4 Best Practices for Implementing New Technology Solutions

When you are looking to implement new technology solutions for your business, the last thing you should do is skip the planning process. You need to carefully consider all of your options, your business’s specific needs, and the various benefits that can come from all of these options. Today we will discuss how your business can choose the best technology that suits your organization and its operations.

This process involves conducting a proper analysis of your business needs, identifying how your new technology will fit into your existing payment structure, whether or not it leans into what your business does well, and what your employees think will help them do their jobs better.

Analyze Your Business Needs

You can’t make the right choices for your business technology if you don’t know your specific needs. Consider what challenges your business faces and how you might overcome them. In this case, however, we want to emphasize that you should only implement technology when you believe that it will truly make things easier. Sometimes businesses implement technology solutions that only make things more complicated, which does the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to do. 

Consider the Price Point

Small businesses often struggle with large up-front costs associated with purchasing new technology solutions, mostly due to the large payments not being particularly conducive to budgeting. We’re not saying that you can’t purchase technology or services up-front–sometimes there are benefits to doing so–but what we are saying is that you should look at other options, like Software as a Service or other services with a monthly payment model. These services tend to be more scalable and fit more easily into budgets.

Lean Into Your Strengths

You do this every day with your employees on a micro-level by segmenting off duties and responsibilities based on their roles within your organization, but on a macro level, you can encourage your business to lean into what it does well with the right technology solutions. For example, businesses that pride themselves on great customer service can provide even better customer service by implementing help desk solutions and instant messaging chats. In other words, you are supplementing your business with technology that makes your efforts easier and more effective.

Ask Your Employees

If you are unsure of how your business can more effectively utilize technology, consider asking your employees for their feedback. Ask them what challenges they face and how they might address them. You can then use this information to make informed decisions regarding the technology that you eventually go to implement for your infrastructure. Plus, employees love it when their opinions matter, so if you can learn a thing or two about your organization by listening to their woes, you can make your business a better place to work as a whole.

Work with a Managed Service Provider

If you’re unsure of any of the above, Net Activity can help your business identify business technology solutions that you will find helpful for making progress toward your goals. To learn more, reach out to us at 216-503-5150.

Google Adding Additional Security Feature To Chrome On iOS

Recently, Google made a small but significant change to Chrome for iOS.

If you use the browser in that environment, it now allows you to lock your incognito tabs behind a FaceID protection wall, giving you an added layer of security. This new feature makes it much more difficult for people to snoop around on your device and see what you’ve been up to on the web.

If you’ve never used incognito mode before, you should. It’s a superb feature that allows you to visit sensitive sites without having them appear in your browser history, and of interest, it also prevents cookies generated by those sites from being saved. Of course, this protection only extends so far. If you surf your way to a sensitive site and then walk away, leaving your device unlocked, there’s nothing to prevent someone from simply picking your device up and seeing what you’re doing, but as long as you take sensible precautions, incognito mode, especially with the new FaceID protection, provides some pretty solid protection.

If you’re interested in giving the new feature a go, simply open Chrome on your iOS device and enter “Chrome//flags” in the address bar, then press Go on the virtual keyboard. This will open the Chrome Experiments page. Once there, search for “Device Authentication for Incognito” and enable it. That done, close and reopen your browser, then go to Settings and Privacy to actually enable the feature and you’re all set.

If you decide you don’t want or need it after playing around with it, simply go back to the Settings and Privacy section and disable it.

It’s a very good addition, and if you value your privacy, then once you’ve tried it on for size, you’ll probably wonder how you ever got along without it. Kudos to Google for the addition. Try it. You’ll love it.

There Are Serious Benefits to Setting Up a Knowledge Base

If you are looking for a way to smooth out the edges of your business, consider putting together a knowledge base that includes all policies, procedures, and other information so it is readily accessible by the people that interact within and from outside your business. Businesses that have well-documented policies and procedures have a tendency to have less difficulty onboarding new hires, fewer operational problems, and can always provide access to resources needed by employees, customers, and vendors. Today we will give you a few tips on how to successfully create a working knowledge base.

Step #1 – Figure Out What Knowledge Is Needed

The first step to creating a useful knowledge base for your business is to truly understand what information should be included. If too much information is included or is not easily defined, the platform can actually be a hindrance and even become a problem. You will need to determine what information your audience will need and where there are gaps in knowledge with your day-to-day operations.

Think about it this way, if you want to create a knowledge base that caters to your customers and your staff, you will need to know what their various concerns are. What questions do they continually ask? What part of your business is most hindered by information requests? You’ll need to take into consideration what information they regularly need to know and plan the makeup of your knowledge base around that. 

Step #2 – Choose the Type of Knowledge Base You Will Be Focusing On

There are six types of knowledge bases: Internal, hosted, self-hosted, customer, external, and open-source. Each has benefits but may not work for your particular situation. You have to make a decision on how you want to forge ahead. Here is a little information about each type of knowledge base system

Internal – Used by employees only. This typically includes policies for your company as well as workflow procedures to give workers access to the information they need to be as productive and efficient as possible without having to rope other employees in.

Hosted – This is a knowledge base system that is hosted in the cloud for ease of use for employees, customers, and vendors alike. 

Self-hosted – This is a knowledge base system that works much like the hosted system, but is hosted on company-owned servers. This provides more control over security.

Customer – Used to provide information to customers only. Many businesses forgo this option with a simple FAQ, but it is a good resource for support.

External – This is a knowledge base system that is publicly available and accessible. This is a great resource for sales and marketing teams as they attempt to find new customers. 

Open-source – The open-source knowledge base, like a wiki, is one that anyone can edit. This typically isn’t a great option for small businesses, but for groups of people that are passionate about a subject, it can be one of the best types of knowledge base on the Internet.

Typically, companies will set up a hosted or self-hosted knowledge base if they plan on supporting information geared towards employees and customers. 

Step #3 – Create Content

Using the research you conducted in step one, get the experts inside your business to create the content for the knowledge base system. This can take some time, but the more thorough your knowledge base, the more resolutions you will be able to facilitate without productivity interruptions. When creating content for your knowledge base, you want to keep things simple as to not exacerbate people’s problems. You want to keep a question-and-answer-based system that is searchable. You want answers to be clear, readable, engaging and have the utility necessary to solve the problems that someone would need solved when accessing this database. 

Step #4 – Don’t Just Set It and Forget It

You will absolutely want to continue to update information as it becomes available. This becomes easier if you make efforts to add it into the workflow when circumstances change. Having a knowledge base filled with inaccurate information won’t do your business any good, so you will want to understand which material is accessed the most and keep adding to it so it represents the most up-to-date information possible. 

The knowledge base can be a major benefit for any business as it can cut down on support costs, keep workflows efficient, and help with training.

Give Net Activity a call at 216-503-5150 if you would like to have a conversation about setting up a knowledge base system for your business.

Don’t Be A Victim Of Watering Hole Attacks

With cybercriminals continuously developing new ways to infiltrate networks and steal user data, it is more crucial than ever to stay one step ahead of these perpetrators. Protect yourself from one of the most common methods that cybercriminals use to inject malware into computers: watering hole attacks.

The term “watering hole” colloquially refers to a social gathering place where a particular group of people often go to. As internet users, we all have unique “watering holes” or websites that we visit frequently. A financial analyst, for example, is likely to visit websites related to financial investments and market trends.

In a watering hole attack, cybercriminals observe the watering holes of a specific demographic and infect their most visited websites with malware. Any user who has the misfortune of visiting any of these compromised sites will then have their computers automatically loaded with malware.

The malware used in these attacks usually collects the victim’s personal information and sends it back to the hacker’s server. In extreme cases, the hacker will actively take control of the infected computer.

But how does a cybercriminal choose which websites to hack? With internet tracking tools, hackers find out which websites companies and individual users visit the most. They then attempt to find vulnerabilities in those websites and embed them with malicious software.

Hackers these days are so highly skilled that they can exploit any website using a watering hole attack. In fact, even high-profile organizations like Facebook, Forbes, and the US Department of Labor have fallen prey to this scheme in recent years.

Protect yourself from watering hole attacks by doing the following:

Update your software

Watering hole attacks often exploit security gaps and vulnerabilities to infiltrate computers and networks. By updating all your software and browsers regularly, you can significantly reduce the risk of an attack. Make it a habit to check the software developer’s website for any security patches. Or better yet, hire a managed IT services provider to keep your system up to date.

Watch your network closely

Regularly conduct security checks using your network security tools to detect watering hole attacks. Use tools like intrusion prevention systems that allow you to detect and contain suspicious or malicious network activities before they can cause problems. Meanwhile, bandwidth management software will enable you to observe user behavior and detect abnormalities that could indicate an attack, such as large transfers of information or a high number of downloads.

Hide your online activities

Cybercriminals can create more effective watering hole attacks if they compromise websites only you and your employees frequent. As such, you should hide your online activities with a VPN and your browser’s private browsing feature. Also, block social media sites from your office network, as these are often used as share points of links to infected sites.

Staying informed is one of the best ways to stay protected. As cyberthreats continue to evolve, it pays to be vigilant and aware of the newest threats. Tune in to our blog to find out about the latest developments in security and to get more tips on how to keep your business safe.

Update VMWare Software Immediately To Avoid Possible Attack

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency recently issued a warning to all companies running VMware Vcenter Server and VMware Cloud Foundation. They are asking them to download and apply the latest security patches as soon as possible because attackers are actively hunting for vulnerable servers.

On May 25th, VMware released a patch that corrected for two critical security flaws, either of which would allow for remote code execution. These two flaws, tracked as CVE-2021-21985 and CVE-2021-21986, both had severity ratings of 9.8 out of ten.

Unfortunately, the software vendor can only do so much. The simple truth is that even when patches are released, most of the people and organizations using the software are notoriously slow to update, which creates an often large window of opportunity that hackers can exploit.

In a recent VMware blog post, a company representative wrote:

“In this era of ransomware it is safest to assume that an attacker is already inside the network somewhere, on a desktop and perhaps even in control of a user account, which is why we strongly recommend declaring an emergency change and patching as soon as possible.”

It’s a grim outlook, but the central point of the blog post is certainly valid. In any case, the CISA has issued formal recommendations that include patching right away and reviewing VMware’s advisory on the matter, as well as the FAQ the company published on their website relating to the matter.

All of that is sound advice, so if you use any of the VMware products mentioned above and if you want to minimize your risks, you know what to do. Here’s hoping that we can get the word out quickly enough to prevent attacks via this avenue. It would be nice to hand the hackers a decisive defeat.