Start 2021 Off Right with These 5 Business Technology Resolutions

For many, the Holiday Season is a time to look back and reflect on the year gone by – and what a year it was! It is also a time to look forward, plan, and consider how we can do better in the coming year. Often, this results in making resolutions for the new year. In that spirit, let us consider five technology resolutions that you might consider adopting for 2021.

1. Use the Internet to its Full Extent

The Internet offers businesses of all sizes a huge number of benefits, of all different kinds. Not only can you use social media to interact directly with your customer base, but you can also attract their attention and pitch your business as an option to them by maintaining a website.

Operationally, the Internet can also support you by enabling you to access cloud-based services and data storage. The advantages to leveraging these services cannot be understated. With cloud-based software, you aren’t committing to repeated investments into your software solutions to make sure they are sufficiently updated and secure. Cloud storage allows you to mitigate the risk of data loss by keeping a copy offsite… a key component to our recommended business continuity planning.

As soon as possible in this coming year, figure out what is out there that would benefit your business the most, and take advantage of it.

2. Simplify Your Business Management

On the topic, there are many software solutions out there that can help simplify—if not outright automate—many of the processes and procedures that your business relies upon to function.

How well do you track your relationships with your individual clients and customers? How cohesive are the systems that allow you to manage the many facets of your business? Are your team members using the most efficient means to complete their workflows, whatever they may be?

From Customer Relationship Management to Enterprise Resource Planning, to various other productivity-focused software solutions, your business’ operations can be made easier and more productive by embracing the tools now accessible to you. Investigate your greatest needs and find the software that can help you fulfill them.

3. Equip Work-From-Home Team Members Appropriately

In the understatement of the century, 2020 was a year of unprecedented business change. At the outset of the pandemic, business leaders told millions of workers to “pack up your computer, take it home, and figure out how to work from there.” And these team members did an outstanding job of making the best of the situation. Along the way, many realized they prefer to work from home and will continue to do so in the future. Therefore, the third of our five technology resolutions center on remote team members. We must ensure that our remote workers have the equipment and tools necessary for the “new normal.” Stated differently, they need to be at least as productive at home as they were in the office.

In addition to addressing hardware issues and fast and secure internet connections, also carefully consider issues such as desks and chairs.  Remember, employers typically have a responsibility to ensure that team members have the equipment they need to get their jobs done efficiently and safely. In most cases, workers’ compensation laws still apply, even if a team member works from home. Hence, it remains necessary to address workstation setup and safety measures, including those related to ergonomics. Further, do not let relatively inexpensive technology expenditures hamper productivity. For example, purchasing an inexpensive scanner or other hardware devices may pay big dividends in increased productivity for team members working from home or other remote locations.

4. Be More Secure

Regardless of how much (or how little) your business relies on technology, cybersecurity needs to be one of your biggest areas of concern. Remember how we mentioned solutions that could automate your processes? Cybercriminals have those, too, making no business too small of a threat to pique their interest.

Due to this, you need to proactively establish and enforce security parameters to counter these activities… which will require you to invest in cybersecurity-focused solutions. In addition to this, you’ll also need to establish a security policy to match. Enforcing solid password practices, access limitations, and other rules for your team to abide by will result in a more secure business moving forward.

5. Keep Your Team “In the Know”

Finally, for any of these improvements to take, you need to keep your team updated and bought into these concepts. By focusing on the benefits that these improvements will offer to the business, and by extension their workplace experience, your team will be more likely to adopt them. Without this crucial step, your business’ capacity to improve will be limited.

Net Activity can directly assist you with many of these steps, in addition to providing our ongoing IT maintenance and management services. To learn more about what we could do for you, reach out to our team at 216-503-5150. Happy New Year!

Windows 10 features You Really Need to Know Now

Configure Windows 10 to suit your needs with the following tips. These will help raise productivity and improve your overall user experience.

Night light

This feature lets you reduce the amount of blue light emitted from your screen, which helps reduce eye strain and boost sleep efficiency. Night Light is disabled by default, so you need to enable it by following these steps:

1. Click the Start Menu.
2. Open the Settings app (or press the Windows key + I to quickly open Settings).
3. Select the System icon followed by the Display option in the left-hand pane.
4. Set Night light to “On” or “Off.”

Taskbar pin

Opening browsers and typing in web addresses are simple tasks as they were, but Windows 10’s taskbar pin feature makes it even easier than before. This is an essential shortcut for anyone who relies on specific web-based apps such as email or company intranets. Simply right click on the app or document you wish to gain easy access to and choose “Pin to Taskbar”.

Organize your open windows

Do you struggle to organize a screen cluttered with open windows? Holding the Windows key and pressing an arrow should solve most of your problems:

1. Windows key + Left – Resize the current window’s width to half the size of the screen and align it to the left
2. Windows key + Right – Resize the current window’s width to half the size of the screen and align it to the right
3. Windows key + Up – Maximize the current window to fit the entire screen
4. Windows key + Down – Downsize the current window

When none of those keys are enough to set you straight, holding the Windows key and pressing the Tab button will show you all the apps you currently have open.

Focus Assist

Notifications are frustratingly distracting. Windows 10’s Focus Assist feature helps you tackle this issue by customizing which contacts and applications can interrupt you during predetermined periods of time. Try it out by:

1. Opening the Settings window
2. Clicking the System icon
3. Selecting Focus Assist from the left-hand pane
4. Adjusting the notifications settings based on your preference

If you want to disable Focus Assist and receive all notifications, simply click Off.

These are just a few of our favorites. For more software and productivity recommendations, give our experts a call today.

Microsoft Teams Has Added Several New Features

Since the start of the pandemic, Microsoft has been working at a furious pace to add new features to Teams. It has become one of the company’s most widely used services, allowing remote employees to communicate seamlessly with each other. Continuing that trend, the Redmond giant has recently added yet more new features, including a call transfer function, anti-spam protections, CarPlay support, a streamlined calling experience, and more.

In short, the latest version is just all-around easier to use, with a new screen that allows for easy access of your call history, voicemails, your contacts, and the software’s settings. On top of that, Teams admins now have the ability to change the default recording storage location, using either SharePoint or OneDrive instead of Stream.

The new CarPlay feature is simply invaluable if you spend a lot of time on the road and want to be able to join meetings in progress while you’re driving. If your car has built in WiFi controls and you can speak with Siri while you’re driving, you can leverage those controls to place and answer calls inside Teams.

In addition to all of that, the company has announced that by early next year, Teams users will gain the ability to transfer calls between your desktop PC and your mobile devices via the Teams app. This will allow you to merge calls, preserve data and work more seamlessly than ever before.

Another new feature on the horizon is the reverse number lookup, which will allow you to grab the name of the caller, assuming you don’t already know it. This also assumes that you’re not disconnected when you transfer the call to someone else and that person isn’t available.

Overall, if you’re a Teams user, there’s a lot to like in the most recent updates and in the rumors we’ve been hearing about what’s next for the app. Kudos to Microsoft for a whole spate of excellent recent additions.

SolarWinds Hack – Everything You Need to Know About The Largest Cyber Attack of All Time

True to form, 2020 gave us a final parting gift: the news that the United States was targeted this year by the biggest cyberespionage attack ever. Let’s go into the ramifications of this attack, and what it should teach us going forward.

 How Did the Attack Happen?

In short, an IT management company known as SolarWinds was breached back in March, affecting a massive number of organizations—18,000 in all. These organizations include the likes of Microsoft, Cisco, and FireEye, as well as many states and federal organizations, including:

• The U.S. Department of State
• The U.S. Department of the Treasury
• The U.S. Department of Homeland Security
• The U.S. Department of Energy
• The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration
• The National Institutes of Health, of the U.S. Department of Health
• The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration

When the attackers gained access to SolarWinds’ network, they were able to use what is known as a supply chain attack to introduce their malware to these departments and organizations by pushing it through the company’s automatic software update system for their Orion products. These kinds of attacks can be particularly effective since the threat is introduced to an environment via a trusted application.

Making this situation worse, many SolarWinds customers had excluded Orion products from their security checks on SolarWinds’ recommendation to prevent their other security products from shutting them down due to the malware signatures that these security products contain.

While (at the time of this writing) it is unclear what the attackers responsible used this access to do, the potential ramifications are truly terrifying. While government departments were targeted, it also needs to be said that this attack could have potentially continued from the major providers like Microsoft and Cisco to their clients, and so on and so forth. That’s why there is still no estimate of this attack’s true scope.

This attack was seemingly only discovered when an employee at FireEye received an alert that their VPN credentials had been used from a new device, and a little digging revealed the much larger situation playing out.

This Wasn’t the Only Attack, Either

Another attack was also discovered on SolarWinds’ network when the company performed an internal audit of its systems. On December 18, a second malware was found to have used the same tactic to infiltrate SolarWinds, but as of this writing does not seem to come from the same source.

Lessons to Be Learned

Frankly, the most important lessons to be learned here are painfully obvious. First off, cybersecurity needs to be prioritized above all else, and all potential threats should be considered a likelihood. After all, the U.S. government was warned about the viability of exactly this kind of threat back in 2018 by the Government Accountability Office.

Secondly, the concept of your employees being a huge part of your cybersecurity strategy needs to be reinforced. This was only discovered when an employee was alerted of unusual activity and took that alert seriously. Your team needs to know what they are looking out for, and how to proceed if they spot it.

While we likely will not know how deeply this threat went for some time, you can at least be sure that Net Activity is here to help keep your IT as safe as possible. If you have any questions for us regarding your business’ technology, do not hesitate to give us a call at 216-503-5150.