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cybersecurity

Ignoring Cybersecurity? Here’s What It Could Cost You!

Cybersecurity may seem like something only large corporations need to worry about, but the truth is, cyber incidents can wreak financial havoc on small to medium-sized businesses too. In fact, the average cost of a data breach for businesses in this size range can hit anywhere from $120,000 to well over $1 million. That’s no small change! So, how exactly do these costs add up? Let’s break it down: The True Financial Impact of Cyber Incidents When a cyber attack strikes, the damage is not just limited to stolen data—it’s your entire business that pays the price. Here's where the financial bleeding happens: Ransom Payments: Pay Up or Lose Out Imagine the panic when your data is locked up, held hostage by hackers demanding a ransom. It’s a tough spot. You either pay the ransom with fingers crossed or risk losing access forever. And here’s the kicker: even if you ...

2024-10-01T16:09:02+00:00
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Why You Need a Proactive Cybersecurity Strategy

Considering the significant financial and reputational risks involved, businesses must adopt a protective approach to safeguard their business. Here are key components to consider: 1. Risk Assessment Start by evaluating your organization's vulnerabilities and the potential impact of a cyber incident. Identify crucial assets, assess your current security measures, and understand the specific threats you face. 2. Employee Training Your employees are often your first line of defense against cyber threats. Regular training can help them recognize phishing attempts, social engineering tactics, and other common attacks. A well-informed team is less likely to fall victim to these threats. 3. Incident Response Plan Develop a comprehensive incident response plan that outlines steps to take during a breach. This should include communication strategies, roles and responsibilities, and recovery processes to minimize damage and restore operations quickly. 4. Invest in Technology Implement robust cybersecurity tools like firewalls, antivirus software, and intrusion detection systems. ...

2024-10-01T13:45:40+00:00
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Top 5 Infrastructure Trends for 2019

We’ve bid 2018 farewell and welcomed 2019 with open arms. So what's next? What’s going to happen in 2019 from an infrastructure perspective? The answer for 2019 is similar to that of recent years. Cloud and security are still the top priorities. Let’s take a quick look at what may impact your infrastructure focus. 1. Exchange Migration Migrations from Exchange on-premises to Exchange online and upgrades from older versions of Exchange to the latest version are both projects going strong in 2019. We continue to support our clients who are going through these Exchange migration and upgrade processes and predict that Exchange migrations, upgrades, and support will continue to be a trend with our clients. 2. Multi-Factor Authentication To add additional security, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) provides one or more additional forms of authentication for users when they log into company resources. Traditionally, users would log into their computers or other ...

2023-02-16T16:01:29+00:00
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What is spear phishing and how can my company avoid it?

The average person receives 16 malicious emails per month. A 2018 study of 500,000,000 emails found one out of every 101 emails received were malicious. Are your employees properly educated about this? Or will they click a link that could cost the company millions? Most of the time, the greatest risk to your company’s internet security are the people who work for it (including you). One click on a malicious email—even one that looks like it comes from a friend—could seriously damage your company. New employees are the most at risk for being duped. [1] What is Spear Phishing?  Spear phishing is an attack in which hackers trick targeted users into sharing confidential information. It can also involve tricking the recipient into installing malware on their computer or network. Here is how it works:  1. You receive an email with an attachment from what looks like it originated from a ...

2023-02-16T16:01:31+00:00
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Azure Information Protection

How do you ensure your organization's confidential documents are accessible by approved eyes only? Fear not. Azure Active Information Protection can be your trusted friend to ensure that the sensitive data is well protected when appropriate groups or policies are set up and implemented. Specifically, Azure Information Protection, which is data loss prevention (DLP) for documents can be utilized to secure your confidential data. This blog provides a high-level overview of the DLP solution for Microsoft Azure. There are some different ways to start leveraging the platform and protecting your sensitive documents. Labels Place appropriate labels on your documents - you can have these labels applied by the users as they're editing documents Using client application and plugins into the office applications to apply labels when editing documents Customize your labels to control access to the documents by department or personnel. Create visual marking on the documents, such as header, ...

2023-02-16T16:01:33+00:00
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Azure Active Directory Identity Management

Microsoft Office 365 is widely used in many organizations. If you are an administrator for your Office 365, you are likely to be familiar with the Admin Center to look at user accounts and monitor activities. But do you know all the account activities were pulled in from Azure Active Directory in the cloud and are only displayed in the admin center?  If you've got Dynamics, Exchange, SharePoint, or any of the Microsoft software that is in the Cloud, it's going to be using Azure Active Directory as its Identity Manager in the back end. There are a couple different approaches to manage identity in Azure Active Directory. Identity Sharing- As an admin, you may be familiar with creating Active Directory trust to different organizations, so you can authenticate across organizations or different servers across organizations. However, you don't have that ability with Azure Active Directory. In Azure AD, it's called ...

2023-02-16T16:01:34+00:00
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Multi-Factor Authentication Conditional Access Configuration

Multi-Factor Authentication Conditional Access and Policies Configuration Multi-factor authentication (MFA) creates an extra step to verify user identity who wants to gain access to your server or database. MFA provides greater security with that layered authentication approach. When hosting MFA on-premises, you can lock down the server or cloud applications that are tied in with Microsoft ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services) in the environment that you have deployed. In this blog, we will be discussing a couple of different ways to manage the cloud version MFA, including setting up conditional access for your MFA. MFA Management Console Go to your Groups and select MFA authentication You should see a list of your users with an indication if they have already enabled MFA Enable MFA for your administrators or selected users By enabling MFA, your users or admins will be prompted to set up their second form of authentication device when ...

2023-02-16T16:01:34+00:00
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Red Level Expands Grand Rapids Datacenter Presence

Sometimes, important changes happen without anyone noticing. That was the case recently as Red Level greatly expanded our West Michigan datacenter footprint. We’ve been watching closely as the Grand Rapids-area market has grown and changed in recent years. Grand Rapids has been emerging as a powerful new hub for information technology-focused companies, both in the form of innovative start-ups and as a destination of choice for established companies looking to expand into a new market or relocate their operations. At the same time, a lot of the area’s established businesses have been embracing cloud-based solutions as a means of building their capabilities and modernizing their IT operations. Naturally, as the markets we serve and our clients’ needs grow, we need to grow as well. The time was right for us to make a sizeable, forward-looking investment in our capacity on the western side of our state. We effectively doubled our ...

2023-02-16T16:01:37+00:00
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Email Phishing Becomes A Bigger & Bigger Threat

Phishing threat is no joke, despite the widows and princes. The phishermen are out there – just make sure you don’t get caught. Imagine: You come into work one morning and open a typical, innocuous-looking email. Unknown to you, that sets in motion a chain of events: Malicious code within the virus embeds itself within your laptop, forcing it to perform a series of hidden procedures that open gateways to your data, send spam emails to your contacts, and reproduce copies of the code. By lunchtime, several of your colleagues’ machines are doing the same thing. Twenty hours later, your entire network is infected, and all 70 employees are idled for two days! Can it happen? It happened recently to a Red Level client.  By opening a single email, business ground came to a complete halt for two days, costing the company capital, revenue, and opportunity. Sadly, it’s something we ...

2023-02-16T16:01:38+00:00
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