A disgruntled ex-employee puts hate messages on your company social media channels. Your sales rep takes your customer contact data with them after they’re terminated. There’s an unauthorized withdrawal from your bank account. These are all scenarios that could happen if you’re not controlling employee access to corporate accounts and data.
It’s unfortunate when an employee has to be terminated but it happens. When it does, your IT team shouldn’t be the last to know about it. In fact, the IT department (or your IT support provider) should be involved as soon as possible, not just for terminations but when any employee leaves.
Has the way your people communicate changed compared to pre-pandemic times? If your answer is “yes” then it’s a good bet that it’s because you relied on Microsoft Teams to keep everyone connected when your employees went home to work. Lots of companies not only increased their use of Teams when they had remote workers, they discovered that they could pull a lot of their everyday activities into their Teams workspace.
As the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic recedes, some businesses are making moves to get workers back to the office. Clearly the importance of having a physical office has changed for those companies that discovered they could operate just as effectively with remote workers.
You’re working from home going about your business. You respond to an email that looks like it’s from one of your vendors. Their request for your login credentials for your line-of-business software is a little odd but you think they must have a good reason or else they wouldn’t ask.
More and more organizations are purchasing cyber insurance. Between 2019 and 2020 the market increased by 29.1% and this upward climb is projected to increase by 25% through 2026. (Statista) The impetus for this trend is due to requirements for cybersecurity accountability from customers and vendors, and the realization by business leaders that they need to take the threat of cyber attack more seriously than they ever have before.
Whether you’re entry-level or you have a few years of experience under your belt, a job on the help desk at a Managed Service Provider (MSP) can be a great springboard to a fulfilling IT career. The help desk (or service desk) is a place where IT professionals can develop problem-solving and critical thinking skills, as well as learn what customer service is all about as it relates to technology users.
Sometimes the simplest things that you can do to defend your organization against cyber-attack get neglected. Take keeping software and hardware up to date for example. When you use unsupported software or fail to apply security patches, you’re creating holes where cyber criminals can enter.
If you’re getting outsourced cybersecurity services from a managed IT service provider, you may have been presented with options for different tiers of service. If this surprised you, it may be because you didn’t expect to have choices. You do have choices, however, because cybersecurity is about risk management, and that responsibility ultimately rests on executives’ shoulders, as do decisions about allocating resources towards managing risks.
If you knew that spending a few thousand dollars would save you tens of thousands in the long run, would you spend the money? That’s how it goes with business process automation. It’s an investment that reaps a harvest of efficiency and cost savings over time but if you’ve never done it before it might take some effort to get the buy-in and resources to move forward.
