Coleman Technologies Blog

Business Automation

As businesses have strict cost considerations to take into account, it is likely that automation will grow in popularity. While perhaps more expensive to initially implement, automated solutions can easily provide a return on investment by clearing schedules of the annoying (if necessary) repetitive tasks that otherwise eat up your human employees’ time. This combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence is known as Robotic Process Automation and enables businesses to greatly reduce how often human employees need to interfere in these tasks.

Some professionals have been hesitant to invest in AI-driven solutions, primarily due to incomplete algorithms and the negative opinion towards “replacing human jobs with robots.” However, artificial intelligence has seen some success in reducing HR costs through its inclusion in some software, and so RPA is experiencing considerable growth.

Furthermore, many of the solutions available today can be used in more simple applications, including the improvement of communications, reducing process inefficiency, and eliminating redundancy.

The Internet of Things

“Smart” devices are quickly becoming the new norm, even in the business environment. Many establishments are directing their budgets toward devices meant to improve security, evaluate utility usage, manage supply chains, and other operations.

The prevailing motivation behind implementing and integrating these devices is simple: better cost control. If a business has the tools to track and manage their costs, the entirety of the business can be better optimized. When fewer resources are expended on a business’ crucial interactions and processes, the business inherently becomes more sustainable.

Various Cloud Services

While it may seem like there has been ample time to take advantage of every aspect of the cloud’s capabilities, new services and utilities are still emerging. Sure, most businesses have adopted the cloud to support their email and file sharing needs, but this is the relative tip of the iceberg as far as the cloud’s potential is concerned. Businesses can now consider options like Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Security as a Service (SECaaS), and even AI as a Service (AIaaS), confident in the reliability of these increasingly popular utilities and others.

Cloud vendors are also creating new services to see to a business’ needs. The largest cloud vendors can effectively fill any requirement a business has through increasingly specific services. As a result, SMBs definitely have options to help resolve their operational hurdles.

Cybersecurity Awareness

At this point, there is plenty of precedent to establish -- without any doubt -- that businesses of every size, industry, and resource level need to have a cybersecurity strategy in place. While many may argue that enterprise-grade security solutions are above their means, the aforementioned precedent makes this argument untenable. 66 percent of all SMBs were targeted by some kind of cyberattack in 2019, and 2020 is already projected to be just as bad, if not worse.

Fortunately, there are ways that a business can improve their cybersecurity preparedness, such as:

• Staff training - It is a simple concept: the more able your employees are to spot and properly handle a potential cyberattack (like phishing), the less likely your organization is to be victimized. Security has improved greatly, thanks to methods like encryption, rendering your employees your most vulnerable point. Properly training your staff to identify and report suspected threats, the safer your network will be.
• Threat intelligence - If you know how you are most likely to be attacked, based on the vulnerabilities that cybercriminals usually target, you will be better prepared to handle these attacks. Think of this as the practical application of “knowledge is power.”
• Multi-layering - With all the potential security issues that businesses face today, businesses of all sizes need to have a strategy in place to reduce all risks that face them. Therefore, all businesses and especially small businesses, need to have redundant file backup, DNS protection strategies, and AI/machine learning-enabled security features in place.

Improved Mobility

For the past decade, businesses have struggled with mobilizing their workforce. As a result, with today’s emphasis on remote work and other mobility-related concerns, solutions that enable a mobile workforce while eliminating risk have increased in importance. Now, increased connectivity, improved data security, and data protection policies like Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) allow your operations to be completed from inside and outside of your workplace, with resources safely delivered to your employees as they need them.

Coleman Technologies can help businesses around British Columbia adopt these approaches, or improve their use of them, to assist their operations and boost profitable productivity. To learn more, give us a call at (604) 513-9428.

What Exactly Is Phishing?

The practice of phishing is not new. It has been used for much of the past decade. The strategy goes like this: hackers use deception to get a user to provide their own credentials, thus giving them unknowingly to the hacker. The hacker then accesses the account legitimately (as the user) and has free reign over the entire account. Sometimes they will go in and siphon data and sometimes they will hijack the entire account, but regardless of the hacker’s intentions a successful phishing attack is a successful transfer of power over an account. 

What’s worse is that you can get phished in multiple mediums. Email is the predominant channel where phishing attacks are carried out, but people can (and do) get phished over social media, instant message, or via text message. There are even phone-based or snail mail phishing attacks that direct users to go to a fake website where they would provide their credentials and/or personal information. 

There are even different forms of phishing based on their intended targets. The general strategy behind traditional phishing attacks is to send emails out to as many people as possible, hoping to snare unwitting recipients into their phishing nets. Today, with more personal information available about people, there is phishing that targets individual people. This is called a spear phishing attack. Then there are spear phishing attacks that are carried out against business and organizational leaders. These are called whaling attacks. The intended imagery aside, phishing attacks are getting more direct, more deceitful, and more serious. 

Spotting Phishing

For all of the bad news surrounding phishing attacks, there is some undeniably good news: with a critical eye, you can tell when you are being phished. You aren’t going to fall for these types of attacks if you know what to look for. Today, we’ve put together a short guide on how to determine if you are dealing with a phishing attack and how to proceed when you are.

Look for Warning Signs

There are a litany of warning signs that will help you spot a phishing attack. Most of them are pretty obvious, and some of the more subdued ones come with telltale signs. 

Does the message have spelling and grammar mistakes? 

Not many businesses will send out official correspondence with grammar and spelling mistakes. This should be the first sign that something is amiss. Most phishing messages come from supposedly-reputable organizations and while a spelling or grammar mistake does happen from time-to-time, several mistakes won’t happen.  

Does the message deal with curious circumstances? 

One of the biggest telltale signs that you are dealing with a phishing attack is the tone of the message that is received. Does the message reference immediate situations that need to be remedied? Does it mention money or illicit a sense of fear or anxiety? If it has these elements, it’s probably not legitimate. Think about it: most organizations that need you to act immediately will have specific ways of contacting you and that correspondence will make it clear that you are dealing with a legitimate organization.

Does this message have a trusted URL?

Most phishing attacks will redirect to a website that is set up by the hacker. You probably shouldn’t be clicking on any links sent to you in an email unless you are sure who sent the email. One way to determine whether or not a link is from a reputable source is to mouse over the link and see where the link goes. If you get an email from Amazon and the link goes to amazorn.com, you are staring at a phishing email.

Protecting Your Assets

There are a couple simple ways to ensure that you or a member of your staff doesn’t fall for phishing attacks:

• Use technology. A spam blocking filter on your email will go a long way towards removing unnecessary and potentially-malicious emails from hitting employee inboxes in the first place.
  
  
• Training. Make sure your employees are trained to spot and properly handle attempts that may come through. By starting with the end user, you’re taking away a lot of the power that phishing has.

At Coleman Technologies, we appreciate the importance of secure workplace practices. If you’d like to learn more about phishing, and how we can help stop it from hurting your business, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.

What is Social Engineering?

Think of it like this: online, you have some type of social currency. Your personal information, your data, your interactions, your profiles, they all add up to your online life. If someone were to use that information to trick you into providing them access to your secure online accounts, you would be the victim of a social engineering attack. 

Basically, a hacker uses what amounts to the fundamentals of human psychology to gain unauthorized access to an account. Rather than exploiting a vulnerability within a system’s technology, a social engineer will take advantage of the human resources to gain access through relatively simple psychology.

Successful social engineering can be the result of many different actions. Some include: carelessness by an individual, perceived kindness, reaction to fear, and business as usual. Let’s take a look at these actions and how social engineering schemes work as a result.

Individual Carelessness

When there is a lack of diligence carried out by an individual, there are openings for a social engineering attack. This includes trash thrown out with information on it, keeping login credentials out in the open, and other careless actions. It’s important that you and your staff understand that the best practices of password protection, such as using a password manager, are crucial to maintaining the integrity of your company’s network and infrastructure.

Perceived Kindness

Many people won’t think twice about helping someone that asks for help. Social engineering attackers take advantage of the better angels of our nature, by using people’s helpfulness to gain access to secure computing resources. Any person can fall for this type of attack. This is why we stress that in order to keep your digital and physical resources secure, a critical eye for potential intrusion works. That doesn’t mean you have to be a jerk, but if a situation is presented to you that’s out of the ordinary, take anyone’s helplessness with a grain of salt.

Business as Usual

When we picture a hacker, we all tend to think about them the same way. They are brooding people sitting in a dark room typing away at a computer. In social engineering attacks, this couldn’t be further from the truth. A popular social engineering tactic is to gain physical access to a large business--where there are often a lot of moving parts--and then spend time at the business looking for ways into secure digital environments. This could also include straight hatchet jobs, where your employees would help people outside of your business sabotage your access control systems. 

Reaction to Fear

Finally, fear is one of the best motivators. By striking fast and threatening all types of negative consequences if a worker doesn’t help them get into a secure computing system, this kind of cyberattack can be a major problem. 

Coleman Technologies Can Help Protect Your Business

If you are looking to secure your network from cyberattacks, including social engineering, the IT professionals at Coleman Technologies can help. Call us today at (604) 513-9428 to learn more about how we can help you with the training you need to keep social engineering from causing problems for you.

Depending on their needs, businesses might have a series of consumer-grade printers, or they may rely on a centralized network copier/printer. Regardless of how you go about using the printers at your business, ensuring they are managed centrally will help a business cut down on problems. 

You Can Manage and Control the Expenses Tied to Printing

Many businesses don’t manage their printers at all. As ink/toner prices continue to climb, this can produce major, pointless costs. That’s why some businesses have begun to push a paperless strategy, using digital means to store, search, share, and back up organizational files. This strategy, while coming with substantial costs, takes the guesswork out of the whole process.

Reducing the amount that your users print can really make a difference over time. In a recent industry survey conducted by Xerox, it was found that 64 percent of small businesses aren’t tracking their printer usage costs. The report also revealed that nearly half of companies believe that their employees were just printing out their emails. 

Printer Management is Worth Investing In

To avoid the waste that comes with this type of behavior, a small business can deploy tools used to control, report, on, and restrict printer usage. Since every business has different uses and requirements, using a permissions-based system allows for centralized management over your printers.

Additionally, by having a print management platform in place, those endpoints are patched, updated, and protected against threats. There have been many cases over the last couple years where cybercriminals have utilized office printers as an entry-point for spreading malware or breaching data. These types of exploits can cost your business a lot more than another ream of paper or toner cartridge.

Going Paperless May Be Right for You

For some organizations, it may be worth it to reduce your printing costs by going paperless. Going completely digital means that documents can be searched, copied, organized, and shared securely, and backed up without requiring paper, toner, or bulky filing cabinets. Today, even contracts can be shared and signed digitally without a single sheet of paper being used.

Would you like to learn more about paperless office solutions? Contact us today at (604) 513-9428.

For context, it helps to know that Microsoft OneDrive is a cloud storage platform that just about any business could make use of, regardless of its size. After all, any size of business will have to remain organized.

Speaking of which, our first tip covers how OneDrive can make this organization super convenient for you.

OneDrive Files On-Demand

Files On-Demand gives your users the ability to effectively link their File Explorer to OneDrive, which enables them to work with files found in your OneDrive without downloading all of them to their device. Not only does this save real estate in the device’s storage, it allows work to continue offline through a simple proactive switch in a particular file’s settings.

Known Folder Move

OneDrive can also work as a simple backup option, although it certainly should not replace a comprehensive plan. Regardless, Known Folder Move allows users to have the contents of certain folders automatically synchronize with their OneDrive storage. This can be set up during the initial installation of OneDrive, or at any time you have need for it.

Integration with Microsoft Outlook

Consider what typically happens when you try to share some kind of Office document as an email attachment for someone to work on: you aren’t sending them access to your file, you’re simply sending them their own copy. OneDrive fixes that by enabling a user to share their files as though they were attachments, editing the permissions provided on the fly. As a result, the actual file is being collaborated on, really allowing work to be done.

What has been your experience using OneDrive? Share your impressions, as well as any other questions we can help with, in the comments!