7 Things Your Company Needs to Know for Your Business Continuity Plan

(To survive the WORST Disasters)

As we've grown our business and work with other local businesses, we've seen a greater need for disaster planning and business continuity

We've put together a very simple list of 7 things your company needs to consider when putting together your Business Continuity Plan.

We encourage you to use this guide as a cheat sheet, so that your business can be prepared for virtually any kind of disaster!

FREE Whitepaper: Five Benefits of Moving to the Cloud

Find out how cloud computing is helping small businesses get more while spending less.

Cloud computing has been disrupting the IT of small and medium-sized businesses. It’s crucial for business owners to understand what the cloud is and how it can affect the way you do business.

Who this whitepaper is for:

Business owners and executives looking to learn more about cloud computing, whether you need to understand how it can benefit your business or you aren’t sure where to start when it comes to implementing cloud solutions for your organization.

What you’ll learn:

• Exactly what the cloud means for SMBs.
• The three primary cloud service models.
• The four cloud deployment models.
• A breakdown of the top 5 most prominent benefits of the cloud.

We also encourage you to reach out to us directly for additional information specific to your business. We’re always happy to discuss the future of your business with you.

It is only too often that businesses, big and small, are targeted by a cyberattack and face unpleasant consequences as a result - and these consequences often lead to them having to close their doors for good. In order to keep your own business afloat, it is not enough to know that there are threats out there. You need to know what these threats look like, what they do, and most crucially, how to stop them.

Below are some of today’s most common threats to your cybersecurity.

Viruses

Quite possibly the best known of any cyberthreat, “virus” is a term describing a malicious program designed to replicate itself by altering the code of existing programs or files and inserting itself into them. Not all viruses will have the same impact on a system. Some will actively attack your computer, deleting files, while others just eat up its memory and cause frequent crashes.

One of your best defenses against a virus is to faithfully maintain the antivirus software that should be installed on each device.

Ransomware

Essentially, once your computer has been infected with this malware variant, your entire system is encrypted. The ransomware then displays a note informing the victim of what happened and instructions on how to pay the ransom through cryptocurrency, often with a deadline to do so before their files are deleted.

While these attacks have gotten trickier over time, your best bet is to avoid clicking unexpected attachments in your emails, especially those from an source you’ve never had contact with previously, and to maintain a discrete backup of your system (just in case).

Spyware

Spyware is another malware variant that has caused no small amount of trouble to many businesses, primarily in terms of data theft. This threat effectively allows a cybercriminal to monitor a system remotely, tracking keystrokes and viewing screens, as well as just generally being a nuisance. If your settings start changing themselves or you start getting pop-ups on your desktop, your computer is most likely infected.

Exercising caution about the things you click online and keeping your system updated and patched will help to keep your system free of peeping eyes.

Phishing

Phishing is the cyberthreat equivalent of the “got something on your shirt” trick, just with much worse consequences. Cybercriminals will pose as someone else, often someone you trust, to see if you will share confidential information, like login credentials. Once someone “takes the bait,” the hacker has what they need. The infamous Nigerian Prince scam is a rudimentary version of this, but there are much more convincing examples out there as well.

A bit of critical thinking will help to keep your business safe from these efforts, along with confirming any messages received through an alternative form of communication before trying to open any attachments.

With these threats (and many, many more) just waiting for the chance to infiltrate your systems, you can’t afford to be lax in your security in planning or in its execution. However, it may be challenging to determine just what it is that your business needs. That’s why Coleman Technologies is here.

How We Can Help

Not only can we review your current technology infrastructure to determine where its weak points and other vulnerabilities are, we can also supply you with the solutions to resolve them. We can also help train you and your staff on how you all can help prevent issues by recognizing their warning signs.

To learn more or to schedule a time for your consultation, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.

COLEMAN TECHNOLOGIES is the best place to maximize value for all your domain names. We work with ICANN accredited affiliates, and offer an unequalled service set for your domains which include many FREE OF CHARGE services with each domain name registration.

We accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover credit cards. All Domain Name pricing in US Dollars.

Click here for Domain Name Help Topics.

Your company’s culture is its identity - the impression that your company leaves when someone makes contact. As such, there are assorted reasons that it pays to create an engaging and inclusive company culture.

Draws in Talent

Let me ask you this: would you rather work someplace that had a reputation of nurturing incoming talent and ensuring that this talent had the resources and access that they needed to succeed in their position, or someplace notorious for leaving new employees to fend for themselves, providing minimal direction when direction is necessary to successfully complete a task? My money is on the first option.

One of the biggest benefits to creating a positive culture in the workplace is that more people will want to make it their place of work. This gives you a wider pool of talent from which to select the best candidates, creating a stronger business.

Of course, attracting this talent is one thing, having it stick around is quite another.

Retains Talent and Reduces Turnover

As long as your company culture matches its reputation, the individuals who accept your offer of employment are less likely to leave, barring any personal circumstances that force them to. This is important, as the sudden loss of an employee can have assorted impacts on your business. These impacts can include dropped processes, missed opportunities, and the costs associated with finding, hiring, and onboarding someone to replace the lost employee.

Of course, you don’t have to worry so much about these impacts if your employees aren’t motivated to leave. This is where having a positive company culture is so valuable - you can better avoid the significant costs of losing an employee, continuing to benefit from their skills in the workplace. Research conducted by Gallup indicated that only 37 percent of employees engaged with their work were actively seeking new employment opportunities, compared to a staggering (albeit understandable) 73 percent of those who had disengaged from their work.

Columbia University conducted research as well, and their results followed in the same vein. According to their results, organizations with strong company cultures saw turnover rates of 13.9 percent. 13.9 percent, compared to the 48.4 percent turnover rates at companies with poor company culture.

Boosts Productivity

A happy employee is a productive employee, which translates to direct benefits for your business if your employees remain satisfied. The right company culture can motivate your employees significantly.  The same Gallup research referenced above demonstrated that engaged employees saw productivity boosts of 21 percent. Another study, by IBM-owned Kenexa, suggested that organizations with an engaged workforce were able to bring in twice the income as an organization without these levels of engagement.

Reduces Employee Burnout

There are many reasons that an employee can experience some level of burnout, whether their schedules are overpacked or their hours are simply too long to be sustainable. However, a negative company culture is often overlooked as the root cause of an employee becoming disengaged with their work.

While employee burnout may seem like more of the employee’s problem at first consideration, there are some very real consequences that a business will need to deal with. For instance, employee burnout has been linked to an estimated 49 percent increase in workplace accidents, and a 60 percent increase in errors.

Stressed out employees are a liability to your company, but helping them to reduce that stress with a better company culture can turn these liabilities into true assets.

Better Attendance

Speaking of assets, your employees aren’t going to be very good ones if they are never in the office. A Harvard Business Review study reported an increase in employee absenteeism of 37 percent among disengaged employees. Naturally, if your employees aren’t completing their responsibilities due to this absenteeism, it is going to have an impact on both your business’ success and internal morale.

However, a more positive company culture encourages your employees to report to work, and as discussed above, leads to improved productivity while they’re there.

Is Company Culture Really So Important?

Based on the outcomes discussed above, it is pretty clear that the better your company culture is, the more effectively your business will be able to operate. So, how can you improve yours?

One way is to give your team the tools they need to complete their tasks more easily than they could with outdated and insufficient IT solutions - and the efficiency boost that new IT solutions will bring can free up some time to develop your company culture even more. Coleman Technologies can help to make sure that you are using the tools that are best suited for your company’s (and by extension, your employees’) needs. Give us a call at (604) 513-9428 to learn more.

Uses for the Cloud

No matter what your business needs, there is likely a cloud solution for it. Hosted VoIP and email are great communication tools. Infrastructure and Platform as a Service solutions empower organizations to leverage more flexible computing power. Software as a Service and hosted storage are available for all of your organization’s needs.

In the end, you can get just as much done with cloud infrastructure as you can with onsite hardware.

The cloud allows for functionality and redundancy, no matter what the industry is or the kind of workforce it contains. These services can be utilized as needed and deployed quickly.

The Drawbacks

Cloud computing isn’t perfect. Businesses can create a private cloud system that can create large costs for their bottom line while also maintaining the control, management, and accessibility… but again, a lot of thought needs to be invested into this kind of solution. Environments that are hosted outside of a service provider can be difficult to control, since your organization doesn’t have control over the hardware it’s hosted on.

A major drawback of cloud computing can actually be the cost. Since the IT infrastructure used to run the solutions is managed by the service provider, the price is adjusted accordingly. If your business needs a certain number of cloud licenses, you could see the cost of your solution rise. Plus, if you don’t cancel accounts when employees leave, you could be paying more for services that aren’t being utilized.

Furthermore, imagine if your organization has teams assembled that need to use three or four cloud-based applications to complete a project. Think about all of the money that’s spent just providing access to the appropriate software solutions. If it’s not properly managed, your return on investment could be put in jeopardy.

Coleman Technologies can help you keep track of your cloud-based resources, whether you’re just hitting the cloud environment, or you have an established presence in the cloud. To learn more about how we can help you manage cloud applications, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.

What Makes Spear Phishing Different?

As a rule, spear phishing is a much more precise and personalized process. To keep to the “fishing” analogy, a generalized phishing campaign casts a wide net, trying to snare as many victims as possible with their scam. Utilizing vague and generic language, the ‘typical’ phishing attack is made to appear to come from a large organization, informing the user of some need for the user to take action, resulting in the hacker gaining access to the user’s information. This methodology makes the typical phishing attack fairly effective against many people, while simultaneously easier to spot if one knows the warning signs.

By comparison, spear phishing is far more precise. Instead of trying to find value in the quantity of targets snared in a trap, spear phishing takes the opposite tack. Using a highly targeted approach, spear phishing attacks are directed toward a specific individual within an organization.

This specified approach means that the generic messages that many phishing attempts leverage simply won’t be enough to fool the intended target. Instead, the hacker has to play investigator, seeking out as much information as they can about their intended target. Where do they work? What is their position in the company? Who do they frequently communicate with? Once the hacker has collected enough information to create a convincing message, they will typically spoof an email to their target. This email will usually contain some reference to a known contact or some in-progress project to make it more convincing and will request that the recipient download a file via a provided link.

However, while the link will direct to what appears to be a Google Drive or Dropbox login page, it is just another layer to the deception. Entering credentials into this page will give them right to the hacker for their use, breaching the user’s security and putting the entire business at risk in one fell swoop.

What Methods Do Spear Phishers Use?

Due to how spear phishing works, the messages sent by hackers need to be as convincing as possible. Combining extensive research with some practical psychology, a hacker has more ammunition to power their attacks.

As mentioned above, spear phishing is far less generic than the average phishing attempt. By referencing specific people, things, and events that mean something to the target, or appearing to come from an internal authority (a manager, perhaps, or even the CEO), the hacker can create a message that is less likely to be questioned. If the hacker writes their messages without any spelling or grammatical errors, as many spear phishers do, it only becomes more convincing.

These hackers are so reliant upon their target being fooled; many will purchase domains that strongly resemble an official one. For instance, let’s say you owned the domain website-dot-com. If a hacker decided to pose as you to launch a spear phishing attack, they might purchase the domain vvebsite-dot-com. Without close inspection, the switch may not be noticed - especially if the hacker creates a good enough lookalike website.

Am I A Target?

Of course, the research that a hacker has to do to successfully pull off a spear phishing attack is extensive - not only do they have to identify their target, they also have to figure out the best way to scam this target. Generally speaking, a hacker seeking to leverage spear phishing will focus their efforts on anyone in an organization who could potentially access the information that the hacker wants but isn’t high up enough in the organization to question an assignment from above.

Or, in more certain terms, a business’ end users.

In order to minimize the chances that a spear phishing attack will be successful against your company, you need to make sure that everyone subscribes to a few best practices. For example:

• Pay attention to the finer details of an email. Is the message actually from This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., or does the email address actually read This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.? Did Christine/Kristine include any attachments? As these can be used to spread malware via email, you should avoid clicking on them unless you are certain the message is legitimate.
  
  
• Is the message written to sound overly urgent? Many phishing messages, especially spear phishing messages, will try to push an action by making it seem as though inaction will lead to a critical issue. Another warning sign to look out for: any deviation from standard operating procedures. Don’t be afraid to question a sudden switch from Google Drive to Dropbox - it may just be the question that stops a spear phishing attack.
  
  
• Speaking of questioning things, don’t hesitate to make sure that any messages you suspect may be spear phishing aren’t actually legitimate through some other means of communication. A quick phone call to the alleged sender will be well worth avoiding a data breach.
  
  

While spear phishing is a considerable threat to your business, it is far from the only thing you need to worry about. Coleman Technologies can help your business secure its IT solutions and optimize them for your use. To learn more, subscribe to our blog, and give us a call at (604) 513-9428.

Businesses usually have either an in-house IT department that can handle everyday maintenance and support, or they forego updates and support for only when operations cannot continue as they had previously been. While it might seem like a solid strategy, not paying for something that’s not needed until it is needed, the fact of the matter is that reaction-based IT maintenance and management is both risky and expensive. Furthermore, some companies rely on untrained employees to make sure maintenance and management occur as needed, but this is also a dangerous practice, as there is too much potential to botch necessary maintenance and ruin more than a little bit of infrastructure.

Events like hardware failures, hacking attacks, and software crashes are infinitely more common with organizations that take advantage of break-fix IT management. Furthermore, the facade of saving money is overshadowed by the crippling budgetary concerns that stem from downtime.

Even businesses that have an in-house IT department don’t have the luxury of providing organizations with IT support. They might be too busy implementing new solutions to bother answering questions. On the other hand, perhaps they are too weighed down by answering daily queries to worry about innovating and implementing new solutions at all.

Long story short, a help desk solution is designed to help your organization fill in the gaps that are left in the absence of a qualified IT technician. It can be used to supplement your current IT resources or act as a fully outsourced IT department that can perform all the roles traditionally allocated to this position. To learn more about how you can take advantage of a help desk solution, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.

Today’s world is driven by data. As a result, information systems have to be secured. That really is the bottom line. Business is all about relationships and without proper security protocols in place, there are some very serious situations that could completely decimate the relationships you’ve worked so hard to forge. While today’s hackers have a lot of different ways to breach an organization’s network, data breaches that occur as a result of lax security are unforgivable from a customer standpoint. Some organizations can spend more on security than others, but it with the landscape as it is today, it has to be a priority, no matter your IT budget.

Here are some of the regulations all business owners and IT administrators should know:

• GDPR: The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation is as comprehensive a data protection law as there is. Its aim is to protect the citizens of EU-member countries from data breaches. The GDPR applies to every organization that processes personal information of people residing in the EU.
• GPG13: Known as the Good Practice Guide 13, it is the U.K.’s general data protection regulation for organizations that do business in the U.K.
• HIPAA: The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act puts several guidelines on how patients’ data is shared and disseminated by insurers and health maintenance organizations.
• SOx - The Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires corporate records to be kept for seven years to ensure that there is transparency in the accounting. For IT this means being able to have access to data to run reports when called upon.
• PCI-DSS - Payment Card Index Data Security Standard are regulations enacted to try and reduce fraud by protecting an individual’s credit card information.

That’s just a few of the regulations business owners and IT administrators have to be cognizant of. For business owners there are several more, like the federal and state tax codes, and the adherence to the Affordable Care Act. All these regulations seem pretty straightforward and necessary until you begin to roll them out for your business. Then they just get expensive. In the first-ever Small Business Regulations Survey conducted by the National Small Business Association, the numbers reported, although not comprehensive by any means, weren’t pretty. To put it frankly, the cost to the small businesses that reported, would sink as many or more new businesses.

“The average small-business owner is spending at least $12,000 every year dealing with regulations,” NSBA President Todd McCracken said, “This has real-world implications: more than half of small businesses have held off on hiring a new employee due to regulatory burdens.” The report goes on to state that the average regulatory costs to start a new business venture add up to a whopping $83,019. These figures don’t take in to account the dozens of man hours each year spent on these very complex problems. It should be stated that the NSBA has been a long-standing advocate of reducing regulations on small businesses.

Regulators are paid to be skeptical, but overall they are put in place for a purpose, as oversight to ensure sustained adherence to data protection laws. How much can they demand from a small business? The question begs for analysis, as to listen to entrepreneurs talk about them regulations are unnecessary, but as stated before, these regulations aren’t just implemented willy-nilly. They have empirical evidence of immoral or unethical wrongdoing attached to them. Moreover, it becomes clear that the financial pain these entrepreneurs are in is indefinite, which means that it is highly debatable. The truth is that each scenario needs to be seen in perspective in order to understand just how much certain regulations are costing a business.

One thing is certain: that the average small business pays more for their regulatory compliance programs than larger businesses in the same market do. That disparity is a main point of contention for many small business owners, as it directly affects a company's ability to compete. Some studies have seen organizations that have less than 20 employees charged nearly 60 percent more than slightly larger businesses. Getting into which regulations are onerous and which are necessary would take an examination of each one in detail, so it’s worth it to repeat that these regulations were bred out of situations where individuals were hurt, making them an important part of the oversight process.

To Comply or Not To Comply? That Is the Question
Small business owners who have been reprimanded or fined as a result of a lack of regulatory awareness have a tendency to get the message, but if an organization is notoriously noncompliant and has slipped past regulators, there is a tendency for them to stay the course; and, that course is filled with nothing good. Many european and multinational corporations are expecting to invest $1 million toward their GDPR compliance. Obviously this figure, despite being higher per user, will be substantially lower for small and mid-sized businesses. The cost, however, remains significant, and while an organization could probably get around it for a bit, when it hits, it could just sink the whole business.

According to Infosecurity Magazine, the average cost of compliance with GDPR is costing enterprises and average of $5.5 million, which comes in about a third of the estimate cost of noncompliance, $14.82 million. That’s a lot of cheddar. It stands to reason that if you are going to spend upwards of 10 percent of your yearly IT budget on ensuring your organization is compliant, that you meet the criteria under the regulation. The best way to do that is by finding affordable solutions that won’t take as big of a chunk out of your operational budget every year.

More than the capital, a business that doesn’t adhere to simple IT regulations probably isn’t adhering to other regulations. Would you want to do business with someone that you know won’t do what’s asked of them to protect YOUR data? Unreputable businesses that are looking to gain an edge by not meeting regulations will pay later for not spending now, end of story.

Compliance and Your Business
Finally, we get to your business. How are you going to plan for your compliance burden? The best way is to educate yourself on what exactly your business needs to plan for by looking at the regulatory mandates, sure, but more often seeking out organizations who have already insulated themself from the risks associated from noncompliance. This is where a managed IT service provider (MSP) can be a godsend. Since we take security compliance extremely seriously, and deal with multiple businesses that represent several vertical markets, we have the perspective that can provide a clear strategy on how to avoid problems staying compliant.

Moreover, MSPs like Coleman Technologies use extremely sophisticated monitoring, management, and reporting software to reduce risk and put our clients in the best position to prepare for any audits or assessments that need to be completed by regulators. Since the regulatory landscape is constantly changing, our IT professionals are in a unique position to serve as both IT administrator and regulatory consultant.

If you are searching for a way to control your compliance situation, look no further than the IT professionals at Coleman Technologies. We can deploy our strategies made up from tried and true industry best practices to virtually eliminate any risk your organization would have as a result of compliance concerns. Call us at (604) 513-9428 today to get started.

The Word is Proactive

When something bad happens, you might look back to see what you could have done to prevent the issue from happening in the first place. The word to remember here is “proactive.” Being proactive requires risk assessment, which demands that you analyze the greatest possible threat to your continued existence and prepare for it. In the event that your business’ IT is unable to function as intended, your business would stop functioning. All it takes is a single component failing to leave your employees unable to do their jobs. This is why you need to be as proactive as possible--to ensure that you have plans in place for when your systems inevitably fail.

Proactive IT Maintenance

For the past decade, proactive IT maintenance has been making strides in the office environment. When one of the most important parts of running a business--your IT infrastructure--no longer works as intended, you lose out on profits and shell out for repairs more often. Furthermore, downtime can be a major cost that your business suffers from due to technology malfunctions. If you can keep your hardware operating properly, your network safe from threats, and your business productive, you can eliminate potential problems before they have time to escalate into the expensive kind.

Coleman Technologies’s proactive IT services provide your business with monitoring and management software. With our expert technicians behind these tools, you can rest easy knowing that we are monitoring each and every critical component of your technology for any telling inefficiencies. This gives you the opportunity to address them before downtime occurs.

Patch Management

Security troubles such as software vulnerabilities can also lead to problems for your business. If you can’t rely on your software tools to get the job done without issue, then you’re doing yourself a disservice. Furthermore, you will need the latest threat definitions and software patches to keep your solutions secure from threats that could derail productivity. A major part of our proactive maintenance platform is deploying patches as they are released, eliminating the chances of known vulnerabilities affecting operations.

For more information on how your organization can be more proactive with its IT maintenance, give Coleman Technologies a call at (604) 513-9428.

For this experiment, we’re going to assume that we are starting from scratch. The optimism and cautious excitement that goes into starting a new business endeavor is palpable. Let's assume for our purposes that you’ve determined that you need to support the following applications:

• Email
• Voice over Internet Protocol
• Line of business applications
• Productivity applications
• HR and operations software
• Storage (enough to support above)
• File sharing
• Backup

It’s not hard to ascertain the surface costs of implementing these technologies, but when trying to figure out the total cost of ownership, it may be a little more difficult. Objective comparison of the two platforms has to begin at their core needs. On one hand, In-house computing comes with several, including power, maintenance, management, and redundancy (and the management and maintenance of that platform), while cloud computing may need enhanced bandwidth and redundancy to work for a business. These costs have to be figured in when trying to plan your next steps.

Then there is the question of who is going to use your data, and what kind of protections need to be put in place as a result of that qualification. What compliance regulations does your organization have to meet? How many users does the network and infrastructure have to support? What software do you need to run? There are literally dozens of questions you have to ask before making any definitive decisions about what kind of hardware you are going to need, let alone what kind of hardware solutions you plan on using.

Once you’ve ironed out the particulars, you will then have to make the big choice. Do you want to buy physical hardware, cloud-based hardware, or some combination of both? Let’s analyze all three options:

In-House Computing

The first thing you have to be cognizant of is that once you decide that your organization needs in-house server infrastructure, you have to know that it is going to cost you a pretty penny. In order to support a full-scale communications solution, all the applications your business uses to do business, email, and backup you are looking at a seriously hefty price tag. Not only are you looking at a few thousand dollars per server, costs that are incurred in configuring the servers, warranties, and maintenance to that server could push the cost into untenable territory, especially if there isn’t a good deal of upfront capital available.

Beyond all that there are HVAC and security costs that need to addressed the first time around. The biggest expense, by far, is the cost of management. If you outsource your IT services management to a company like Coleman Technologies, you may be able to mitigate some of the recurring costs and get expert management, but ultimately the facts point to on-premise hardware rollouts costing a substantial amount more than utilizing cloud, especially with today’s IaaS costs.

Implementing an in-house server room does provide you with some pretty stark benefits, however. They include complete management over the systems within, the resulting comprehensive data security, and access to data without an Internet connection. It also front-loads the costs associated with the environment, so if the big capital expenses don’t cut into your operational budget considerations, you will be paying less per month. The infrastructure costs (which are fixed costs) and the management and maintenance of it, and operational costs (that are very often variable), all have to be taken into consideration, as does your organization’s regulatory compliance needs.

Cloud Computing

For the start-up that doesn’t have any overreaching data compliance issues, utilizing cloud computing is a no-brainer. Not only are there limited set up costs, there are so many different service-based computing plans that it is now possible to strictly use the cloud for all of your organization's central computing.

For the established company, it may be a little more difficult, so before we go “all hail the cloud!” on you, we have to admit that there are plenty of considerations you have to make if you were to go ahead with a completely virtualized computing infrastructure for your business. Here are a few:

• Migration Time and Cost: Getting started with cloud computing may not come with the enormous capital costs that an inhouse server would, but there is cost, especially if you are migrating data. For an established business to move from physical servers to cloud infrastructure there is a substantial investment. It takes a lot of bandwidth and time to move all if an organization’s data over, and in doing so, you will likely incur a fair amount of cost.
• Dependability and What Uptime Really Means: Cloud providers like to measure their effectiveness in uptime; and, in doing so, don’t properly represent what customers want from their cloud provider. Businesses need ubiquitous access to data and applications stored on a cloud construct, and sometimes that can be a problem. The VM running the server may be up, but if there isn’t access to critical information and applications, a business deals with their own downtime, which is a major problem.
• Problems Estimating Costs: The cloud’s cost to a business seems simple enough, but a lot of business owners do a poor job of estimating the true cost of the service. With cloud computing pricing costing businesses so many cents-per-service-unit, they often fail to multiply this cost over months and years. By moving the least utilized applications over first, a company can save more money than just moving it all over at once.
• Trusting Your Architect: Well before cloud implementation, a company would have a cloud architect make them a map (of sorts) so that decision makers can see how the data flows. A problem arises when you’ve trusted the plan and mid-implementation, the migration team wants to change everything. To avoid a complete cloud migration failure, your best bet is to consult with the architect to make certain that everything goes to plan.
• Cloud security: For companies that migrate over to the cloud, they will have to know beforehand that all of the solutions they had deployed to protect their systems from threats are probably not going to be deployed by the cloud provider. As a result, it may initially feel as if the cloud construct is lacking security. Hiring a third-party to test your security will go a long way toward alleviating (or reaffirming) the concerns you may have about your cloud’s security.

As costs go, it’s pretty evident after considering all the factors, that deploying new infrastructure is always going to be costly. An organization can save money by moving to the cloud as long as the migration is done properly and meets all the file sharing, data security, and deployment needs that an organization has. In fact, most organizations have some sort of cloud project on the books for this very reason. The benefits outweigh the detriments for a lot of what companies do.

The Hybrid Approach

Nowadays, the Hybrid Cloud approach is becoming more popular. As data regulations increase and legacy software is still mightily functional, the best option is often to deploy both a cloud platform and keep an on premise server. Essentially, finding ways for the two to work in unison is called a hybrid cloud. While this seems like a match for nearly every business, it comes with a great deal of design and implementation headaches, and can cause significant cost overruns.

In order to design and deploy an effective hybrid cloud, you first have to know what the potential pitfalls can be. Two include:

• Utilization uncertainty: When moving part of an organization’s data and infrastructure to the cloud, there should be a baseline of utilization that is acceptable. If you overplanned for cloud utilization, you could be looking a pretty hefty bill in the face for computing resources your organization will never use.
• Development costs: The two computing constructs often won’t “play nice” and as a result you may be looking at substantial development costs during the integration. These costs are variable and are difficult to plan for, so like everything else IT, plan to spend more than you will and you won’t be left disappointed.

To solve the challenges that come with significant hybrid cloud costs, many organizations will abandon the idea, but really it’s about simplifying the whole process. New strategies, practices, and products are being formed that will simplify the hybrid cloud process, while allowing an organization to get the most out of their IT infrastructure. It won’t be long before there will be hybrid cloud services that will marry the two ends into one secure and dynamic IT infrastructure. Until then, however, controlling your computing costs, no matter the platform, will take careful consideration and thoughtful planning.

At Coleman Technologies, we have years of experience designing, implementing, managing, and supporting powerful IT infrastructures for businesses of all sizes. To learn more about cloud computing, including hybrid cloud implementations, reach out to us today.

Downtime is Crushing

Any time your organization isn’t operating under normal circumstances (i.e. any time it’s simply not functioning, or functioning at a loss) can be considered downtime. This takes multiple forms, including employees unable to access critical software or data, the office being shut down due to a power outage, or even technology problems that result in devices not working as intended. Whatever the reason--and data loss disasters are a big one--you can bet that downtime has a considerable impact on both your wallet and your organization’s long-term sustainability.

Data Loss is Challenging

What a lot of businesses might not understand about data loss is that it equates to lost progress, or work that needs to be done over again. Think about it this way; your organization has to collect all the data again, assuming that there is no way to actually restore it. This is why so many businesses have a data backup and disaster recovery solution, as retracing your steps can be costly, time-consuming, and, quite frankly, a waste of time that could have been avoided with the proper foresight.

Considerable Fines for Security Risks

In many cases, a data disaster can involve a security breach, where personally identifiable information or sensitive corporate data can be stolen or exposed to danger. When this happens, certain industries that are supposed to adhere to various security thresholds may be subject to fines based on the specific types of data affected. It’s needless to say that this kind of disregard for security compliance can lead to crippling fines and legal repercussions.

In all of the above cases, having a data backup and disaster recovery solution from Coleman Technologies can offset the challenges and difficulties of operating at a loss. To learn more about the solutions we offer, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.

Today, many of the largest and most lucrative companies in the world, Google, Apple, AT&T, Amazon, Verizon, Facebook and Microsoft are all, more than manufacturers of computer-based goods and services, data brokers. These data brokers create services that they then sell to advertisers that allow them to target you based on the information these companies have of you, which can accurately tell how and what to sell you.

Since nearly everyone has a near-ubiquitously-connected experience there is a lot of data collected, bought, and sold every year and it’s big business. Facebook, a company whose main revenue stream is from selling advertising, made a net profit of nearly $16 billion in 2017. This tells us that if you have people’s data, you have people’s hopes, fears, and dreams, which means you can pretty easily get someone to pay you for access to that information.

For small businesses it’s much less lucrative. In fact, all the data your organization needs to keep, is probably necessary to simply do business, not to sell to advertisers. Facebook voluntarily gets a lot of personal information from every one of their users, as where the typical small business often has to strategize to just get a name and a phone number. The information that is sensitive (mostly customer information that you collect) has a lot of value to the people looking to steal it. So while you aren’t making billions of dollars selling consumer profiles, it is still a mightily important part of doing business, and needs to be secured.

Is Data a Commodity?
Technically speaking, it isn’t. Since a commodity’s value is based namely on its scarcity and the amount of capital that needs to be put up to create it, in both resources and labor, the data that is being purchased isn’t really a commodity. In lieu of the dissolution of the U.S. Net Neutrality laws, this has created the argument in the U.S. that since now it’s up to the telecommunication companies how they want to manage (or more accurately bill) data consumption, that they would throttle and tier service, something that isn’t possible with a true commodity, where there are laws prohibiting those types of practices.

On the other hand, Internet access is something that a majority of the commerce requires, and delivering data is in itself an expensive endeavor (infrastructure spending, development, utility costs, etc.) so telecoms, who are seeing their would-be profits syphoned by over-the-top content providers, and publicly demonized as a result of a very public lobbying effort to gain control of the ability to implement some sort of prioritization strategy, have to find a strategy to sustain their ability to get a workable return on their investments.

Securing Your Organization’s Data
Regardless of what your view of data is, it’s an important resource for your organization, and as mentioned above, it needs to be secured. For one of your company’s most important resources, data can be lost relatively easily, so there needs to be a concerted effort to keep your network and infrastructure free from the threats that could put your data at risk. At Coleman Technologies, that’s what we do. We ensure organizations like yours get the professional IT expertise you need to work efficiently, effectively, and securely in what is the most turbulent time in computing history. With the litany of threats your business faces everyday, you need experts that have your back. We offer:

• Backup and disaster recovery: With a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery system in place, all of your organization’s data is safe, redundant, and able to be restored on demand.
• Proactive monitoring and management: By keeping a dedicated eye on your network and infrastructure, our technicians can be proactive.
• Patch management: By keeping all of your organization’s software up to date with the latest threat definitions, you can ensure that your software isn’t going to be a problem.
• Access control and threat detection: By having full control over who can access what, and a complete view of the entire network, we can keep people who aren’t supposed to see certain information from accessing it.
• Training: Most times, your own staff is responsible for data breaches and malware. We can train you all on what to look for to ensure that you are doing your best to keep your network and infrastructure free from threats.
• Around the clock support: If three out of every four businesses deal with phishing emails, and over 95 percent of all phishing emails deliver ransomware, chances are that if a mistake were to be made, you will need immediate IT support. Our support and help desk can remediate a lot of your security issues to keep downtime to a minimum.

With data such a major part of doing business today, ensuring you have the right solutions and support in place to be confident that any situation you face will be managed before it becomes a problem is in itself a benefit. Call Coleman Technologies at (604) 513-9428 for more information.

Operations change over time. It’s likely that your business’ operations don’t even remotely resemble what they were in previous years. For example, mobile technology first became more popular for computing around the year 2013, and “unified communications” was a hot commodity in the business world. Nowadays, productivity and collaboration solutions using mobile devices are some of the most basic solutions out there.

Many organizations fall into the trap of believing their past successes guarantee their future, but this isn’t necessarily the case. The reverse could be true. Here are some questions to ask if you suspect that your organization could be falling into complacency:

• Are any potential changes or growth opportunities avoided or rebuffed through the use of highly selective facts?
• Do conversations amongst your team skirt around topics like new markets, possible competition, or other developing business opportunities?
• Are failures used to postpone new attempts instead of as learning moments?
• Do meetings frequently end in a holding pattern?

Any of the above questions indicate whether or not a business has gotten too comfortable, preventing them from making sound decisions. Thankfully, once you’ve identified this complacency, it becomes easy to resolve it. Try asking these questions about your business, its policies, and its culture:

• Is there any way that your processes could be made more efficient?
• Does your business plan reflect the goals that your business is currently striving for?
• Is your service offering a good fit for your current audience? What needs will they have in the near future?
• Are there any technologies that could soon cause a disruption in your market, or could be used as an invaluable tool?
• How engaged are your employees?

Answering these questions will give you all the ammunition you need to put together a solid understanding of what your business needs to do on both a local and industrial level. Of course, this can be challenging as well, as you might encounter issues that need to be resolved before you can make progress as a business.

Coleman Technologies can help your business implement IT solutions designed to keep your business running efficiently while still maintaining the status quo. To learn more, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.

Stay Organized Whenever Possible

Any business owner receives countless emails on a daily basis, and when they all collect in one place, they can quickly become overwhelming. The issue with this is that, when you have to focus on too many messages at once, it’s more likely that you’ll miss important messages, focus on the wrong tasks, or even respond to messages thinking they are different ones, creating some messy confusion. If you can’t determine what’s important in your inbox, how can you even be productive? We recommend placing filters on your inbox so that you can determine a message’s importance, sender, topic, and even more to navigate and sort your inbox in the most efficient way possible.

Allocate Time to Your Inbox

You should always set aside a specific amount of time every day to deal with the emails you receive. If you don’t, chances are that you will get sidetracked by a task and possibly miss out on responding to important emails. One thing to keep in mind when considering how quickly you should respond to emails is that messages that are the most important aren’t going to come in your email inbox. The ones that are critical will likely come in other forms, such as someone within your organization knocking on the door or giving you a phone call to make the issue known.

Use Alternative Communication Methods

If you find yourself stuck with a perpetually full inbox, perhaps you could benefit from sending or receiving fewer messages. If the message is short or a simple notification, perhaps it would be better to use alternative means of communication, such as an instant message. This is particularly great, as it cuts down on the back and forth required for a quick conversation, as well as takes the urgency out of a situation.

Make a Quick Phone Call

Sometimes a matter is too important to leave to an email. In cases like this, making a phone call is the most prudent. Furthermore, meeting in person can take this advantage one step further, as you eliminate the possibility of intent being misconstrued altogether, making it much easier to be as clear as possible.

To learn more about how you can eliminate the pains of email, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.

Need #1: Security

In order to be successful, a business needs to have the security necessary to protect its resources. The first step to accomplishing that, is to identify any weaknesses in its infrastructure through a preliminary IT evaluation known as an IT risk assessment. This assessment can reveal where a business is the most vulnerable. At that point, these flaws can be mitigated using tools like firewalls, antivirus, and multi-factor authentication - tools that either SMBs or enterprises can (and do) use.

With SMBs increasing their use of cloud services, a large portion of this process should be fulfilled by the cloud provider. However, the business leveraging the cloud provider needs to make sure that the provider they have selected is able to uphold what they have promised as part of their service-level agreement. If this is the case, the SMB could find themselves in the position to leverage enterprise-caliber security solutions, for a cost that fits their budget.

Need #2: Data Storage

While their budgets put enterprise businesses in a much more favorable position to create an infrastructure that can contend with their operational needs, this is not to say that SMBs are left without any options. Any good data storage solution will perform well based on a few benchmarks: how well it works, how often it works, how easily it can be accessed, and how easily its contents can be searched.

The enterprise business has quite a few options to leverage, such as data tiering (where data of differing importance is stored on different servers) and higher-performing data storage solutions. If this is starting to sound expensive, it is - but again, thanks to the cloud, SMBs aren’t left without options, either. With scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service being available for a much more affordable rate, SMBs are able to leverage the advanced tools that would otherwise only be available to corporate-level businesses.

Interested in leveraging some of these capabilities in your business, or want to find out more? Reach out to the professionals at Coleman Technologies! We have the experience necessary to bring your information technology to the corporate level. Reach out to us at (604) 513-9428 to learn more.

Before we go into depth about network and cybersecurity, we’d like to point out just why they are so important. You invest a lot of time and money into making your business what it is. You pay a lot of money for hardware, software, services, and time to give your business a chance to succeed. The act of protecting your business, its staff, vendors, and clients is one that should be taken seriously, because if any are compromised, your business is in trouble.

The Protection of Business Computing

Today’s business uses a computing infrastructure that is much larger and complex than most and includes considerations outside the physical confines of the network. Cloud services have become a very popular product for businesses and individuals alike. Cloud services are hosted in some other place, and by companies that have taken great diligence at securing their solution. For obvious reasons, you can’t guarantee that your cloud-hosted data is 100% secure, but logic suggests that a company offering computing services over the Internet would be in serious trouble if they were to have their security compromised.

These services all have dedicated access control systems that are designed to only let authorized users in. Some organizations also require their staff to utilize two-factor authentication to secure the solutions further.

This brings us to the perimeter of the network. Regardless of a company’s ineptitude with cybersecurity, there is typically some form of firewall that stands between the Internet and the company’s network. If the firewall is properly maintained with threat definitions, it will stop a good amount of unwanted traffic. It’s just not enough. With the immense amount of attack vectors threats are coming from nowadays, a stand-alone firewall is like a single sheet of flypaper in front of a window.

Going the Extra Mile

In order to keep their business’ data and infrastructure safe, many organizations have begun to utilize Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS). These systems include Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), software that attempts to block determined threats, and logs network traffic so that IT professionals can go in and see the current state of the network.

For years, this would have been enough technology to keep most threats out. Nowadays, however, it’s really just getting started being vigilant. If you consider your network to be like an onion, you need to understand that each layer needs to have its own set of security protocols that typically come in the form of a dedicated access control system and a firewall.  This way, every “layer” is protected from its perimeter, to the applications, to the databases that hold all your data. This tiered access control system is designed specifically for your needs and is in place to do one thing: protect your assets.

It also works to protect your business against the biggest digital threat on the Internet: phishing attacks.

A phishing attack is where someone outside your network tries to infiltrate it by passing off some form of correspondence as legitimate. It’s all a fraud. Verizon, who does an annual study of cybersecurity, found that around 90 percent of all network attacks are the result of successful phishing attacks. Unfortunately, there is no piece of software out there that will make phishing attacks completely benign. That is why training is so important.

Training Your Staff

Training your staff about phishing (and cybersecurity in general) has to be a priority. You’ve spent a lot of capital and time building what you have, and the thought of losing it because you bullheadedly forged ahead without getting your staff trained up properly could be thought of as shortsighted.

A phishing attack is now the preferred method of hacking. Since security systems have evolved to be hard to crack, hackers now look to use your staff’s legitimate credentials to gain access to your network, applications, and databases. By training your staff about phishing, specifically what to look for, how to react when they come across phishing attacks, and what the consequences of a phishing attack can mean for your company, you should be in a better position to protect your network, infrastructure, and data against the onslaught of outside phishing threats.

To learn more about how to secure your network, train your staff, and acquire the technology you need to protect your business, reach out to Coleman Technologies today at (604) 513-9428.

As with any applications on your device, you’ll have a variety of first and third-party applications that can be set as your default apps. Here are the steps to make this happen:

• Click the Windows icon at the bottom left-hand side of the taskbar.
• Click on the gear icon to open up your Settings.
• Select Apps.
• In the left-hand column, click on Default Apps.
• In the right-hand side of the Default Apps screen, you can see the various types of files that will be opened by specific apps.

Changing your default video playback settings is also easy to do. From the Video playback option in the Apps section, you can enable streaming content at high dynamic range quality, process video for more enhanced quality, play back video in either a high or low resolution based on preference, and change how video is played based on battery life. You can pick from prioritizing video quality or battery life--whichever you prefer.

Before making any changes to your computer, we recommend speaking with the technology professionals at Coleman Technologies. This prevents you from making any changes to hardware or software settings that could cause frustrations for you and your staff. To learn more about the services we provide, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.