Fred Rappuhn, Author at NuTech Services LLC

Sep, 2020

There’s Scheduling, and Then There’s SMART Scheduling

A schedule has long been the tool of choice for businesses to uphold their productivity, despite the challenges that managing everyone’s schedule can often present. Fortunately, today’s cloud solutions provide a means to overcome these challenges. Let’s explore the idea of smart scheduling and how it can make your entire process so much simpler.

Understanding Smart Scheduling

These software solutions are commonly found in industries that are subject to a lot of outside influence and fluctuating demand due to a variety of factors, such as retail. Smart scheduling gives these businesses the capability to schedule their employees more effectively, using automation to simplify the process.

Having said that, the principles of smart scheduling can be applied to all industries if they are viewed as a process, rather than a technology. Not only can all industries apply these principles, they should, as all businesses must deal with numerous factors that impact their operations.

Looking at it in this light, smart scheduling effectively just boils down to consolidating your various circumstances and scheduling to accommodate them accordingly. It’s recognizing that certain times will have different demand levels, that some conditions will impact operations, and making the preparations to deal with them proactively.

Scheduling More Intelligently

Even if you don’t have a dedicated solution lined up for these purposes, there are some ways that you can embrace the concept of smart scheduling. Consider these strategies:

Bring Your Information Together—You should consolidate any available information that you have regarding your schedule and your business’ operations to make it easier for you to predict patterns and prepare for them. Understanding what priorities you have, and how much your employees have been available to accomplish, will assist you in scheduling your team more effectively.
Communicate—Communication is one of the most important factors when determining your success, and this goes for how much information your schedule provides. Give your employees context into their tasks to help empower their procedures and productivity.
Use a Scheduling Platform—Businesses have many options to assist them with their scheduling available, and not all of them need to be inherently “smart.” Finding one that works for your needs will bring considerable benefits to your business and its processes.

Regardless of the business solutions you need, NuTech Services is here to help you manage them. To learn more, reach out to our team by calling 810.230.9455.

Sep, 2020

Small Businesses Make Progress with Managed Services

For a lot of businesses, 2020 has seen some major challenges. Many SMBs feel like they are in a snow globe attached to a paint mixer that is always switched on. With all the problems laid out in front of them, many businesses have decided that in order to protect their business that they would subscribe to a strategy of proactivity. Let’s take a look at a couple of ways managed services help keep you ahead.

What is it to be Proactive?

It’s all about preventing issues and risk. Being proactive is simply action taken after a risk assessment. Many times, risk is inherent, so being proactive is just managing situations to keep risk at bay. It goes without saying that taking proactive steps, especially in business, can be some of the most effective strategies to get ahead. Why is this? It comes down to time.

When a person sees a problem and fixes the problem, the time that is spent fixing the problem is waste, especially when taking proactive action could eliminate the problem in the first place. Managed services are predicated on this very concept. The more you do to keep problems from presenting themselves, the more time there is to be productive. We measure this in uptime.

Downtime, the Business Killer

Your business isn’t Google. It isn’t Google in 2013. That was the year that Google went down for almost five hours. Imagine five hours without Google! It cost the company–in 2013–an estimated $545,000. Now, Google can afford that, but it just illustrates how expensive downtime can be. It can be problematic in several ways, including:

Customer frustration – Downtime is extremely problematic for your customer relationships. Not only does extended downtime flood your business with calls and messages, it also fosters distrust.
Staff frustration – For many small businesses, employees wear a couple different caps. One of those caps, that many workers would rather not wear, is that of a customer service representative. If someone on your production team can’t get at the resources they need to do their jobs, you are paying them to either be PR or janitorial staff. Either way, they tend to get impatient pretty quick when they can’t do what they were hired to do.
Exorbitant cost – The two previous examples fuel rising costs. If you are paying your employees and they aren’t producing anything tangible, you are losing money, period.

Limiting downtime is a priority for every well-run business, otherwise you are just throwing away money.

Proactive Services

At NuTech Services, we have a couple proactive solutions that can really benefit your business. They include:

Remote monitoring – By remotely monitoring your network and infrastructure, our expert technicians can see if there are inconsistencies, infiltrations, or irregularities that we can take care of before they become problematic. By staying ahead of hardware issues and monitoring for malware and other network-related issues, you avoid the downtime it takes to fix these issues when they come to a head.
Cloud computing – Another option is to take your computing infrastructure offsite. Cloud solutions often come with comprehensive management baked into the price so that your employees will have anytime, anywhere access to the data and applications they need.
Patch management – Software vulnerabilities can be exploited by hackers and cause significant devastation on your company’s network. By updating all of your software systems with the latest updates, you mitigate the risk that comes from running older versions of software.

Proactivity doesn’t just happen, you have to make it happen. If you would like to stare down some of the biggest risks to your technology and data, and improve your business’ uptime, call us today at 810.230.9455.

Sep, 2020

You Need to Be Asking These 4 Questions to Maximize Security

Today’s business has to prioritize its data security. There are endless examples of businesses that haven’t done enough. Some aren’t around anymore. To help you build a strategy, we’ve put together four questions that need to be asked to give you a chance to outwit and overcome the endless threats your company could run into online.

#1: Is security a priority when we build processes?

Your business has a way that it does what it does. Are those processes created with both physical security and cybersecurity in mind? The amount of threats your business is subject to is literally innumerable. Each day new threats are created and used to try and steal money and data from businesses just like yours. When building your business’ processes, the first consideration that isn’t “can I make money this way” has to be about how to secure your business from outside threats.

Some ways you can prioritize security is to train your staff on what threats look like when they come in, ensure that you prioritize access control and proper authentication procedures, and really make sure that your entire staff is educated about the importance in keeping you secure. Making sure that all transferred data is encrypted can also help.

#2: Who has access to my files?

When we talk about access control, we talk about limiting access to data. Not all members of your organization need access to the same data, after all. Doing your best to ensure that some of your most sensitive data is protected not just from people outside your organization, but also inside.

By enabling role-based access and adding in a multi-layered authentication procedure, the security of your organization’s data will be much improved. Another good practice is to keep logs and routinely audit both them and the other protections you put in place.

#3: How can encryption help my business?

Data in transit can be stolen. Data just sitting there in the open can be too. You will want to ensure that all of your most sensitive data is encrypted both when it’s at rest and when it’s being moved from one location to another.

Today the most popular forms of encryption are the Data Encryption Standard (DES) or the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Understanding the particulars of encryption may be complex, but knowing how to use it to better secure your business’ data is not.

#4: Is my security strategy working?

Obviously, the security that you put on your business isn’t plug and play. It needs to be properly configured to meet your business’ specific situation. The best way to get the most comprehensive security resources to protect your business’ network and data is to have knowledgeable consultants help you find the strategies and solutions that are right for you, implement them, and then routinely test them to ensure that they would stand up under pressure.

If you would like to start this conversation, call the IT experts at NuTech Services today at 810.230.9455.

Sep, 2020

How to Make the Most of Mobile Device Management

The concept of remote work is closely tied to mobility, which means that solutions and strategies that promote this mobility are particularly important for businesses to adopt if they are interested in benefiting from remote operations. Mobile device management is one such solution.

Let’s go over a few key practices to successfully using MDM to your business’ benefit.

What is Mobile Device Management?

Mobile device management is the application of software solutions that allow you to implement policies that control how users can access your business’ data. This enables your business to improve its data security while implementing a Bring Your Own Device policy.

If you are currently considering implementing an MDM solution, here are a few best practices to keep in mind as you make your selection:

Comprehensive Compatibility

Some people are fans of Android, while others will pick iOS whenever they have a choice. To successfully implement MDM, both platforms need to be supported. You should also be sure that your solution can differentiate between an employee-owned device and one that is property of your business and be able to adjust its policies accordingly.

Device Tracking and Management

On the off chance you have to let an employee go, you don’t want your BYOD strategy to leave you vulnerable to retribution. A good MDM solution will allow you to review what a device has access to, and to remotely revoke that access as necessary. As a bonus, these features make general device troubleshooting much simpler as well.

Security in Your Control

While your business’ security is obviously a priority for you, your team probably won’t think about it as seriously as you will… despite it largely being their responsibility. They might just assume that the chances of something happening are so low, they can cut a corner or two. Instead of convincing them that they’re mistaken, an MDM solution allows you to set the acceptable benchmarks for your security. This enables minimum password requirements, encryption, remote wiping capabilities, and other utilities.

Comprehensive Backup

If you’re allowing BYOD in your business, there’s a good chance that some of your business’ data is spread out amongst several employee devices. Should something happen to that device, you could easily lose this data. Protecting this data is as simple as backing it up to the cloud.

For more information about mobile device management, or any of our other IT services and support options, give NuTech Services a call at 810.230.9455.

Aug, 2020

What’s Next for Microsoft Windows?

It may be hard to believe but Windows 10 has been around for five years. It may not have reached the on-every-device OS Microsoft had planned, but it still can be found on over a billion devices worldwide. That’s pretty impressive. Today, we will be taking a look at Microsoft’s plans for Windows 10 and how it might just be the last build of Windows.

Windows 10

In Windows 10, Microsoft has built a complete and secure operating system. Users can do about anything they’d like inside of Windows 10. The platform was initially built to support three levels of devices, from smartphones to other mobile productivity machines, to your traditional productivity machines, your PCs. After Microsoft pulled the plug on their smartphone division, the subsequent changes they’ve made to the OS have been with the PC user in mind.

Microsoft had a solid strategy to get their Windows 10 software on as many devices as possible: they gave it away. For a year they provided any user that had Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 8.1 the ability to upgrade for free. Since then, it has been available as other versions of Windows have been, for digital download.

Windows-as-a-Service

Since the software giant has retired support for the hugely-popular Windows 7, and Windows 8.1 was kind of a flop, Windows 10 becomes the development priority for Microsoft. They seem to be extremely invested in the OS, hinting that it might very well be the last Windows title ever developed. Microsoft has made many huge changes to Windows 10 over the past five years and looks to continue to develop the software more as a service than a product.

Like many other software, Windows–or, Windows-as-a-Service, if you will–will continue to be one of the leading names in computing. It just won’t be replacing Windows 10 the way Windows 10 replaced Windows 8.1. In fact, Microsoft is now offering Azure-hosted Windows 10/Office 365 platforms for one monthly fee. In doing so it is changing the way that people access, and pay for their computing.

If you would like to know more about Windows 10, Microsoft 365 platforms, or any other way that business computing is innovating, call the IT professionals at NuTech Services today at 810.230.9455.

Aug, 2020

Artificial Intelligence Will Be Assisting Cybercriminals

To effectively manage the risk that your business is under due to cybercriminals and their activities, it is important to acknowledge what attacks your business may soon have to deal with. Due to the increased accessibility of artificial intelligence and related processes, we predict that cybercrimes will likely use AI to their advantage in the very near future.

We aren’t alone in believing so, either. A recent study examined twenty such AI-integrating cybercrimes to see where the biggest threats would lie.

Here, we’re looking at the results of this study to see what predictions can be made about the next 15 years where AI-enhanced crime is concerned. Here’s a sneak preview: Deepfakes (fake videos of celebrities and political figures) will be very believable, which is very bad.

The Process

To compile their study, researchers identified 20 threat categories from academic papers, current events, pop culture, and other media to establish how AI could be harnessed. These categories were then reviewed and ranked during a conference attended by subject matter experts from academia, law enforcement, government and defense, and the public sector. These deliberations resulted in a catalogue of potential AI-based threats, evaluated based on four considerations:

Expected harm to the victim, whether in terms of financial loss or loss of trust.
Profit that could be generated by the perpetrator, whether in terms of capital or some other motivation. This can often overlap with harm.
An attack’s achievability, as in how feasible it would be to commit the crime in terms of required expense, technical difficulty, and other assorted obstacles.
The attack’s defeatability, or how challenging it would be to overcome, prevent, or neuter.

Split amongst themselves, the group ranked the collection of threats to create a bell-curve distribution through q-sorting. Less-severe threats and attacks fell to the left, while the biggest dangers were organized to the right.

When the group came back together, their distributions were compiled to create their conclusive diagram.

How Artificial Intelligence Cooperates with Criminality

In and of itself, the concept of crime is a very diverse one. A crime could potentially be committed against assorted targets, for several different motivating reasons, and the impact that the crime has upon its victims could be just as assorted. Bringing AI to the party—either in practice or even as an idea—only introduces an additional variable.

Having said that, some crimes are much better suited to AI than others are. Sure, we have pretty advanced robotics at this point, but that doesn’t mean that using AI to create assault-and-battery-bots is a better option for a cybercriminal than a simple phishing attack would be. Not only is phishing considerably simpler to do, there are far more opportunities to profit from it. Unless there is a very specific purpose to a crime, AI seems most effective in the criminal sense when used repeatedly, on a wide scope.

This has also made cybercrime an all-but-legitimate industry. When data is just as valuable as any physical good, AI becomes a powerful tool for criminals, and a significant threat to the rest of us.

One of the authors of the study we are discussing, Professor Lewis Griffin of UCL Computer Science, put the importance of such endeavors as follows: “As the capabilities of AI-based technologies expand, so too has their potential for criminal exploitation. To adequately prepare for possible AI threats, we need to identify what these threats might be, and how they may impact our lives.”

The Results of the Study

When the conference had concluded, the assembly of experts had generated a bell curve that ranked 20 threats, breaking each down by describing the severity of the four considerations listed above—specifically, whether or not they were to a criminal’s benefit. Threats were grouped in the bell curve based on similar severity, and so the results neatly split into three categories:

Low Threats

As you might imagine, those crimes ranked as low threats suggested little value to the cybercriminal, creating little harm and bringing no profit while being difficult to pull off and easy to overcome. In ascending order, the conference ranked low threats as such:

1. Forgery
2. AI-assisted stalking and AI-authored fake reviews
3. Bias exploitation to manipulate online algorithms, burglar bots, and evading AI detection

(In case you were wondering, “burglar bots” referred to the practice of using small remote drones to assist with a physical break-in by stealing keys and the like.)

Medium Threats

Overall, these threats leveled themselves out. The considerations for most canceled each other out, generally providing no advantage or disadvantage to the cybercriminal. The threats included here were as follows:

4. Market bombing to manipulate financial markets through trade manipulation, tricking face recognition software, blocking essential online services through online eviction, and utilizing autonomous drones for smuggling and interfering with transport.
5. Learning-based cyberattacks (or an artificially intelligent distributed denial of service attack), fake AI sold in a snake oil misrepresented service, data poisoning by injecting false numbers, and hijacked military robots.

High Threats

Finally, we come to those AI-based attacks that the experts felt the most concerned about as sources of real damage. These columns broke down as such:

6. AI being used to author fake news, blackmail on a wide scale, and disrupting systems normally controlled by AI.
7. Tailored phishing attacks (what we call spear phishing) and weaponized driverless vehicles.
8. Audio/visual impersonation, also referred to as Deepfakes.

Deepfakes are a digital recreation of someone’s appearance to make it appear as though they said or did something that they didn’t or were present somewhere that they never were. You can find plenty of examples on YouTube of Deepfakes of various quality. Viewing them, it is easy to see how inflammatory and damaging to someone’s reputation a well-made Deepfake could prove to be.

Don’t Underestimate Any Cyberattack

Of course, now that we’ve gone over these threats and described how much of a practical threat they really are, it is important that we remind ourselves that all of these threats could damage a business in some way, shape, or form. We also can’t fool ourselves into thinking that these threats must be staged with AI. Human beings could also be responsible for most of them, which makes them no less of a threat to businesses.

It is crucial that we keep this in mind as we work to secure our businesses as we continue to operate them.

As more and more business opportunities can be found online, more and more threats have followed them. Keeping your business protected from them—whether AI is involved or not—is crucial to its success.

NuTech Services can help you keep your business safe from all manner of threats. To find out more about the solutions we can offer to benefit your operations and their security, give us a call at 810.230.9455.

Aug, 2020

Tip of the Week: Three Ways to Improve Remote Meetings

Remote work has certainly shown its utility over the past months, but despite this there are still many businesses who struggle to effectively run remote meetings. As remote meetings aren’t likely to phase out anytime soon, we felt it would be helpful to offer some tips to help make these meetings a little smoother for all involved.

Give Your Team Members Some Responsibilities

An in-person meeting and a meeting through a conferencing solution can admittedly have two very different feelings to the participants. The kind of participation that comes somewhat naturally in an in-person meeting can suddenly feel entirely foreign, the visual context cues that would normally drive the conversation stripped away using technology. As a result, awkward pauses and missed line items abound. This can easily lead to people increasingly talking out of turn, while others will remain silent. One way to help mitigate this is by distributing an agenda with assigned segments beforehand. That way, each team member will be responsible for some facet of the meeting, with the bonus of being able to prepare ahead of time to increase the meeting’s benefit.

This isn’t the only way you can keep your team members involved, either. You could also assign tasks for people to take notes or to keep track of the time remaining in the meeting. As a result, the whole team stays engaged in the meeting, and therefore will be more apt to contribute to the discussion.

Don’t Overfill Your Meetings

Have you ever sat in one of those meetings where the group was so big you felt as though you couldn’t get a word in edgewise, and that even if you did, only half the group would pick up on the point you made? An overly large remote meeting can work the same way. Lagging technology and people fighting for the chance to speak can make conversations difficult, and the increased background noise could easily drown out any productive conversation.

Therefore, smaller remote meetings are invariably better, as a more natural conversation can quickly take over and there is a reduced chance of distracting background noise. As a bonus, the smaller meeting size means that each person has a chance to contribute proportionally more to the meeting, increasing their engagement with it.

Don’t Allow People to Mute Themselves

Having people mute themselves during a remote meeting is like having a mime join a choir—there’s very little that they are going to contribute.

In addition to preventing people from contributing (potentially sacrificing valuable ideas), muting could also allow people to dissociate from the meeting completely. If they’re muted, one of your participants could be listening to a podcast, for all you know. If anything, allow brief muting to help hide noisy interruptions, like a sneeze or an unaware family member, but that’s it.

What have you done to keep your meetings running smoothly? Share your strategies with us by putting them in the comments!

Aug, 2020

Windows 7 Should Be Long Gone

Windows 7 was the most popular operating system Microsoft ever created. It’s so popular that months after the software giant officially retired their record-breaking OS, some businesses continue to use it. Today, we will take a look at why some businesses haven’t moved off of Windows 7, and what effect it could have on their company.

When we say that some businesses are using Windows 7, what we really mean is that with a remarkable market share that still sits around 23 percent, a lot of businesses have chosen not to upgrade to Windows 10, Microsoft’s latest OS. In fact, as of January, when Microsoft officially did away with support for Windows 7, nearly half (47 percent) of SMBs were still utilizing it. It’s not a good scene. Let’s take a look at why so many haven’t moved off of Windows 7.

Why is Using Windows 7 Bad?

Windows was released in July of 2009. That’s over ten years ago. Microsoft has upgraded their OS several times since then. While its functionality and usability are adequate, the major problem is that it is not supported by Microsoft any longer. Since it carries a long-passed end-of-life date, the OS doesn’t get the security updates and patches of a supported software, and is therefore, a liability.

As you’d imagine, cybercriminals are not adverse to picking low-hanging fruit; and, if your business still uses Windows 7, it’s definitely time for an upgrade. This is especially true if you have any notions of connecting it to the Internet.

FBI Says Using Windows 7 is Negligent

The Federal Bureau of Investigation released the following statement to the private companies they work with: “As time passes, Windows 7 becomes more vulnerable to exploitation due to lack of security updates and new vulnerabilities discovered.”

It’s not just the multi-billion dollar corporations that are at risk. If you have exploits built into the software you use, you are far more at risk than if you use clean and actively supported software. Cybercriminals have no problems hacking small businesses that aren’t taking the steps necessary to protect themselves.

Most legacy software can now be run in the cloud, and with the importance that a business’ data plays nowadays, there are very few reasons that your business should be running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2.

What Should Windows 7 Users and Businesses Do?

Obviously, you should be upgrading away from unsupported software. Again, Windows 7 is not supported and you will likely get hacked. For a business, this can be a devastating process. You aren’t just going to get spammed, you are going to get hacked and whatever customer data you have stored can get stolen. I’m sure the last thing you want is to explain to your clientele that you accidentally exposed all their PII.

More than that, you get Windows 10, which is constantly updated with security patches and functionality upgrades. Microsoft stated their intention to use Windows 10 for the foreseeable future. Windows 10 is more secure, has more features, and even law enforcement thinks you should upgrade.

Managing risk in your business is important and using Windows 7 is the definition of risk. If you would like to talk to someone about getting out from under Windows 7 altogether, what your options are for the legacy apps you use, and how a quick upgrade will exponentially improve your business’ ability to ward of cyberthreats, call the experts at NuTech Services today at 810.230.9455.

Aug, 2020

Cybersecurity Needs to Shift for Businesses to Survive

With some motivation from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses are adjusting their approach to cybersecurity. Typically, businesses would take a more measured approach in their day-to-day security improvements, while swiftly acting if there was any kind of clear and present danger. While this proved effective, the current situation has now shifted priorities over to maintaining resilience. Let’s examine some of these shifts, and how an advantage can be gained through a consistent cybersecurity strategy.

The Changes We’ve Witnessed

For such an… eventful… year, it started off with little anticipation of the events to come. Businesses had ample time to plan their 2020 technology budgets, but most (if not all) of these budgets were postponed (if not thrown out the proverbial window) with the spread of COVID-19.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, cybercriminals are typically quite opportunistic, and so many took advantage of the crisis at hand to strike. Exacerbating this issue even further, many businesses saw their security budgets as a candidate for budget cuts and borrowing funds. Due to these circumstances, these businesses had weakened security measures during the time that strong security would be needed the most.

However, industry analysts have found the events that have followed somewhat surprising. While security spending was cut by many, the investments that remain are still mitigating attacks. In fact, data breaches fell by a full third during the first half of 2020.

Naturally, many businesses are now wondering if the large investments they were making into their cybersecurity were actually helping them all that much.

Don’t Abandon What Works

Before we go any further, we wanted to take a moment and identify a few security investments that—despite the shifting viewpoints on cybersecurity spending—should not be sacrificed:

Endpoint protection – There are policies that you need to have in place, like those that secure your network’s entry points, in order to keep threats out of your business network. Cybercriminals now have some very sophisticated means of gaining access, which means you need to be able to detect, identify, contain, and neutralize these attacks.
Employee training – Nowadays, phishing attacks are one of, if not the, most popular cyberthreats out there today. If you want to keep your network and the data it stores sufficiently secure, you need to make sure your employees can both identify a phishing attempt and address it appropriately.
Encryption for remote connections – Remote work has become a very popular option, but this makes your security as you implement such a strategy no less important. Implementing a trustworthy remote access solution or installing an enterprise VPN will help to protect your business as you continue its operations.
Mobile access management – The smartphone is now an essential business tool, but it is used even more for personal use. Therefore, it is crucial that you have the protections in place to secure these devices.

With these technologies supporting your security, you can maintain your productivity without putting your resources and data at risk.

How to Move Forward

With so many businesses now tightening their belts and their budgets, it’s a safe bet that we’ll see emerging strategies that integrate what we have learned in the recent past with the limited finances that organizations have access to today. In short, we’ll see far more cost-efficient cybersecurity platforms coming to the fore. We’re confident that these platforms will commonly feature a few strategies:

Building unified resilience – Which sounds easier, protecting a few disparate departments or protecting an entire business with consistent security practices? Obviously, the latter. Establishing a universal strategy can help reduce overhead spent on support as well as encourage a more continuous business.
Improving cyber hygiene – Many organizations lack a sufficient system to properly manage the different levels of access their digital resources should require. Implementing such a system can provide operational benefits to all levels of the business that does so.
Focusing on cooperation – While the pandemic has separated many from their coworkers, it has also demonstrated how crucial it is for departments to work together to accomplish the business’ goals. In the same vein, keeping up a standard of shared security responsibility makes it harder for bad actors to successfully strike.

One thing is abundantly clear: cybersecurity needs to be a major focus point from here on out, even more so than it was before. NuTech Services can help you implement the protections you need. Reach out to our experts today by calling 810.230.9455.

Aug, 2020

Tip of the Week: Specifying Your Google Queries

Searching for something on Google seems stunningly self-explanatory: type in what you’re looking for, press Enter, and like magic, it appears. However, there is a lot more that you can do, if you know how to use Google’s full capabilities. Let’s go over how these capabilities can be harnessed to your advantage as you perform your next search.

Improving Your Google Queries

–

If you want to tell Google to omit certain potential results from your search, you can use the hyphen/subtraction mark to define what you don’t want considered.

For example, if you were in the market for improved seating for your workplace, you could search for computer chairs and eliminate any designed for gaming purposes by searching for computer chair -gaming.

()

Adding a parenthetical allows you to set a prerequisite for your search results. Basically, by including a term in parenthesis, you’re instructing Google to only return results for the rest of the search if they relate to that term.

So, if you were specifically looking for IT services around Michigan, you could type in (IT services) Michigan.

Of course, by being on our blog, you’ve pretty much skipped that step, already!

site:

Let’s say that you were looking for something that you were confident that you could find on a specific website. Perhaps you had even found it before but hadn’t been able to locate it again since. Adding the site tag into your Google search instructs Google to zero in on a particular website as it looks for your search term.

So, let’s say you wanted to know more about business continuity. To find that information, you could input business continuity site: www.nutechology.com. Google will promptly deliver the links you’re looking for.

filetype:

Maybe you’re looking for a specific kind of file, like a JPEG or a PDF. Inputting your search terms and adding filetype:jpeg or filetype:pdf will only produce results that feature the designated file format.

intext:

Have you ever encountered one of those moments where you can remember an exact quote from somewhere, but you can’t remember where you read it to save your life? Google offers a feature that can work with that. Searching for intext:, followed by that particular phrase, will instruct Google to look at in-page text to find it.

Which of these Google tricks were new to you? Are there any that you see being particularly useful? Make sure you subscribe to our blog for more handy tips, and for any of your specific IT support and service needs, give NuTech Services a call at 810.230.9455.

Aug, 2020

How to Set the Tone for Workplace Collaboration

Collaboration—one of the more popular workplace buzzwords you hear nowadays, it serves a very important function for any successful business. Therefore, establishing healthy collaborative processes should be considered a priority in any establishment’s operations.

Let’s review what true collaboration is, and how you can lead your company towards more collaborative behaviors in your day-to-day undertakings.

Teamwork and Collaboration Aren’t the Same Thing

First, it is important that we define the difference between these two seemingly synonymous terms. While it is possible to work as a team without collaborating, collaboration requires some element of teamwork to be present.

Consider it this way: by definition, teamwork is the combined action of a group of people. While this could mean that each member of the team is contributing to each step along with their teammates, signifying collaboration, it might instead signify that the task and its requisite responsibilities have been divided up amongst the group.

Teamwork, yes. Collaboration? No.

Other differences between these apparent synonyms:

There is a tendency for a team to have a set leader to set the course of whatever project is being worked on, while collaboration thrives in an egalitarian group setting.
Teamwork can be effective in completing a business’ short-term goals, while long-term goals are better served by collaborative behaviors.
As we hinted at, teamwork requires someone to be in control of the group. Collaboration requires the group’s members to trust one another.

Collaboration Can Benefit Your Business and Your Team

Embracing the cooperative elements of a collaborative work environment can have universal benefits to those involved. For instance:

Your Operations

As the saying goes, two heads are better than one. However, if you have a whole team’s worth of heads, why not make the most of them to help advance your business? With collaboration instilled in your workplace culture, you will find it easier to come up with solutions to your operational challenges. Furthermore, your employees will be more engaged in their work, which itself brings considerable benefits, including increased revenue growth, diminished turnover, fewer accidents, and heightened productivity.

Your Employees

When it comes to the people you’ve hired to work for your business, collaboration can improve their experience as well. In addition to the shared knowledge that can benefit everyone’s quality of work, collaboration can improve the relationships between your employees. This is particularly important, as a study has shown that office friendships are the most important facet of work satisfaction for 70 percent of employees. Fittingly, collaboration leads to increased morale, which positively influences productivity and employee retention alike.

Encouraging Collaboration

So, with so much riding on your office collaboration, it is important that you endorse it in any way you can and actively encourage it amongst your workforce. But how does one do that?

There are a few strategies that you should adopt to accomplish improved collaborative habits.

Unite the Team with a Mission and Establish Expectations

It is important that your team understands how crucial they each are to your company’s success, as this can give meaning to their responsibilities in the context of your company’s shared overarching goal.

This goal is essentially your company’s mission. Once your mission is clarified, it becomes easier to set benchmarks that need to be met and what each team member’s individual role will be in accomplishing it.

Reward Collaboration and Innovation

Naturally, a positive response to collaborative efforts is going to provide no small motivation for your team to adopt them. A similar attitude toward new approaches in the office should also be in place. Risks can often lead to rewards, which means that an employee who is willing to try something new might discover a better method to fuel productivity. At the very least, they’ll confirm that you’re on the right path if your current methodology proves more effective.

Foster your team’s creativity and embrace input.

Support Your Team with Collaborative Tools

Here’s the hard truth: your employees are bound to have varying skill sets. Brian may be a brilliant writer, while Beth may have an affinity for customer service. Allowing your employees to work at those tasks they excel at will only benefit your outcomes. These outcomes can be augmented further using collaboration tools. With more people than ever before working remotely, these tools are more crucial than they have ever been. Make sure that your team is equipped with the technology solutions to collaborate even while distant from one another.

NuTech Services is here to help your business collaborate as effectively as possible, with the tools and resources your team will need at the ready. Learn more about how we can help sustain your effective operations through our managed services by giving us a call at 810.230.9455.

Aug, 2020

COVID-19 Vaccine Attacks Teach an Important Cybersecurity Lesson

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 coronavirus has wreaked havoc across the globe, there has been a lot of hope and effort put towards developing a vaccine against it. Unfortunately, just as some experiments have produced promising results, hackers have begun targeting the research centers responsible. Let’s look at this situation to see what it can teach us.

The Cozy Bear Threat

According to the National Cyber Security Centre, a government security organization based in the United Kingdom, a hacking group known as “APT29” (also referred to as “the Dukes” or “Cozy Bear”) has actively targeted the research centers conducting research into developing a COVID-19 vaccine. These claims have been supported by both the United States’ National Security Agency and Canada’s Communications Security Establishment.

In fact, the National Cyber Security Center released a report that outlined the attack that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency also endorses.

This report describes the use of various exploits in conjunction with spear phishing attacks by APT29. Both tactics give APT29 access to carry out the rest of their attacks, which often involves deploying malware known as WellMess or WellMail.

On a side note, some of these exploits have been patched, so make sure you’re also up to date on your patches as well.

Many experts also share the opinion that Cozy Bear has struck before, and that the current threat needs to be taken very seriously as a result. It is believed that APT29 was responsible for the 2016 intrusion into the Democratic National Committee’s systems, as reported by CNN. The group has also been linked to assorted attacks on healthcare, energy, governmental and diplomatic organizations, and think tanks in the past.

What is Spear Phishing?

Phishing is a form of hacking that targets the end user, rather than using software vulnerabilities, to gain access to a system. Spear phishing is a more direct form of phishing. Instead of sending a generic message to massive groups of potential targets to see who takes the bait, spear phishing is specifically directed to an individual with access to key data and resources.

While APT29 may not target your organization as a part of these efforts to steal research, it is nevertheless critical that you and your team can recognize a potential phishing attack and mitigate it before it causes significant problems. While the following is by no means a comprehensive list of warning signs, it is a good place to start educating your team:

Always check the details. Many phishing attacks can be identified by close-but-no-cigar “From” addresses. When in doubt, try looking up the email address that sent an email.
Proofread the message. While legitimate messages can contain terrible spelling and grammar mistakes, and attackers can more and more effectively mimic professional communications, many phishing messages can be rife with errors.
Double-check. If possible, don’t be afraid to confirm that the email is legitimate by reaching out to the supposed sender (through some non-email form of communication) to confirm that they sent the message.

For more assistance in dealing with phishing attacks, reach out to us! At NuTech Services, we’re motivated to help prevent a phishing attack from impacting your operations. Give us a call at 810.230.9455 to learn more.

Aug, 2020

How to Host a Hamilton Party Online

Hamilton had risen to be one of the most coveted theater tickets before the pandemic struck, having a low-end price tag of over $600, with a nine month wait. Now that the pandemic is in full swing, however, there is another option that enables you to catch the show.

On July 3rd, the Tony-winning Broadway musical was released on Disney+, meaning that history buffs and theater nerds alike don’t have to Wait for It. Even better, you can now watch Hamilton with all your friends. We Know, it’s pretty cool, especially since you don’t all need to be In the Room Where it Happens. Let’s go over how you can arrange that in this song-title-pun-filled blog.

Making Use of a Disney+ Watch Party

What is a Watch Party? Simple: it’s where you virtually gather with your friends and family to simultaneously stream a movie or show together, despite being in different locations. Many services, like Amazon Video, added this feature to help people make it through social distancing during the global COVID-19 pandemic without telling anyone to “Meet Me Inside.”

Hosting a Hamilton Watch Party

To enjoy this theater production of the life and times of Alexander Hamilton along with your socially distant friends, there are a few things that will be required of all participants.

Disney+

Naturally, everyone who wants to watch will need an individual Disney+ account. Unfortunately, the free trial offer for Disney+ is no longer offered. After all, once the second season of the Mandalorian was announced, they knew they could say “You’ll Be Back” to all their subscribers (we’ll see how the $30 rental for the live-action Mulan impacts this).

Subscribing only requires a quick visit to https://www.disneyplus.com/. You may also want to check online for any promotional codes that may be currently offered.

A Browser Plugin

Everyone also needs to install a Chrome browser plugin. There are some exclusive to Disney+, while others allow you to host watch parties via Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and Prime Video as well. If you’re hosting, pick the one that works for you and make sure everyone has it installed ahead of time so there aren’t any delays. If you only care about doing a watch party with Disney Plus, you can use the Disney Plus Party plugin. If you want to host watch parties with Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube, and Hulu as well, you can check out Vemos.

These plugins will let you synchronize your video with the rest of the watch party and chat with one another. Add the plugin to the top of your browser and create an account.

Once that’s accomplished, you can start up Disney+ in your Chrome browser and start the movie. Then you can click on your new plugin and select the option to host. You’ll be prompted to name your viewing room. Meanwhile, the rest of your party will need to have installed the plugin, created an account, joined a movie, and entered the name of your room. That Would Be Enough for everyone to participate.

Then, as the host, you have the power to start the movie and have it play to everyone’s device. You can pause it so that people can Take a Break without asking “What’d I Miss?” or you can play the entire production Non-Stop.

Fair warning—some of these group viewing applications are only free for a set number of hours each week. Make sure you pick one long enough to view the whole thing, so nobody starts asking What Comes Next?

With any luck, this will allow you and your friends to watch Hamilton and keep everyone Satisfied.

Want more handy technology tips and tricks? Consider NuTech Services Your Obedient Servant. Each week, we update this blog with more tips and best practices, along with a Hurricane of useful technology information. With our help, you don’t have to feel Helpless when it comes to your business’ IT. We can be your Right Hand Man, just give us a call at 810.230.9455.

Let us know, how did we do with the song title puns? One Last Time, don’t forget to subscribe to our blog!

Aug, 2020

What’s the Best Way to Secure Your Mobile Device?

Smartphones now come with a variety of ways that users can elect to unlock their device, from biometrics to tactile patterns to good, relatively old-fashioned personal identification numbers. Of course, not all these authentication measures secure your phone equally well. Let’s consider some of these measures to determine which one is best for your device’s security.

Why Mobile Security is So Important in the First Place

Consider the capabilities of our mobile devices today, as compared to those that were considered high-end before Apple premiered the iPhone in 2007 (Not to discredit all the classic PDA/smartphones that came before the iPhone, like the Palm Trio, the Blackberry, and the line of super cool HTC Windows phones, but general consensus feels that the big shift in mobile computing really started with Apple). The difference is staggering. While those devices that are affectionately referred to as “dumb phones” certainly can contain sensitive data, it is effectively nothing compared to what a smartphone can access.

Applications for money management, shopping, medical data, and so many other examples of personal information currently reside on today’s mobile devices—which is precisely what makes the security that protects these devices so important. The authentication method that a user can confirm their identity through is just one example of this security.

The Best Options, and the Worst Options

The various methods that are available to users now each offer their own method of maintaining security, presumably for the user’s convenience. However, as we have established previously, not all these authentication methods are equally good.

Let’s review your various available options and see how their differences make some a better solution than the others.

Passcodes/PINs/Passwords

These authentication measures are effectively the baseline security on any mobile device, as they also protect the device from other forms of authentication being added without approval. While these security measures are by no means impassable, they form the foundation for any decent security measures if used responsibly.

Of course, we do have to address the inherent weaknesses that these authentication requirements present. Most of these weaknesses are derived from the user responsible for setting them up. For instance, a 2012 study demonstrated that most people used PINs that either represented personally important years, simply repeated digits, or heavily featured the number “69.” Also prevalent, numbers that are simple to type: 1234, 7890, and so on. Another research study revealed that the benefits on a six-digit PIN were negligible as compared to a four-digit PIN, as the added length provides a false sense of security and winds up encouraging less-secure PINs in general.

Of course, passwords are also an option (and a stronger one to boot) if the user has the patience to retype their password each time the device locks. The consensus is that these authentication measures are the most secure option currently available.

Biometrics

Improved hardware and software now allow users to effectively use their own bodies as the key to their mobile devices, as biometric authentication is now incorporated into many mobile devices. Of course, the efficacy of biometric authentication isn’t universally consistent—some methods are simply more secure than others are.

Fingerprint Sensors: Most smartphones will have fingerprint-detection capabilities for some time, some projections seeing up to 90 percent of devices incorporating these tools by 2023, while 95 percent of phones had such a sensor in 2018.

There are various technologies in play that power these sensors, with varying security efficacy. For instance, Samsung devices are beginning to include sensors under the screen, which create a three-dimensional image of a fingerprint. While this makes them inherently very secure, screen protectors have been shown to bamboozle them, potentially allowing any fingerprint to unlock them. Furthermore, fingerprints can potentially be harvested from surfaces and transplanted to a device, so properly training your device to your unique fingerprint is crucial.

Iris Scanning: The prevailing opinion is that iris scanning is the most secure form of biometric authentication, as fingerprints aren’t as unique as a person’s irises are. Some phones feature these capabilities, but they may not be as popular, as scanning the iris can take a little longer simply because the user must look directly at the sensor for it to work.

Facial Recognition: Many manufacturers have begun to phase out fingerprint sensors for facial recognition options, especially as full screens have grown in popularity. With appropriately captured reference data, decent facial recognition software can simplify the unlocking process significantly.

However, the quality of the software and the images it uses for reference can cause some issue. Poor-quality images—like those with excessive glare—can make it easier for an attacker to make it past the lock, not to mention make it more challenging for the user.

Pattern Passwords/Knock Codes

Finally, many Android devices have the option to designate a pattern on a 2×2 or 3×3 grid that must be tapped correctly to unlock the device. Studies have shown that this method is by far the least secure of the authentication requirements, as it becomes far easier for an attacker to figure out the user’s chosen pattern.

For instance, in one study, researchers discovered that a full 65 percent of the 351 participants selected a code that began at the top-left square and immediately proceeded to the top-right, presumably influenced by Westernized reading patterns. Larger grids encouraged shorter patterns, and the data collected during the study revealed that some patterns were commonly adopted:

An hourglass: top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right, top left, top right
A square: Top left, top right, bottom right, bottom left, top left, top right
The number seven: Top left, top left, top right, top right, bottom left, bottom left

Proving patterns are an even worse method, these researchers also observed that knock codes were more easily forgotten, with about 10 percent of participants having forgotten theirs by the end of the 10-minute study, and their five-second entry time being slower than the 4.5 seconds needed for a PIN.

Make Sure Your Mobile Device is Secured

With our mobile devices playing such a huge role in our personal and professional lives, their security needs to be prioritized, with only the most secure methods protecting them.

For assistance in managing your security, from your in-house business solutions to the devices your employees use each day, reach out to NuTech Services. Our team can assist you in implementing the technology you need while educating your employees on the importance of secure practices. Give us a call at 810.230.9455 to learn more.

Aug, 2020

Nope, You Haven’t Been Hacked By Google and Apple’s COVID-19 App

Google and Apple have recently started an initiative with local governments to try and help prevent the increased spread of COVID-19. Basically, this app would notify people if there were positive COVID-19 test results in their area. While this does bring up some major privacy concerns, we wanted to discuss something else today: the prevalence of false warnings that have already been forced onto mobile devices. Let’s dig in.

There’s been a consistent pattern that has emerged with popular software applications: a major update or other change is made, and uproar on social media ensues.

Just look at what happened when the Android platform’s Facebook application began requesting access to the user’s smartphone camera several years ago now. While this was required so that Facebook’s newly released native photo-taking capabilities could be embraced, there was still a lot said about it on social media.

Don’t get us wrong—many of the changes made in technology can be concerning, especially where it involves a user’s privacy. However, there is usually a ton of misinformation muddying the waters. Again, we’re not saying that you can always trust giant tech companies and their data collection policies… quite the opposite, in fact. You’re right to feel concerned at times and should be exercising the control over their collection of your data that you have a right to.

Having said that, we couldn’t help but notice an extreme response to the news of Apple and Google’s new COVID-19 contact tracing application framework.

So, Did Google or Apple Install a COVID-19 Tracking App on My Phone?

Nope.

Neither Google or Apple added an application to your mobile device without your knowledge or consent. What Google and Apple did was collaborate to develop an application framework, which can now be used by app developers as they create COVID-19 tracking apps.

However, due to sensationalism on social media, a lot of people are concerned. Just look at this post that has been making the rounds on Facebook:

“**VERY IMPORTANT ALERT!***

A COVID-19 sensor has been secretly installed into every phone. Apparently, when everyone was having “phone disruption” over the weekend, they were adding COVID-19 Tracker [SIC] to our phones!

If you have an Android phone, go under settings, then look for google settings and you will find it installed there.

If you are using an iPhone, go under settings, privacy, then health. It is there but not yet functional.

The App can notify you if you’ve been near someone who has been reported having COVID-19.”

There’s a lot of misleading information to unpack here. First, neither Google nor Apple secretly installed a new “sensor” (especially since we’re talking about a software update, not a hardware update).

This software update was simply a setting to enable the COVID-19 Exposure Notification system that the two platforms are preparing. When this system has its official applications developed, users will not only have to install the application and activate it, but also confirm that they want to participate with Google or Apple.

So, this update simply provides a unified framework for local governments and the health industry to use as they create their COVID-19 applications, while offering users the choice of whether they want to participate.

So No, This is NOT a COVID-19 Tracking App

Seriously, unless you consciously selected the option to “Install,” your mobile device isn’t going to start tracking you and those close to you to identify anyone with COVID-19. In fact, if you follow that Facebook post’s instructions to your settings, you’ll see that you have to A: install a participating application or B: finish setting up a participating application before your notifications can even be activated.

In a rare joint statement from Apple and Google, they go on record to say, “What we’ve built is not an app—rather public agencies will incorporate the API into their own apps that people install.”

To clarify further, an API is an Application Programming Interface. Think of it as the foundation of an application. By teaming up, Apple and Google have laid the foundation for others to build their own applications upon.

As a bonus, this also makes it easier for people to opt out. Unfortunately, if too many people decide not to use the system, it may not be reliable enough to work at all.

What Do We Know About these Tracking Apps?

Well, the system itself is extremely new, so responsibility for the official applications will fall to state and local governments.

The platform that Google and Apple co-developed is built to be decentralized, which will help to make it more secure. Basically, when a user opts to use one of these apps, their phone is assigned a random ID and it is then shared with other phones within the range of a Bluetooth connection. Each phone then stores an anonymous roster of the other IDs it has been in proximity to.

So, when someone is diagnosed with COVID-19, they would then manually share that with the contact tracing app. Then, with their permission, all the IDs that their phone has stored over the prior two weeks would be uploaded and those users would be sent a notification of their potential exposure. Your location isn’t shared, nobody’s identity is shared, not even Google or Apple will get this information. In addition to all this, that random ID is changed every 10 to 20 minutes, and the apps are not allowed to use your location or to track it in the background.

As a result, these apps are safe to use with complete anonymity, and to avoid opting in, you just wouldn’t install any COVID-19 tracking apps, official or not.

Uninstalling the COVID-19 Exposure Notification

Okay, since we know that some will want to ask this question, we felt we needed to address it.

In short, you shouldn’t because it isn’t an app, it is an API. As such, it can’t just be uninstalled. It is now part of the Android and iOS operating systems and is pushed to devices through security updates.

If you were to do some Internet snooping, you could find some walkthroughs on the Internet that take you through how to roll back your phone and other such processes, but that only leaves your device exposed to other threats. Again, there is nothing to uninstall, and neglecting future security updates is a terrible idea.

The API is nothing to worry about. It is nothing more than a setting, and one that is deactivated by default. If you really are worried, both Apple and Google have confirmed that not installing, or uninstalling, a COVID-19 Exposure Notification app is enough to avoid participation.

And again, since we can’t stress this enough:

DO NOT FOLLOW ANY INSTRUCTIONS ONLINE THAT WALK YOU THROUGH ROLLING BACK YOUR PHONE AND OPTING OUT OF SECURITY UPDATES.

If you are that serious about your privacy, it just doesn’t make sense to expose that privacy to greater risk.

In our professional opinion, understanding the technology used to create the COVID-19 Exposure Notification system, every effort has been made to ensure the security and anonymity of its users. Keep in mind, there are also healthcare regulations to comply with as well, and our clients will know how stringent they are where data privacy is concerned.

The decision whether or not to use the COVID-19 Exposure Notification system falls to you, but you can rest assured that both Google and Apple have done everything right to keep their system safe, private, and secure.

Please, to learn more about these technologies, don’t hesitate to give us a call.

Aug, 2020

Tip of the Week: Warning Signs of a Mobile Malware Infection

If you’re the average business user today, you probably rely on a smartphone to manage much of your life, both personally and in the professional sense. As our phones have become so central to our lives, hackers now have the opportunity to attack through malicious applications. For this week’s tip, we wanted to go over a few ways to tell that an app might be an attack in disguise.

Excessive Permissions

Data security is a priority for many people, but even amongst them, mobile applications often aren’t even considered a potential threat to their data. While you should ever only download applications from an official application store, some attacks can potentially slip through the vetting process to be distributed via these means. Therefore, it is important to carefully consider every application you have installed and the permissions that each one demands. If these permissions seem excessive for the application’s needs, reconsider if the app is necessary to use (chances are, it isn’t). This helps protect you against the tactic that many cybercriminals use: getting a harmless app to the store, and then turning it malicious with an update once it is downloaded.

Rapid Battery Loss

Buckle up, it’s time for a lesson in physics.

According to the first law of thermodynamics, there is a set amount of energy present in the universe. Energy isn’t created or destroyed; it is simply transferred in different forms from one thing to another. This is important to our point.

Have you ever set your fully charged phone down, not touching it or interacting with it at all, only to later pick it up and find a significantly lower charge? While the technology behind the battery isn’t perfect, the amount of energy lost should not be that extreme. Your phone may be infected with malware, which uses your phone’s battery as it operates in the background processes. Check your battery settings to see which applications are using more power than they should be.

Sudden Password Changes

Let’s say that you type in the password to one of your accounts, and it bounces back labeled as incorrect. Fair enough, everyone makes mistakes. However, if this keeps happening, and you know that you’ve entered it correctly, there’s a good chance that your account has been infiltrated and taken over.

To resolve this, you’re going to have to reach out to the company and reclaim your account, if possible. Whether or not your account can be retrieved, you need to change the passwords for all the others too, just to be safe. Keeping to password best practices and restoring your device from a recent backup to clear out any lurking malware, are solid practices.

From your on-site infrastructure, to the cloud environments you’ve deployed, to the mobile devices your employees use, NuTech Services can help you manage your IT. Learn more about our many managed services by calling 810.230.9455.

Aug, 2020

It’s Time to Audit Your IT

Unfortunately, small businesses are having a hard time right now. If your operations are to continue throughout this time, some significant changes are going to be required. Here, we’re looking at how you can use current technologies to help sustain your business. Chances are, you may already have these technologies available to you.

Making the Most of What You Have

As states have mandated that businesses either close or move operations offsite for the well-being of their employees and clients, many people seem to have been caught off-guard by the duration of these orders. As a result, many businesses have since shifted from a “shut down and wait it out” strategy to trying to do whatever they can—which, for many, is implementing a remote workforce.

Regardless of whether a business tried to cobble together remote operations at the onset or later on, there are still a lot of issues that they will need to contend with. Paying the bills, setting everyone up with the solutions needed to work, and maintaining productivity are all necessary to consider.

Some businesses took the route of laying off their workforce as shutdowns began as they put their businesses on pause and were then provided a lifeline in the form of the paycheck protection program. This subsidy enabled them to keep at least some of their team working and employed. A major tool that helped to accomplish this for many was automation, as this helps to keep your finances fluid.

Automation helps businesses spend their time more productively, fulfilling tasks like payroll processing, managing operations, and invoicing. This not only helps save time, but also money, mainly because these common tasks are commonly outsourced. Of course, other business needs like collaboration, supply chain management, and project management can also be benefitted by leveraging automation.

Security Amidst Security

Cybersecurity is another critical business need that has been largely pushed to the back burner. There has actually been a decline in cybersecurity spending, despite an upwards trend in business being conducted online. Small businesses actually cut their cybersecurity budgets when revenues began to disappear. The cybersecurity industry has been growing at a rate of approximately five percent each year for the past eight years. This year? A little over one percent.

If you’re currently depending on a remote workforce, you want to give them every opportunity to experience success. This is true of most. Most organizations, while they are reducing their overall cybersecurity budget, are still investing in endpoint and intrusion protection. This shows us that, despite the uncertainty of the future, they are still reducing organizational risk by securing their network endpoints.

Of course, you shouldn’t rely on automation to eliminate cyberthreats. Despite IT solutions now heavily featuring artificial intelligence to identify threats, many attacks now rely on phishing attempts. These only become more dangerous when your employees are working remotely, and even more so on their personal devices. As a result, you need to ensure your team is aware of the phishing attempts that will be directed against them. This will require ongoing training in updated best practices, if only to prevent a major malware attack from infiltrating your network.

One way or another, businesses will almost certainly have a larger focus on remote operations moving forward. For assistance with the solutions and strategies that will keep your processes progressing from here on, reach out to the IT experts at NuTech Services today. Give us a call at 810.230.9455.

Jul, 2020

Improve Your Business With These Documentation Practices

With the amount of technology that the modern business relies on today, each business needs to maintain comprehensive documentation outlining it. As a managed service provider, we can provide an expert perspective on what needs to be included in this documentation. Let’s get into it.

What Should My Documentation Include?

Basically, your documentation should be a complete inventory of all the technology you have, first divided between your hardware and software solutions.

Hardware

There’s a lot of information regarding your hardware solutions that you will want to keep a record of, as it will make a lot of processes a lot simpler moving forward.

Serial/Model Numbers – These will help you to ensure that the device you are working on is the one you think it is, in addition to simplifying things for your support team.

Purchase Dates – If any of your decisions are going to be based on the age of the device (i.e. whether to repair or replace), knowing how long you have had it will help you to evaluate if you got the value from your investment.

Warranty Information – On a related note, knowing the terms of an item’s warranty can help you make the best decision for your business while taking this into consideration.

Installation Dates – Let’s say that one of your workstations is acting up. If you knew that it was installed the day before an extended brownout hit your office, this information could help you narrow down the issue.

Physical Locations – It is important to know where a device is supposed to be. This makes it easier for the service team to keep it maintained, as well as boosts your security somewhat.

Device Names – Having a name for a specific device, aside from the one the manufacturer assigned, adds another level of differentiation.

IP Addresses – If you need to find something on your network, knowing the IP address will help immensely.

Software

Just as is the case with your hardware, there’s a lot of information about your software to carefully record and track. Make sure you’re establishing the following in your documentation:

Product Licenses – Similarly to the serial number, keeping track of your product licenses ensures you are aware of how many copies of a given title you have available to use.

Purchase Dates – Again, as with your hardware, knowing when you acquired something helps you find out of your purchase is still under warranty, along with other pertinent details.

Install Dates – Once again, if you know when a given software was installed on a system, you’ll know a lot more about it through inference and deduction.

Subscription Details – If you maintain a subscription to a software suite or similar tool, keeping track of your subscription details can ensure your ability to use that title.

Usernames or Registration Emails – Knowing who in your organization is associated with your various software titles can help you log in to a vendor’s website or otherwise receive support later.

Version History – Finally, keeping up with your software’s current version in your documentation can help you keep track of where updates are needed, and where you may be susceptible otherwise. Of course, your documentation should outline the proper update procedures as well.

Why Bother with All This Documentation?

Simplicity. Security. Peace of mind.

Maintaining your technology will be so much easier with these details recorded for future reference, allowing you to get the maximum value for your investments into IT. For assistance in establishing these processes, or for insights about what we track, give us a call! Our professionals can be reached at 810.230.9455.

Jul, 2020

Tip of the Week: Useful Excel Shortcuts

When most people think “spreadsheet,” they’re thinking about Microsoft Excel. Yet, for how well-known it is, many people are unaware of many of its capabilities. This is particularly true of the shortcuts available to properly format these spreadsheets. For this week’s tip, we’re sharing a few of these formatting tips.

Quick and Easy Tables

Let’s face it—a spreadsheet full of points and figures isn’t the most comprehensive way to view your data. It is far better to instead format that data into a table, as you can then reorganize it and filter it as needed. Once your data is in a spreadsheet, creating a table is as simple as selecting one of your cells, pressing Ctrl + T, and then hitting Enter.

Handy Formatting Shortcuts

Formatting a spreadsheet is a matter of balance. While it isn’t something you want to spend a ton of time and effort doing, it can add a significant amount of comprehension for the person reviewing it. Shortcuts can help make this formatting less intrusive, and more efficient for you, the person creating the spreadsheet in the first place.

Here are a few select shortcuts that you will likely find useful:

Ctrl + B – Bold
Ctrl + I – Italics
Ctrl + U – Underline
Ctrl + 5 – Strikethrough selected text
Ctrl + 1 – Format box for selection
F4 – repeats the last action

Icon Sets

On the topic of visibility, some trends can be challenging to spot without this kind of added context as well. Excel has icons that can automatically put in a bit of visual context. With the cells you want to add the icons to highlighted, click on Conditional Formatting under the Home tab of the menu. There, the Icon Sets option should appear, where you can select the set of your choosing.

These icons are particularly handy because they are automatically configured to adjust to your data. Let’s assume that you pick the icon set with three arrows. Based on the range your data covers, the lowest third is automatically assigned the downward arrow, the middlemost third has the sideways arrow, and the highest third gets the ascending arrow. With five icons, your range is split into fifths, as your range is automatically divided amongst the icons.

What are some of your favorite formatting tricks for Excel? Share them in the comments!

Jul, 2020

Why There Has Never Been a Better Time for Managed IT

Okay, time for some real talk: There is no denying that 2020 has held a few unique challenges for everyone who runs a business. Economic challenges, political tensions, and an honest-to-goodness pandemic have all thrown us all for a loop. As a result, it is important that businesses all adjust their technology priorities to survive. Let’s discuss these priorities, and how they will need to shift.

IT Management Matters More Than Ever

From a certain point of view, businesses now find themselves in a unique position to restructure their operations. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic has provided an inconvenient case study of sorts that shows a promising outlook on remote productivity.

It has also helped to shine the light on how impactful waste can be in poorly managed IT strategies. Without any engaged oversight, the heightened use of cloud services can lead to a few considerable issues, including

Unused accounts and services
Duplicate accounts for services
Services still earmarked for a former employee
Misconfigured services

These issues can ultimately account for 30 percent of an organization’s IT investment spend and can be resolved with remarkably little effort. The problem is that someone has to know to catch it—and if these things were set up by somebody who has since left, or worked for a break-fix provider, that person may not be available.

So, it only makes sense that businesses would want to take account of these costs, and shore them in.

Of course, we have to talk about the economy. With the economy in the state that it is in, businesses are going to have to batten down the hatches. In addition to consolidating budgets and managing them better, businesses need to know that they have the solutions necessary to survive going forward.

This will require modern solutions that allow for remote productivity and collaboration to take place. A modern IT provider, like NuTech Services, can provide for all these needs.

How Our Services Can Help

As a managed service provider, we work in the background of your organization, remotely keeping an eye on the technology your team is relying on to do their jobs. In doing so, we can spot potential wastes of time and money—including the ones listed above, by the way—and resolve them before you ever find out about it. This way, your workday can carry on without the added stress that technology issues bring.

To learn more about our services, give us a call at 810.230.9455.