New Enhancements To Look For With Windows 11

With Windows 10 installed in over a billion devices, the success of this operating system (OS) is going to be hard to replicate. However, that isn’t stopping Microsoft from trying to prove itself once again with its new OS, Windows 11. The new OS has new features that can help business owners and managers keep their IT infrastructure competitive.

Security features

Windows 11 continues what its predecessor has been doing, which is to provide apps that boost security and grant control over security and privacy settings.

OS LEVEL: SECURITY BASELINES

Security requirements differ among different industries and organizations. For instance, a hospital must be HIPAA-compliant and maintain the privacy of patients’ health information, whereas a phone manufacturer would want to safeguard the fruits of its R&D department. Given the multitude of controls to set, security baselines help firms configure their own granular security settings and apply industry standards.

APP LEVEL: WINDOWS APPLICATION SECURITY

When malware-laced apps and files are opened, malicious code may be executed alongside innocuous programming. Microsoft is well aware of how hackers abuse Office macros and turn these into cyberattack vectors, so it developed Windows application security to thwart such threats.

DEVICE LEVEL: MICROSOFT DEFENDER FOR ENDPOINT AND ENDPOINT MANAGER

Defender for Endpoint is a security platform that keeps networks protected by detecting, analyzing, and responding to all types of cyberthreats. On the other hand, Endpoint Manager is an administrative tool for enforcing security compliance policies across all devices on your network. It helps an IT admin prevent data breaches and minimize their impact by isolating compromised devices.

USER AND IDENTITY LEVEL: WINDOWS HELLO FOR BUSINESS

As a security tool, passwords are obsolete because of how these have become easy to steal. Windows Hello for Business protects your organization at the end-user level by replacing passwords with biometrics or PINs that are kept locally in users’ devices.

Hybrid work innovations, productivity enhancements, and other helpful features

These innovations help users accomplish their tasks and provide nice-to-have conveniences:

VIRTUAL DESKTOPS

Whether employees use company-issued devices or their own, they tend to use these for both work and personal tasks. Personal apps, files, and activities increase your organization’s exposure to cybersecurity risks, while the converse is also true: work apps, files, and activities may also expose an employee’s personal accounts to cybersecurity risks.

With virtual desktops, users can compartmentalize the professional and the personal by creating a separate desktop for each one. This separation helps limit the impact of a cybersecurity event to the affected desktop. Plus, compartmentalization has the added benefit of helping employees avoid personal distractions while at work, and unplug from work when their shift is over.

WINDOWS AUTOPILOT

Autopilot automatically takes care of preparing a Windows PC or HoloLens 2 for use whenever you issue one to an employee. Just have the employee sign in to their account, then Autopilot automatically does the following in the background:

• Enrolls the device into Endpoint Manager, which then deploys work apps like Microsoft Teams
• Applies policies and settings
• Has the device join either Azure Active Directory or Active Directory

Autopilot can also be used to reset, repurpose, and recover machines.

Everything mentioned thus far can all be done without ever involving your IT admins, thereby allowing them to focus more on higher-value tasks.

WIDGETS

If there’s info that you consume regularly, such as news and weather reports, it’d be convenient to have a repository you can open with just one click. That’s what Widgets is for. Simply click on its icon on the taskbar to access your very own personalized information feed — no need to manually search in web browsers.

Widgets can also contain small apps like calendars and calculators. These apps are ready to be used and do not need to be launched separately.

SNAP LAYOUTS

Snap layouts allow users to arrange app windows for when they’re using multiple apps simultaneously on a single screen. To illustrate, a data analyst may place two data sources on the left side of the screen while they work on their report in a spreadsheet on the right side.

Users can save a particular grouping of apps or layout into a Snap Group. This means that they can save a Snap Group for every task that requires a different set of apps. Therefore, when a user wants to perform a certain task, they can just open the related Snap Group to select the apps they need for that task. This is much faster than opening apps individually and setting your preferred layout every time. Furthermore, if a user has created multiple Snap Groups, they can easily switch to another Group when they have to perform a different task.

POWER AUTOMATE

With Power Automate, users with practically no coding experience can leverage robotic process automation or RPA to automate repetitive processes and make their work tasks a lot easier. All a user has to do is to select from Power Automate’s 400-plus premade actions and utilize a recorder to keep track of keyboard functions and mouse actions. To illustrate, you can create automated email alerts that notify your team whenever a client submits a form, or you can automatically place purchase orders whenever supplies breach minimum quantity thresholds.

If you wish to deploy Windows 11 in your organization, let Net Activity’s IT experts help you out. Tell us more about your business requirements today.

Is Your Employees’ Social Media Behavior Impacting Your Business?

Social media: love it or hate it, it has transitioned from a casual pastime to a business necessity in the relatively few years it has been around. However, as beneficial as it can be to your business’ efforts, it can easily have the opposite effect if it isn’t used appropriately. 

Let’s explore this increasingly complicated topic, including what needs to be done to ensure that your business’s social media presence isn’t actually harming its success. We recommend that you also share this information with your employees, even directing them to this blog to read it for themselves.

What Are You (and Your Employees) Comfortable with Sharing?

It is fair to say that a business is representative of the people who work in it and vice versa. This is why it is so important to establish a culture within your organization beyond a unified stance on cybersecurity or the ways that you keep your team members motivated. 

This relationship is also precisely why it is so crucial for there to be an understanding of appropriate social media use.

While we’ve long been proponents of maintaining a proper work/life balance—especially when working from home—some elements simply can’t be completely separated from one another. One of these elements is the impression that can be generated in response to behavior on social media… whether it’s the behavior presented on your business’ official profile, or on the personal profiles that your employees maintain for themselves.

This behavior can result in serious consequences that directly affect the business’ success, which means that you will need to address this behavior to the best of your ability… even if that ultimately means that an employee is let go for what they’ve posted on social media.

“This Sounds Like an Infringement of My First Amendment Rights!”

Many would argue that the first adjustment made to the United States Constitution would bar an employer from restricting what an employee can say on social media or terminating their employment due to their online activity. As it turns out, this is not the case.

For the sake of clarification, let’s consider the actual text involved in Amendment I:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

While the Amendment strictly bars Congress from legislating control over the populace in these matters, nothing there dictates that a business cannot prohibit an employee from publicizing a particular view or that bars the business from levying out consequences should these views be publicized. In plain English, the First Amendment applies to the government and the government alone. Businesses can set conduct expectations as they please.

Speaking of which, it is important to outline a few practices that your team members should follow as they engage on their social media accounts (and that you should subscribe to with your business’s social media activity as well). While social media grants an incredible amount of power, it also comes with great responsibility and consequences.

Social Media Practices Every Business (and User) Needs to Follow

Be Extra Considerate About Images and Other Media You Post

There are a few reasons that everyone associated with a business needs to think before they share something online. Let’s consider the business side of things first.

Have you ever taken a photo that looked passable enough at first glance but featured something that you would have really rather not preserved in a photograph on further inspection? The Internet is filled with such unintentional photobombs, making it clear that even glaring details can be missed at the moment.

For example, when in the office, sharing pictures of your team hard at work or otherwise interacting with one another can help personalize your team and engage your social media followers that much more. However, if sensitive data happens to be visible on a screen in an image, your social media account would suddenly be classifiable as a data leak.

As for your team members, make sure they are cognizant of their role as a representation of your business as a whole. Even in their off-hours, they remain one of your team members, so sharing inappropriate images on their social media ultimately reflects poorly on your organization as well. 

Remember That the Internet Never Really Forgets

Even when it’s posted on a personal account, the content that your team members share reflects on your business as well. Unfortunately, if someone enjoys stirring the pot online, any ill feelings felt about them could leach back to your business’ reputation by proxy… and even if they delete their more inflammatory posts at some point, they won’t really be completely gone. The reality is that there are dangerous consequences of posting pics.

This also ties back to our previous point, in that an employee talking too freely on social media about their work could easily expose data and information that should have remained private. Regardless of the time they are using social media, they need to keep the workplace in mind and conduct themselves accordingly.

Keep a Level Head

Likewise, social media is not the place to lose one’s temper, either as a representative of oneself or of a business. As we’ve established, online trolls are a very real thing, and it isn’t unheard of for people to get fired up about a difference in opinion. While I wish I didn’t have to say it, a business should never lash out at anyone online. There’s a difference between getting angry, and simply caring a whole lot and expressing it appropriately. Your business and, once again by proxy, your team members should always default to the latter option.

Don’t Share Your Passwords

Seriously, just don’t. Also, you and your team members should be following the same best practices at home as we recommend in the office—using a different password for each proof of identity, ensuring that these passwords are strong enough, and otherwise boosting how effective your authentication measures are. While passwords may not be totally effective on their own at preventing breaches, there is no reason to make it simple for an unauthorized person to get in.

Watch Out for Phishing Attempts

While phishing may be most commonly associated with email, social media posts and ads can also be used to swindle an employee. Your team needs to understand more than just how to spot a potential phishing attack… they need to be aware that these kinds of attacks can come from all angles.

This is Why You Need to Establish a Social Media Policy

Like any other of your business’ assorted requirements, your team members should be made aware of the expectations you have of their conduct on these platforms while they are under your employ. Not only should this policy lay out the rules they are to follow, but it should also clearly describe the consequences of noncompliance. While this may seem excessive, you must insulate your business from untoward influence or scrutiny by association.

It is not unusual for team members to not understand where the lines are and how much leeway an employer has. For example, many remote workers wonder whether or not their boss can monitor their work habits via a webcam. The answer to this question is based on many factors, most importantly what you agreed to when you signed your employment agreement. The same concept applies to your social media presence.

While there will never be a perfectly clean split between an individual’s professional and personal life, you should still try to encourage your team members to separate them as much as possible… particularly on social media.

Why All Businesses Should Implement a Virtual Private Network

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations were forced to transition to remote work, even though they would have preferred to keep operations within the office. While the transition was rough at first, these organizations may have found that remote work offers certain flexibilities that were impossible in the traditional office environment. That said, one looming threat was (and still is) a major concern for the remote workplace: security.

One of the major ways businesses can protect their organization while working remotely is through the use of a virtual private network or VPN.

What is a VPN?

When you connect your device to a virtual private network, what exactly is happening to the connection? It’s actually much more simple than it sounds; what it boils down to is that the device connects to an encrypted network over the Internet. This encryption allows for the secure transfer of data to and from the device, preventing onlookers from observing (or stealing) the data.

Think about it like looking at a pipe that is transferring something to and from a location. If the outside of the pipe is solid, onlookers cannot see what is in the pipe. When it is clear, you can see exactly what is inside it. Encryption in this case acts as an opaque pipe, obfuscating contents to the point where they cannot be seen clearly, but you still know that something is there. In VPN terminology, the pipe in the above scenario is referred to as a “tunnel.”

How Does It Help Your Business?

You can see how this would benefit the remote employee. Since the employee is not in-house working on the company network, they do not have access to the in-house security solutions that you may have implemented to keep your data safe. This is why encryption is so necessary; if you fail to protect your company’s assets through unsecured connections to your network, you are unnecessarily risking your company’s future.

Now, think about the possibilities that open up when you don’t have to worry about network security while out of the office. Employees can travel for business trips (when it’s safe to do so, of course) without fear of data being stolen while communicating with your home office. They can perform work from anywhere at any time, allowing for enhanced productivity without sacrificing security. They will not need to rely on public Wi-Fi connections or other unsecured networks to connect to your office.

We don’t want to beat a dead horse, but it just makes sense to implement a VPN from a security and longevity standpoint.

Get Started with a VPN Today

If you are ready to take the leap and implement a virtual private network for your business, don’t wait any longer. Net Activity can help you deploy a solution that is specific to the needs of your organization. We’ll work with you to get the most secure solution at the best price point. To learn more about how a virtual private network can benefit your business, reach out to us at 216-503-5150.