-specific voluntary code of practice shows that governments are starting to pay attention to the issues that the IoT has the potential to open up. However, this doesn’t mean that businesses can sit back and relax. On the contrary, there are a few things that a business can and should do to help mitigate IoT-based attacks: Encrypt Data There are relatively few IoT devices out there today that feature encryption as one of their standard security protocols. Implementing encryption on a network level makes it so that your data is effectively indecipherable while in transit, rendering it more or less worthless to the cybercriminal targeting it. Change Default Passwords on IoT Devices Of course, ALL default passwords should always be changed, but the IoT makes this an even more important practice for a business. Take the few moments required to come up with a more secure password than the device is equipped with initially. Use Devices from Security-Conscious Manufacturers One other way your business and your users can help make a change while protecting your own assets is to try to deal exclusively with devices manufactured by companies that take a security-first approach. Voting with your dollars can quickly make a change if enough people do it. Otherwise, it may be wiser to stick with the “dumb” option if it serves your needs just as well. There is little doubt that the IoT will have an increased presence in modern life in the years to come. Time will only tell if that presence is a secure one. In the meantime, you can trust us to help you ensure that your business is as secure as possible. Give us a call at (603) 889-0800 to find out what we can do for you and your operations.

It should be mentioned, first off, that monitoring employee activity is nothing new. Businesses have been monitoring their in-house networks since they gained the ability to do so. This is usually done not out of a need to spy on employees or guarantee productivity, but as a security means to make sure workers are not doing anything that puts the organization or its network at risk. However, this hasn?t stopped some employers from going too far with this practice, and there is some debate over what exactly ?too far? is. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a significant increase in both remote work and monitoring of employees while performing said remote work. Employers simply want to know how employees are using their time. For an example of how these numbers looked before the pandemic and during the pandemic, let?s take a look at research performed by Opinium. According to a survey of 2,400 employees, 32 percent of employees are being monitored at their jobs as of October. The numbers in April were 24 percent, showing a significant increase. Furthermore, according to HR departments, employee monitoring is far more prevalent than those numbers showcase. Respondents in HR and IT both indicated that monitoring is currently happening within their organizations at 69 percent and 63 percent respectively. So, it is safe to say that the majority of employees are being monitored in some way, whether they know it or not. This creates issues of trust and transparency within organizations, both of which can be hard to get over to work towards a common goal.  How you monitor your employees is none of our business, but we do think it is important that you are monitoring your network, especially to aid in network security. If you would rather take a hands-off approach to monitoring your network so that your employees don?t villainize you, then White Mountain IT Services can help by assisting you with monitoring services and solution implementation. We can discreetly keep an eye on your infrastructure and keep it safe, even from your own employees. To learn more about comprehensive our remote monitoring services, give us a call at (603) 889-0800.