COVID-19

Should I Go, Or Should I Wait? Re-opening Tips

June 23, 2020

Stay at home orders are being lifted, businesses are beginning to reopen. Our world is being turned on its head again, and normal will never be the same again.

As we begin to reopen our doors and essentially relaunch our businesses, here are some things to think about to get you started.

Be very careful about what and where you make cost cuts
Uncertainty naturally causes us to restrict, and this is by no means bad. You may have to make cuts in order to get things back on their feet. But Inc Magazine contributor, Graham Winfrey, cautions to you make those cuts wisely.

In his interview with Manny Cosme, the CEO and President of a CFO and Bookkeeping business, he was advised to make projections before you make cuts. Cosme said that businesses need to think about growing their way out of the crisis.

He said, “Every cut that you make is going to cut your ability to generate revenue or keep your business going, which is not something you want to be doing right now.” So think very carefully about what, and even if, you are going to make any cuts as you reopen.

Look closely at your business model
No matter how much we wish we could just go back to the way things were, we have all experienced significant changes over the last few weeks. Nothing feels better than returning to some sort of normalcy.

But one thing we have learned over this global health crisis is the ability of the entrepreneur and the business owner to pivot and meet their consumers’ needs where they are. Changing your business model in light of the pandemic just might be what saves your business.

Graham Winfrey suggests you ask yourself 3 questions:

● What should your business model be when you come out of this?
● Is your current business model viable? If so, how can you hang on until it’s viable again?
● Are there ways you can pivot all of your expertise into a better revenue stream?

Along with his panelist in the article on Inc, Cosme believes that it comes down to changing one or more of the following within your business model:

● What you sell
● Whom you sell it to
● How you deliver it

Evaluate local support options
Throughout this crisis, many federal and local supports have been extended to small business and their employees. Graham suggests that you look to your local chamber of commerce to see what local support programs may have been crafted to help you as you reopen your doors.

Create policies to ensure the safety of both your employees and customers
After you have completed the above steps, now you should create your communication plan for letting your customers know you will be open for business.

George Brandt in his article in Forbes suggests you approach it in three steps: Emotional, rational, and inspirational.

Be authentic
George suggests that you connect with your audience in an authentic, relatable and compassionate way.

Empathize with your consumer that you know this was difficult for them as well as for you. George quotes PrimeGenesis’ saying, “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.”

Lay out the facts
With calm composure, polite and authoritative, lay out the hard facts of the current situation. For them and for you.

George defines the facts as “things that any rational person would agree are true no matter what bias or perspective they bring to the situation – objective, scientific truths as opposed to subjective, personal, cultural or political truths, opinions or conclusions.”

Think ahead and paint an optimistic view
George recommends that you ground all your communication with Mayfield and Mayfield’s meaning-making and direction-giving language, meaning providing purpose and value: be – do – say.

The New Normal COVID-19 Office Security

June 23, 2020

With continued WFH policies and multiplied COVID-19 scams and threats, the importance of good cyber security stands out. Indeed, with a workforce that is highly dependent on digital services for the foreseeable future, the new normal COVID-19 office security is necessarily stronger, more vigilant, and more dispersed.

Yet, a lot of questions remain unanswered. For example, will behavioral surveillance be part of the new normal? As organizations plan to implement contact tracing, privacy advocates voice their concerns.

Given the uncertainty, we expect to see these non-intrusive measures with clearly defined benefits coming to the new normal.

Thermal cameras for passive temperature checking
The advantages of temperature detection for a business COVID-19 strategy include early discovery and reporting leading to early isolation and treatment.

Advanced temperature detection technology is not a substitute for medical grade FDA approved thermometers. The advantage of an advanced thermal camera system is that it can pick out personnel with abnormal body temperatures in heavy traffic areas to be assessed later by a professional with medically approved equipment.

These systems use an HD video camera and thermal camera side by side looking at the same field of view. The resulting video and metadata output, when combined with advanced artificial intelligence, gives sensible temperature data on multiple objects simultaneously.

Some systems employ facial detection technology paired with a face database and a high temperature detection alarm. They can identify up to 16 targets with a temperature accuracy of .54° F and come with an easy to use interface.

In-office security cameras
Also likely to become more common, in-office security cameras provide a video record of events. They function as a tool to answer concerns about what happened if a COVID-19 behavioral complaint surfaces. The societal resistance to surveillance will likely be counter-balanced by the desire to maintain a safe work environment.

Plexiglas barriers
Plexiglas® extruded acrylic sheets promote both worker and consumer safety to help control the spread of the virus.

Sneeze guards made from Plexiglas make sense. So, it is logical to see their use extended in the office to create barriers between closely seated workers. We’ll see them in other areas to promote social distancing.

Health questions
The CDC recently issued guidance recommending that employers actively encourage sick employees to stay home. Interpreting this guidance, the EEOC confirmed that the rules of the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act continue to apply but do not prevent employers from following guidelines from the CDC and other public health authorities regarding COVID-19.

Per the EEOC’s guidance, employers may ask employees who report feeling ill at work, or who call in sick, questions about their symptoms to determine if they may have COVID-19. In addition, they may require employees to stay home if they have COVID-19 symptoms, screen applicants for symptoms of COVID-19, delay the start date or withdraw the offer of an applicant with symptoms.

Thus, employers may find it necessary to ask employees about their symptoms. They might require notification of high body temperatures, and request disclosure of recent proximity to individuals who have tested positive for COVID-19. In doing so, they must be mindful to do it consistently and avoid discriminatory use of the results.

To simplify the process and avoid collecting unnecessary information, employers may simply ask employees to stay home if they show certain symptoms, rather than asking them about the specific symptoms they have.

Work from home security
The WFH new normal creates multiple security challenges that must be addressed. From simple provisioning issues like shredders for employees handling sensitive documents to updated incident response plans, new circumstances demand new security responses.

For example, the company’s business continuity plan should be updated to address new fail-over and backup procedures. Also, the difficulty of securing and verifying credentials in a remote environment will encourage the use of multifactor authentication.

In addition, with less physical oversight of employees, organizations may need to focus more on user activity. Access logs and user behavior analysis come to mind. Increased threats require increased employee education. And, employees also need to know how to report security risks or threats through all the currently used communication channels (in addition to email).

How To Set Up And Maintain A Secure, Remote Work Environment To Overcome The COVID19 Pandemic

May 30, 2020

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

“We are in this together.” We can’t say that enough. It’s not you, and I, but US.

Information technology and communications providers are considered essential services in this unprecedented time, and we take our role seriously. We are here to help, and we ask you (no, implore you) to reach out with any technology-related questions as you work to transition from a central office to a remote employee environment.

As you prepare (or maybe you already have transitioned) for remote work environments, many of which will need to be done by the individual who will be working there, we developed this list of 10 things to keep in mind to secure a remote work environment on the fly.

Invest in antivirus software for all employee devices
Yes, technically it is your employee’s devices and these are usually outside of the typical IT circle. But with these circumstances coming about quickly, there may not have been time to follow your normal procurement cycle to get the specific equipment your employees need to remain productive while working from home. That means they will be working from their own device, and they may or may not be as cognizant of your security measures.

So a good rule of thumb is to work to ensure that all employees utilize antivirus software. Many ISPs (Internet service providers) also offer free antivirus software with their service, and we would encourage you to take full advantage. There are several ways you can handle this and we invite you to give us a call to see what will work best for your organization. [Read more…] about How To Set Up And Maintain A Secure, Remote Work Environment To Overcome The COVID19 Pandemic

Working From Home? Probably The “New Normal”

April 30, 2020

I hope that you and your family (and pets) are safe and sound and doing as well as can be expected. This is an extraordinary time for all of us, and the very embodiment of the ancient Chinese aphorism “may you live in interesting times.” We surely do.

Our team is mixed between working in the office and working from home, and everyone is doing a great job. We initially saw a huge increase in our ticket volume as our client’s teams prepared to work from home but that’s tapered off in the last week to a pretty normal level of activity.

If you had to wait for help, please accept my personal apology for the inconvenience – while we have plans to handle client disasters, I never anticipated something as far-reaching as the current pandemic.

The “new normal”

If the politicians and experts are to be believed, many of the changes we’ve had to make to slow the spread of this virus are going to be around for quite a while, at least until we have an effective vaccine for COVID-19. From an IT perspective, that means more of your team will probably be working remotely. And that presents a new kind and new level of security exposure for your company. [Read more…] about Working From Home? Probably The “New Normal”

Designing A Comprehensive Security Plan For Your Company

April 30, 2020

After years of being in the industry and watching the evolution of cyberattacks, we feel that there are 13 critical pieces to any cybersecurity plan that we, as your managed service provider, should implement. They are:

Two-factor/Multi-factor authentication

Two-factor authentication is probably the most widely misunderstood security solution, but a critical and effective part of every cybersecurity strategy.

Two-factor authentication is just how it sounds: two separate layers of security. The first is a typical username and password log-in with the addition of a secondary level that looks for something you know, something you have, or something on your body (e.g., fingerprint).

Here are some stats you should know that describe the critical need for two-factor authentication:

90% of passwords can be cracked in less than six hours.
Two-thirds of people use the same password everywhere.
Sophisticated cyberattackers have the power to test billions of passwords every second.

This sobering reality is why we require two-factor or multi-factor authentication for all of our employees and users of our system, and we highly recommend that you do too.

Password management

The main reason people use the same password everywhere is because it’s impossible to keep track of hundreds of usernames and passwords across various devices and systems.

A secure password is a unique, hard-to-guess one, so it’s understandable why users resort to the use of the same password for each site. This is why we have a password management program built into our procedures. The password manager program generates unique, complex passwords for each site or program then securely stores them in the management program.

When one of our staff needs credentials, they use the master password to open their database of passwords and obtain the login information they need, making it easy to “remember” a complex password and significantly reduce the risk of a breach.

Security risk assessment

A security risk assessment involves reviewing your technology and how you use it, followed by the implementation of security improvements and preventive measures.

The assessment should be performed at a minimum of one time per year, if not more. A full security assessment includes the following pieces:

Identification – When performing a security risk assessment, we first need to take inventory of all of your critical information technology equipment, then determine what sensitive data is created, stored, or transmitted through these devices and create a risk profile for each.

Assessment – This step takes identification to the next level. To complete the assessment step, we need to identify the security risks to each critical asset and determine the most effective and efficient way to allocate time and resources to mitigation.

Mitigation – This is where we solve problems. We have specifically defined a mitigation approach for each potential risk in our network and what security controls will be initiated in case of a breach.

Prevention – We have specific tools and processes to minimize the risk of threats against us and our network in order to help keep you safe.

Information security plan

There is a significant need to safeguard any information that is collected, transmitted, used, and stored within information systems, so the development of an information security plan is crucial. We take this very seriously. We have taken steps to document a plan and designed systems to secure our and our clients’ sensitive business data.

A security program is essentially about risk management, including identifying, quantifying and mitigating risks to computers and data. There are some essential basic steps to risk management:

Identify the Assets – Beyond generating a list of all the hardware and software within the infrastructure, assets also include any data that is processed and stored on these devices.

Assign value – Every asset, including data, has a value and there are two approaches that can be taken to develop the value: qualitative and quantitative. “Quantitative” assigns a financial value to each asset and compares it to the cost of the counter-measure. “Qualitative” places the threats and security measures of the assets and sets a rank by use of a scoring system.

Identify risks and threats to each asset – Threats to the system go beyond malicious actors attempting to access your data and extend to any event that has the potential to harm the asset. Events like lightning strikes, tornados, hurricanes, floods, human error, or terrorist attacks should also be examined as potential risks.

Estimate potential loss and frequency of attack of those assets – This step depends on the location of the asset. For those operating in the Midwest, the risk of a hurricane causing damage is extremely low while the risk of a tornado would be high.

Recommend countermeasures or other remedial activities – By the end of the above steps, the items that need improvement should become fairly obvious. At this point, you can develop security policies and procedures.

Policies and procedures (internal & external) – A crucial part of an effective cybersecurity plan is the policies and procedures, both for internal assets and external assets. You can’t have one without the other. A general description can be thought of as this: a policy is the “rule” and a procedure is the “how.” With this in mind, a policy would be to effectively secure corporate data with strong passwords. The procedure would be to use multi-factor authentication.

Cybersecurity insurance and data breach financial liability – CyberInsureOne defines cybersecurity insurance as “a product that is offered to individuals and businesses in order to protect them from the effects and consequences of online attacks.”

Cybersecurity insurance can help your business recover in the event of a cyberattack, providing such services as public relations support and funds to draw against to cover any financial losses. It’s something that your MSP should carry as well as your own business.

And just like business liability and auto liability insurance, it is paramount that your business (as well as your MSP) covers themselves with data breach financial liability insurance to cover any event that may be attributed to their activities causing a breach.

Data access management – Access management is determining who is and who isn’t allowed access to certain assets and information, such as administrative accounts.

This is critical for your business as it enables control over who has access to your corporate data, especially during times of employee turnover. Other benefits include increased regulatory compliance, reduced operating costs, and reduced information security risks.

Security awareness training (with phishing training) – Phishing is the number one attack vector today with over 90,000 new attacks launched every month. If your provider is not actively participating in security and phishing awareness training, they will be unable to keep you up on the latest trends in how these malicious actors are attempting to gain access to your businesses data.

Data encryption – At its basic level, data encryption translates data into a different form, making it readable only by the starting and ending points and only with the appropriate password. Encryption is currently considered one of the most effective security measures in use as it is nearly impossible for an outside force to crack.

Next Gen antivirus and firewall – Antivirus is software designed to detect and neutralize any infection that does attempt to access the device and should be on every endpoint.

Many providers are marketing their software as “next generation,” but true next generation antivirus includes features such as exploit techniques (blocking a process that is exploiting or using a typical method of bypassing a normal operation), application whitelisting (a process for validating and controlling everything a program is allowed to do), micro-virtualization (blocks direct execution of a process, essentially operating the program in its own virtual operating system), artificial intelligence (blocking or detecting viruses the same way as a human user could), and EDR/Forensics (using a large data set from endpoint logs, packets, and processes to find out what happened after the fact).

Next generation firewalls also include additional capabilities above the traditional firewall, including intrusion protection, deep packet inspection, SSL-Encrypted traffic termination, and sandboxing.

Business continuity plan – This is a process surrounding the development of a system to manage prevention and recovery from potential threats to a business. A solid business continuity plan includes the following:

Policy, purpose, and scope
Goals
Assumptions
Key roles responsibilities
A business impact analysis
Plans for risk mitigation
Data and storage requirements that are offsite
Business recovery strategies
Alternate operating plans
Evaluation of outside vendors’ readiness
Response and plan activation
Communication plan
Drills and practice sessions
Regular re-evaluation of the current plan

Your MSP should be able to provide you with a copy of what is included in their plan and how it will affect your business if they do encounter a business continuity event, as well as their backup plan to maintain your critical business infrastructure.

Email security layers – In short, layers limit risk. Email security layers include tactics such as two-factor authentication and spam filters at the basic level (which give your employees time to evaluate a potential threat by removing the words “urgent” or “do right now” from internal subject lines).

As your managed service provider, we are dedicated to helping you maintain effective cybersecurity through these advanced tactics, as well as through a consultative, trusted advisor relationship. You are more than just a number to us and we will do everything in our power to help keep your business safe and running smoothly.

Working Remotely: Changes Amid The Outbreak

April 30, 2020

Jason Cooley is Support Services Manager for Tech Experts.

It was early March when Microsoft decided to mandate its employees work remotely. Over a month since then, the world has not yet “bounced” back.

It’s still looking like we haven’t seen the worst of things to come. Many industries are closed altogether. Others are running with reduced staff. More people than we can count are out of work and seeking unemployment.

Unless your position called for travel, working remotely wasn’t something many people would consider. However, there is no normal right now, and many people find themselves working from home for the first time.

Not all industries can manage it. There are front liners that have to work. Sure, you can likely do a video appointment with your doctor, but doctors are still seeing patients.

Food service, gas station, and grocery store employees are all critical and in-person jobs that are going to work on a daily basis.

Insurance companies and accounting offices? Their employees are probably very important to a lot of people right now. Their jobs are unlikely to be reliant on a central location.

A computer with web access can be enough to get you through in some situations, and other times, you need access to resources on your corporate network. Different people have different needs. In some cases, people are learning what they need and how to get it as they go.

As someone working in the IT industry, a fair portion of my normal work is done remotely. The only difference is my physical location. I can make calls, remotely assist clients, resolve issues, and carry on like a typical day at the office.

Many are not so lucky. The world doesn’t stop running, and being under quarantine is creating some unique situations. People who have never worked from home suddenly are.

Non-critical business is on hold, but the justice system isn’t on complete shutdown. Different cities and states are still working with its judges to get things done. There are certainly some instances of cities where they have the infrastructure in place to do telecourt appearances. There are others that are trying to put systems in place to be able to operate and hear cases.

While it is likely that some criminal cases will be put on hold, other court matters, like custody cases, can’t always wait indefinitely.

With such uncertainty, some judges are doing Zoom meetings just to make sure that the world does keep moving around us.

Meeting apps like Zoom are being used more and more frequently as people attempt to find ways to host meetings. Skype, Discord, and just about anything else have been used in a pinch to try to make ends meet.

Technology can be daunting, especially when new concepts like virtual meetings or VPNs are introduced.

People trying to use a webcam and mic or remote connection for the first time can get frustrated; it can be hard enough when we’re not facing a global pandemic. Having a technology partner like Tech Experts can ease the transition (and your mind) in these trying times.

There are many things to be learned from this entire situation, though, and many things are sure to change. One thing is for sure: we will all likely be a little more comfortable with the idea of working from home in the future, should we need to.

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