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By the DynaSis Team

Every day, small and midsized business (SMB) owners are bombarded with seemingly conflicting messages regarding how IT solutions can help them best run their businesses. With so many options to consider regarding corporate security, productivity and cost efficiency, it is not surprising that some of them stick their heads in the sand and do nothing.

Unfortunately, with SMBs becoming favorite targets for cyber attackers, and with corporate competition increasingly fierce, that is the worst possible way to operate. Here’s one example:

A business owner has been operating with a “break-fix” mentality, which means he or she only makes technology purchases when something breaks. This is a reactive operating strategy, but many business owners take this path because they believe they cannot find the time or budget to manage their technology proactively.

This approach has always been financially inefficient and detrimental to productivity, and DynaSis has long recommended that business leaders team with a knowledgeable, trustworthy IT consulting partner, such as a managed services provider or an IT services firm, to help them create and implement a technology roadmap that includes staged upgrades and improvements.

Today, however, the break-fix approach has become more than inefficient. Outdated, network-connected equipment, such as networked printers, likely has no built-in security protections. Such machines are more likely to be operating with open Internet connections, and hackers know that. Furthermore, competitiveness in today’s market relies on providing workers with modern technology. Organizations that persist with the break-fix model invariably fall behind.

In other words, making smart, planned technology improvements helps organizations foster productivity, security, cost efficiency and competitiveness—not to mention employee satisfaction. The question then becomes: how does the business owner know which improvements are smart?

To help our readers, we have prepared a chart of technology Do’s and Don’ts, in terms of best practices. The list only scratches the surface, but it’s a good place to start.

Choosing the Right Technology

These are just a few of many examples where smart technology choices are beneficial to your company, its personnel and its bottom line. If your technology environment is inadequate or outdated, your employees cannot achieve their missions, and customers may perceive your physical space—and your firm—as dated. Similarly, if your approach is too lenient, you could be throwing away money, productivity and security. A knowledgeable, expert IT support company can help you evaluate your options, minimize your risk and keep your equipment operating in peak condition.

Selection of an IT outsourcing company is a very important business decision. For almost a quarter century, Atlanta’s small to mid-sized businesses have relied on DynaSis’ for managed IT services, internet security, and 24 x 7 x 365 helpdesk support. Today, with cybercrime becoming an ever-increasing threat, DynaSis has become an industry leader in network protection and ransomware prevention. Please take a tour through our website at www.DynaSis.com or speak with a technical expert at 678.218.1769.

By the DynaSis Team

With bad news about cybercrime appearing daily, many small and midsized business (SMB) owners may be wondering, “How vulnerable am I?” After all, most of the news accounts of data breaches and other attacks relate to major companies, governmental entities, and other very large targets.

Unfortunately, the reason SMBs aren’t making headlines is because they don’t make great news, not because they aren’t favored targets. A quick Internet search will turn up dozens of stories about the vulnerability of SMBs, as a group. In 2011, Symantec’s annual Internet Security Threat Report found that companies with fewer than 250 employees constituted 18 percent of targeted attacks. In the 2016 report, that figured had risen to 43 percent, with SMBs being the most heavily targeted group.

Why are SMBs so attractive? Major corporations have big security budgets, and they can afford to implement the latest techniques to protect their networks. Many have teams of security specialists whose primary tasks are to keep cybercriminals at bay. SMBs don’t have these types of resources, and hackers know that.

Nevertheless, the vulnerability of SMBs wouldn’t be enough, by itself, to make them targets. If hackers had to expend days, or even hours, finding and attacking a vulnerable SMB in exchange for a handful of proprietary information, they wouldn’t do it. Fortunately for the hackers, they don’t need to.

An entire ecosystem of cybercrime tools now exists, and many of them are freely available. Hackers have also learned they can turn groups of vulnerable systems into “botnets.” Here, multiple computing devices are interconnected and used to scan the Internet, looking for compromised websites to hijack, open corporate network connections to infiltrate, and other inadequately protected resources. Making matters worse, cybercriminals continue developing new attack tools and approaches, and even large organizations have a hard time keeping up.

For SMBs, becoming a victim at some point is a near certainty. In fact, most experts no longer counsel organizations that they can completely prevent a breach. Rather, the goal is to mitigate the damage when one happens.

Fortunately, it is neither expensive nor complicated to secure your firm and its resources and substantially reduce your odds of attack. It is also possible to implement automated mechanisms that will detect penetration and stop it, quickly. However, these tools are sophisticated and it is usually neither practical nor cost effective for in-house IT support teams to manage them.

For most SMBs, contracting with a managed services provider or an IT solutions firm is the most effective way of implementing and managing stringent IT security. However, not all IT consulting or IT support companies are created equal. Some are more security focused than others, with certified professionals and the latest technologies at their disposal.

To help organizations better understand cyber security and the considerations for hiring outside IT security assistance, DynaSis has developed two white papers: Cyber-Security 2016 and Managed IT Security. Both are complimentary downloads on our site. In future blogs, we will drill down into greater detail about cyber security, so stay tuned!

Selection of an IT outsourcing company is a very important business decision. For almost a quarter century, Atlanta’s small to mid-sized businesses have relied on DynaSis’ for managed IT services, internet security, and 24 x 7 x 365 helpdesk support. Today, with cybercrime becoming an ever-increasing threat, DynaSis has become an industry leader in network protection and ransomware prevention. Please take a tour through our website at www.DynaSis.com or speak with a technical expert at 678.218.1769.

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By the DynaSis Team

In today’s IT-driven business world, networks have become the arteries that keep information pumping through a company. Yet, the technology of the networks themselves—what makes them operate most efficiently—is still a mystery to most people who use them. The good news is that there are now monitoring tools that can tunnel through networks, pinpoint their issues and often resolve them without human involvement.

Unfortunately, many companies still don’t use them. A study of 547 US and European-based network and security operations professionals found that 45 percent of IT staffs monitor network and application performance manually, instead of implementing network monitoring tools. As a result:

This isn’t surprising, because networks are incredibly complex. They are webs of network hardware—firewalls and routers, for example, connected to dozens (if not hundreds) of endpoint devices, from desktop PCs and tablets to printers.

Furthermore, network hardware has become so adept at resolving or bypassing conflicts and other glitches that a few problems might not cause an outage. The issues mount until an outage occurs, at which time IT support staff must unravel a tangled web.

Even the most dedicated IT services experts cannot manage the current generation of networks (and their systems) manually, which is why monitoring tools were developed. They are fast, efficient and inexpensive, and they work with virtually no load on the system. More important for network security, monitoring tools can pinpoint network dangers that are not technically faults, such as unauthorized devices operating on the network.

Minimizing System Slowdowns—and Outages

So, what do monitoring tools do to help with network stability? They identify and monitor all connections and their relevant information and activity. They can also automatically fix a variety of minor problems that impact network speeds—before they become major problems.

To help ensure business health, monitoring tools can identify issues that require manual intervention before they cause an outage. They provide ongoing alerts and reports that properly trained IT solutions professionals can act upon. Any number of elements can cause an outage or significant slowdown, from excessive connection attempts that might indicate malware is attempting to penetrate the corporate firewall to an improperly configured device that an employee slips onto the network. Some can be resolved automatically, but others require attention, and fast.

Of course, like any tool, monitoring tools are most helpful when they are used by a qualified professional. For this reason, business leaders often work with a managed services provider (also called a managed IT services firm)—even when they have an internal IT department—to deploy these tools and follow up on any issues they detect. Such assistance not only reduces the incidence of system downtime dramatically; it also has been proven to free business resources, fostering innovation and a greater competitive edge.

DynaSis has been Atlanta’s premier IT support services provider for more than 23 years. As an IT company working with small to midsized businesses (10 to 150+ users), DynaSis has developed a unique 12-layer approach to network threat protection, ransomware prevention and crypto virus threat elimination. The DynaSis Business Cloud functions through a highly secure environment with full real-time data backup. Please contact us at 678.218.1769 or visit our website at www.DynaSis.com.

By the DynaSis Team

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IT consultants for many firms, whether they promote themselves as IT support companies or managed service providers, will tell you they are going to “monitor and manage” your systems and/or network. Others may say they specialize in “network and systems administration.” As a business owner seeking the most protection for your IT systems—and value for your investment—you likely wonder, what does this mean? Are all these types of services the same? How do they protect me and my company?

These are important questions you should ask of any current or prospective IT provider. To help you evaluate the answers you receive, here is some background.

From a generic perspective, network and system monitoring and management means keeping an eye on your network (and potentially its devices) and your servers or other IT hardware, to enable intervention before or after problems arise. Network and systems administration, generically, means the same thing, although some providers who “administer” do not “monitor.”

For a reactive IT solutions provider, this could mean looking at weekly or monthly logs (reports) of system “error codes” to see if anything might be going wrong. If the provider notes any obvious problems, they might notify the customer and ask if they want follow up (often for an additional fee). Alternately, they might not report the aberration but instead will note it, in case problems occur down the road. Neither of these approaches is cost effective in the long-run, and they also don’t promote system stability.

A proactive managed IT services firm, on the other hand, will likely provide remote monitoring. The service will scan the network and systems for problems, analyzing traffic and other information using advanced processes to identify signs of impending trouble. It will also create alerts for changing conditions, such as the need for system updates. The IT provider’s staff will have access to real-time performance data and can intervene to troubleshoot, respond to alerts and more, which helps to avert serious trouble before it occurs. (We call this issue avoidance.)

Proactive versus reactive IT service is an important distinction, as the examples above show. Some IT providers follow what we call a “break-fix” model—“If it breaks, we will come fix it.” Firms like this are at the far end of the reactive spectrum. They rarely have the ability to perform any automated monitoring or proactive troubleshooting and issue avoidance. Providers such as these may try to minimize the value of proactive services, asserting they are not worth the expense. Some will even mislead potential customers with obscure service descriptions.

In our experience, proactive network and system monitoring can dramatically increase system uptime, more than paying for itself in productivity gains. For small and midsized businesses hoping to grow and thrive, it provides another benefit. Per a study conducted by IT automation firm Kaseya, using remote, automated monitoring tools for both routine tasks and problem avoidance enables personnel to spend more time on strategic projects that drive productivity—and the success of the business.

DynaSis has been providing managed IT support services to Metro Atlanta’s small to midsized businesses since 1992. We provide Availability – making sure your network is up and running; Mobility – allowing your employees world-wide access to your network; and Security – as an Internet security company, we resolve “issues” before they grow into problems. If you want to learn more, please visit www.DynaSis.com, or call us at 678.218.1769.

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By the DynaSis Team

Of the many sources of organizational risk that business leaders envision, printers likely aren’t one of them. Admittedly, one could run out of paper or toner/ink right before printing a major presentation for a customer. But other than that, how much risk can a printer pose? In today’s connected environment, the answer is “a lot.”

If your printers are networked, which means employees can send jobs to them from their desks or devices, then your printer is tied in with your network, and anyone who can access your printer can access your network. If you are thinking, “but my printer isn’t connected to the Internet, so how could someone gain access?” think again.

If your personnel connect to the Internet, and they connect to your printers, then the two are tied together. Furthermore, some printers automatically send and receive information, such as driver updates, across the Internet without anyone’s knowledge. That creates an additional layer of vulnerability.

Another way your printer can expose you to risk is through storage. Do your printers have the ability to store jobs for later printing? If so, they can (and likely do) retain information after the fact. Most printers have a “cache” for storing information, if not a designated hard drive, and unless someone clears it, the information is there for the taking.

Even assuming no one steals data from the printer while it is at your office, what happens when you sell or trade the printer? Even if the drives and caches are wiped, in some cases it is possible to lift data images off drums and other printer components.

Protecting your printing transmissions and data is beyond the scope of this article, but we can refer you to a few good tips. Rather, our objective here is bigger. Your office printer is a concern, but it is just one example of how “risks” are all around business owners today, often in the most unexpected places. Savvy cybercriminals know this, and they are learning how to penetrate companies in odd ways, such as through a printer-driver update link that may not be detected by the “average” firewall.

We are not suggesting that business owners be cognizant of all these risks, themselves. We’re not even suggesting that they should take action to avoid all of them. Rather, business owners must be keenly aware that business risks can be anywhere and everywhere, and they must take prudent, considered action as risk relates to technology. That means:

To do anything less is to admit defeat. In that case, we recommend the business owner start planning an exit strategy, because that’s what he or she will need, next.

DynaSis has been Atlanta’s premier IT support services provider for more than 23 years. As an IT company working with small to midsized businesses (10 to 150+ users), DynaSis has developed a unique 12-layer approach to network threat protection, ransomware prevention and crypto virus threat elimination. The DynaSis Business Cloud functions through a highly secure environment with full real-time data backup. Please contact us at 678.218.1769 or visit our website at www.DynaSis.com.

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By the DynaSis Team

We’ve talked about BYOD (bring your own device) several times here, but it’s always been mostly from the technology perspective. This week, we’ll offer a few suggestions that also address what your employees need to know about using their devices. These are all ideas we recommend you integrate into your own corporate policies.

As we’ve discussed before, many employees show little compunction about sneaking onto corporate networks with personal devices, whether you allow them to or not. It makes no sense for companies to fight the BYOD trend any longer. Beyond adopting best practices such as mobile device management, having a straightforward discussion with workers will go a long way towards preventing trouble with BYOD.

1. Be Crystal Clear. Make it clear what employees are and are not authorized to do. For example, don’t assume they know they will not be reimbursed if they upgrade their plan, purchase more data and/or add international dialing or data when they go out of the country. If you won’t pay for these add-ons, tell them so. Don’t get caught between keeping a key employee happy and footing a big bill.

2. Establish Barriers. Create “clearance levels” for different pools of company data and restrict the most sensitive information to workers that really need access. (Restricting data behind a cloud-based portal is a good solution; controlling access is an even better one.) Notify all personnel of the procedures and remind them that not following policy puts the business and their jobs at risk. New surveys show that consumers absolutely blame corporations for data breaches and expect them to pay for damage they do. Don’t accidentally expose your firm to litigation by taking a slack attitude towards data access.

3. Enable “Lock and Wipe” Features. The best corporate “portal” solutions wipe all traces of the data from the device after each work session ends. Nevertheless, corporate data may sneak onto personal devices, often when workers forward emails or text corporate data to themselves for the sake of convenience. Be sure your mobile device management platform has remote lock and wipe features in case a phone goes missing. Reinforce to personnel the importance of reporting a missing phone promptly rather than holding the information in hopes of finding the device.

4. Reward a Job Well Done. Studies show that employees will work extra hours when you permit them to use personal devices at work. That’s great, but you should reward this behavior by compensating hourly employees for documented work that takes place outside the office. To do otherwise sets you up for a possible Department of Labor violation and penalties.

5. Don’t Fight Social Media. Your personnel are going to check Facebook or other social platforms during the work day. It’s a fact of life. So, ensure that all corporate content is sufficiently protected by encryption and anti-malware software. In lieu of pay, consider establishing a social media policy that trades on-the-job social media “comp” time for work done after hours (see number 3). Isn’t it better for workers to be given a few minutes a day to check Facebook rather than to have them do it without your consent?

6. Respect Worker Privacy. Speaking of social media, under no circumstances should you ever require workers to give you social media passwords―or passwords that protect any personal data. Your goal is to protect your data and intellectual assets, not to snoop into theirs. To do otherwise could set you up for a lawsuit.

Using BYOD blurs the lines between personal and corporate life. It’s your job to redraw them clearly. To learn more about some of the solutions we have mentioned here (all of which DynaSis offers), fill out our inquiry form or give us a call at (770) 569-4600.

The DynaSis Team

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If you’ve ever wanted to see a plethora of stats about email, in a single place, then we have found the site for you. It’s called Email Monday and the marketing expert who runs it updates it each week. When we checked it recently, we noticed some statistics that are very pertinent to small and medium business (SMB) owners.

The foremost statistic is that 47% of email is read on a mobile client compared to 28% on a desktop client, as of March 2014. This is actually a few points lower than a peak that occurred in November-December 2013, but we ascribe this number to holiday shopping, vacations, and other out-of-office situations that occur during this period.

More importantly, the number is up, year over year (mobile email usage was only 15% in the first quarter of 2011), and webmail has climbed, as well, to 25% of all opens. In other words, only 28% of email is now being read on a desktop computer. That’s an important statistic for SMBs—especially those that do not have a secure mobile solution in place for their employees. (More about this in a minute.)

Another interesting stat is that 79% of smartphone users rely on their device for reading email—a higher percentage than those who use it for making phone calls. What’s the takeaway on these statistics? We believe it to be that whether or not you have defined and implemented a corporate email policy, your employees are likely checking corporate email on their smartphones. They are also likely checking personal email on these devices while at the office—across your Wi-Fi network.

Without effective security and access control in place at your firm, in the form of both user policies and technology-based monitoring, you and your employees could be putting your corporate assets at risk.

We didn’t plan to talk about security two weeks in a row, but we decided to do it because things are pretty scary out there, these days. Furthermore, an alarming number of SMBs (the companies we are dedicated to protecting) are not taking proper precautions. Mobility is absolutely critical to business productivity, as these numbers underscore, but without security in tandem with it, the negative impacts can wipe out those benefits.

DynaSis certified professionals can perform an affordable, non-intrusive network assessment that will determine whether or not your company is vulnerable, and then help you develop a roadmap to fix any issues they find. (We find problems on the vast majority of networks we examine—even those “protected” by other firm’s solutions.)

In case you are not convinced yet, we’ll leave you with one more interesting statistic. Android users spend far more time perusing email on their devices than do iPhone users. And, since Android is a far more vulnerable device platform, we can project what that means to your corporate security.

If you haven’t had your corporate defenses examined recently (or ever), or if you have worked with us in the past but are not protected by our end-to-end desktop and device security solution, we hope you will fill out our inquiry form or give us a call at 678.218.1769.

By the DynaSis Team

[featured_image] In conjunction with the kickoff of National Small Business Week, Time Warner announced the results of its most recent survey about small business technology trends. The survey results were illuminating, to say the least, and we thought you might find them interesting. Despite interest in cloud technologies, mobile productivity and other hot technologies, small business owners put three more “basic” needs at the top of the list: fast, reliable Internet access, clear, reliable phone service, and a reliable Wi-Fi network at their businesses.

Among survey respondents, 80% indicated that their customers expect them to offer free Wi-Fi at their locations, yet only 43% of businesses offer it. These business owners may recognize that allowing customers and guests to roam onto the company network isn’t a safe practice. What they may not know is that setting up a parallel “guest” network isn’t difficult. Businesses that take this small step could increase their customer satisfaction.

Another interesting issue, especially with Microsoft’s recent end of support for its popular Windows XP operating system, was that 33% of small businesses have been negatively impacted by outdated technology. Furthermore, business owners recognize the advantages of up-to-date technology, with 73% stating it would give them easier/faster access to information and 57% projecting it would increase customer satisfaction.

Of those surveyed, 93% had performed at least some technology upgrades in the past five years. However, as we reported last week, the pace of technology itself makes such upgrade timeframes impractical.

This survey was conducted with primarily very small business owners (24 employees or fewer), and among larger businesses, the priorities shift somewhat. For 2014, research firm SMB Group found that the number one technology challenge for medium businesses would be data integration.

Firms in the 25-100 sector continue to adopt cloud technologies, but they often do not proceed in an integrated or cohesive fashion. As a result, they end up with disparate silos of information that are not accessible to all workers. SMB Group predicted that cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-premise integration would both take center stage for the remainder of 2014.

DynaSis technical experts can help companies achieve all these goals, whether they seek a guest network for their clients or want to deploy a unified data store to hold all of their digital business assets. We can also help companies adopt a fully cloud-based solution that gives all workers―on premise or mobile―access to data and applications, 24/7/365. To learn more, fill out our inquiry form or give us a call.

Two years ago, automotive, commercial and industrial lubricant supplier Halco Industries found a perfect IT support solution with DynaSis and Digital Veins, DynaSis’s proactive, 24/7/365 monitoring,  maintenance and support solution. This year, when Halco increased its office and conference space during a remodeling project, the firm called in DynaSis for help expanding its wireless network. The result has been increased productivity and satisfaction for on-site employees, outside salesmen and vendors, all at minimal cost.

A Growing Concern
In the two years since DynaSis came on board, Halco had grown its operation to 48 employees, and its reliance on the Internet had grown along with it. When the company’s lease expired, rather than moving to a larger building, Halco negotiated with the landlord to remodel the warehouse and use part of it for new offices and a second conference room. However, the firm’s current wireless network didn’t reach to those locations, so a reconfiguration was in order.

According to Halco Accounting Manager JoAnn Carney, the timing couldn’t have been better. “The existing wireless network already wasn’t getting it for us,” says Carney. “We have a lot of people on wireless, and we were always experiencing dropped signals.”

Carney called in a DynaSis IT Services team to explore the situation, and they recommended adding two SonicPoint wired access points, connecting to the SonicWall firewall device that DynaSis had installed earlier. The new access points would create a new network with greater range that would service both Halco employees and guests, with the two streams of traffic segregated to protect Halco’s servers.

The new network not only expanded coverage into the new offices and conference space; it also resolved the firm’s wireless overload problem. “They put one access point around a corner and another in the conference room. Since they put those in, we haven’t been dropping anything,” says Carney. “Everybody who works here could now get on the network at once, including the outside salesmen with their iPads, and we wouldn’t have any problems. That doesn’t happen often, but when it does, we would have a mass uproar if people could not connect.”

Untethered and Free to Work
During the same project, DynaSis installed a wireless projector—the Dell 4320—to make it easier for visiting salesmen and vendors to stream presentations from their mobile computers. Suspended from the ceiling, the projector supports both Wi-Fi and cabled connections. It also has a high lumen output, so it resolves an excess ambient light problem in the new conference room.

“We have 10 outside salesmen with iPads or laptops, and they don’t have a proper office,” says Carney. “A few of them come in every day for a couple of hours, getting mail; printing things. They use the conference room as their office, and also to make presentations. Plus, we have vendors who want to make presentations.

“With the new wireless projector and network, it’s easier for our salesmen and vendors to give presentations. Last week, the sales manager had a two-day hurrah, and there were eight people in and out of the office for two days straight, giving presentations. Everything worked perfectly.”

Equally importantly, Carney notes, is the support for mobile devices they have gained with the new wireless network. “We all have smartphones. I am around this building, all over the place, and I love that I now have freedom to move throughout the building. My office is at the end of the hall, and in the old days, the wireless would drop frequently because of the location.

“Now, I get email anywhere I go. I could use the phone’s 3G wireless, but this is so much faster. As soon as I cross the threshold in the morning, I hear a beep-beep reminding me to log in and retrieve my email over the wireless network.”

Problem Solved
Carney says they’ve only had one problem with the new network—right after the installation—and DynaSis came out to fix it promptly. “The wireless didn’t seem to be any better, but when we’d talk to them, it would be working,” she says. “I told them, ‘trust me, something is wrong with it. You just have to come out.’ They came right away, they spent many hours here figuring out what was wrong and they fixed it.”

Carney says those are two of the things she loves about working with DynaSis—they trust her when she says something is wrong, and they work on problems until they’re resolved. “Our last company was notorious – they would close a ticket and say we were fine when we weren’t,” says Carney.

“DynaSis is very good,” Carney concludes. “We don’t have an IT person here, and I don’t speak the language. They have to talk to me like I am a 3-year old.” She also praises DynaSis’s user-driven support system. “Every employee can contact DynaSis from their workstation and open their own ticket. People aren’t calling me and telling me they have a problem. They just open a ticket and the DynaSis support folks take care of it.”

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