Keeping your passwords safe with a password manager

by RITO Technologies | Dec 11, 2023 | New Normal

Keeping your passwords safe with a password manager

Did you know the most common used passwords for almost a decade have been “123456” and “password”? If you have been using passwords like this or keeping your passwords written on the side of your desk or saving them in a text file on your device – stop this immediately. We know how difficult it is to remember a password combination and even more so now that we have multiple applications, we require passwords for, but more so today we require complex unique passwords to protect our data.

What is a password manager?

A password manager offers convenience and, more importantly, helps you create better passwords, which makes your online existence less vulnerable to password-based attacks.

PC Mag says password managers are apps that generate new, random passwords for all the sites you visit. They store these credentials for you in a secure virtual vault. Then, when you visit a site or open an app where you need to log in, the password manager automatically fills in your login name and password for you.

Most password managers can also fill in your personal information, like name, address, and credit card number on web forms to save you time during account creation or checkout when making a purchase online. Some password managers can store your important documents or other credentials like safe codes and medical information in the vault, too.

Five good reasons why a password manager can help you

Passwords may seem a trivial protection method, but secure, frequently updated passwords are still an effective way to keep your data safe.

1. Never having to memorise another password
The main benefit of using a password manager to boost your cyber security is that you do not need to use the same password all the time or have a good memory to remember them all.

2. Use stronger passwords
Without having to remember passwords, you can now use complicated passwords by incorporating the latest recommendations for secure passwords, including using long phrases, symbols, punctuation, and capitalisation. Rather than using ones that come off the top of your head.

3. Use the same password manager across multiple devices
Many password managers provide access across multiple devices. As we use our mobile devices more often (and as more websites provide optimized mobile experiences), this is increasingly important. Many of the password managers also provide support for passwords for apps.

4. Simple access to multiple accounts
You can login to accounts easily. Once you sign up for a password manager, you can install a browser extension that will autofill logins for you while still storing them securely.

5. Share passwords securely
You can share passwords to joint accounts with family or co-workers. Of course, it’s not recommended you give away your personal passwords, but for shared accounts, a password manager gives you the option to control who has access to passwords.

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The Keeper password manager

Keeper is one of the most secure options on the market and keeps credentials, so confidential even the platform doesn’t know what your passwords are. The service can be as simple or complex as you want it to be, making it suitable for personal or business use.

As a leading and trusted cybersecurity leader, Keeper protects millions of people and thousands of companies globally. It is an easy-to-use platform that unifies critical components of identity and access management and enables zero-trust transformation.

The service also includes dark web monitoring and account takeover protection features so you can live your digital life stress-free. Keeper comes with an extensive knowledge library and comprehensive support.

Rito Technologies are ready to help you

We are an experienced IT partner that can help you maximise your business output with a reputable password manager. We enable our clients to optimise efficiencies with their IT Strategic Planning, which is guaranteed to increase your accessibility, productivity, and levels of communication with the right level of technology for business and potential customers.

With our free IT assessment, we can help you establish what VoIP system would be best suited for you. We can also identify areas for improvement as well as fill the gaps to present further opportunities for growth with an IT roadmap.

For more information about our IT assessment to help improve your company’s connectivity with VoIP, get in touch with us at info@rito-tech.co.za or call us on 010 213 7016 and we will gladly assist you.

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VoIP for small businesses is the way to grow

by RITO Technologies | Nov 20, 2023 | New Normal

VoIP for small businesses is the way to grow

Any business with a concern about efficient and cost-effective solutions for telecommunications has been informed that Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone systems are the best choice in today’s Internet-driven society. It also allows small businesses to scale, making it easier for them to grow.

What is VOIP?

The process works similarly to a regular phone, but VoIP uses an internet connection instead of a telephone connection.

VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) is a phone technology that allows you to make and receive phone calls using the internet instead of traditional phone lines.

Unlike landline phone systems that are limited to a single desk phone in your office, VoIP lets you make and receive business phone calls from your laptop, tablet, regular smart phone (using an App), and even VoIP compatible office phone sets.

Advantages of VOIP

Lower costs: The bottom line is vital for every business, large or small. So, you must consider every cost-saving opportunity. One-way companies can realise significant cost savings is by adopting a VoIP phone system

No physical limitations. If your business is on-the-go, VoIP services can be a tremendous benefit to you as it will follow you wherever you go.

Simplified equipment. Rather than having to run special wiring and install special equipment, companies that choose a cloud-hosted VoIP phone solution don’t need to purchase any equipment to set it up.

Improved scalability and flexibility: Another advantage of VoIP is higher scalability. Whether you’re hiring more staff or opening a new branch in a new city, VoIP makes it easy to grow.

Employees can work from anywhere with VoIP: Another game-changing benefit of VoIP is work flexibility. Once you modernise your phone system with internet-based calling, your staff can work from anywhere. That means your organisation can go fully remote or use a hybrid model, where some employees come into the office for at least part of the week.

Why VOIP for small businesses?

VoIP phone systems make good sense for small businesses. In fact, recent research shows that more than one-third of all businesses are now using a VoIP phone system, with the vast majority of those being businesses with fewer than fifty employees.

VoIP for small business continues to advance significantly in terms of voice clarity, so much so that it has become indistinguishable from more traditional phone conversations. The advancement of VoIP technology and its low cost make VoIP an ideal choice for small businesses, but businesses should still do their homework before committing.

Is it right for your business? With so many options and information available, we recommend you ask an expert to guide you through to make the right decision for you.

Rito Technologies are ready to help you

We are an experienced IT partner that can help you maximise your business output with VoIP. We enable our clients to optimise efficiencies with their IT Strategic Planning, which is guaranteed to increase your accessibility, productivity, and levels of communication with the right level of technology for business and potential customers.

With our free IT assessment, we can help you establish what VoIP system would be best suited for you. We can also identify areas for improvement as well as fill the gaps to present further opportunities for growth with an IT roadmap.

For more information about our IT assessment to help improve your company’s connectivity with VoIP, get in touch with us at info@rito-tech.co.za or call us on 010 213 7016 and we will gladly assist you.

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How secure are hybrid work models?

by RITO Technologies | Oct 26, 2023 | New Normal

How secure are hybrid work models?

By the end of this year, 39% of global knowledge workers will work hybrid. This number increased from 37% in 2022, according to Gartner. Given these numbers, it’s easy to understand that collaborative work, which is time spent working with your colleagues using digital tools (like email, IM, phone calls and video conferencing platforms), is increasing. Research shows that collaborative work rose by about 50% between 2011 and 2021 and now consumes 85% or more of our working weeks. But how secure is it?

How secure is hybrid?

Research suggests that 57% of workers prefer hybrid work, which not only improves their engagement, productivity, and well-being, but also causes security headaches for IT.

With employees accessing corporate resources from various locations and personal devices, the attack surface has become much broader, making it difficult for IT professionals to defend against security threats.

Balancing security and flexibility have certainly become a challenge for companies. However, with the right security solution, IT can provide employees with hassle-free access to the applications they need to get work done from anywhere, while preserving their experience and applying security policies and controls transparently in the background.

What do the studies say?

A recent study done by Citrix says that the threat level has increased with widespread remote work:

1. 74% of security decision makers claim information security procedures, systems and controls have become more complex due to widespread home working.

2. 73% of survey respondents agree that over the past 12 months, the volume of security events and data to process has increased significantly.

3. 73% of respondents believe information security teams must tolerate a higher level of acceptable risk in a hybrid, work-from-anywhere environment.

How can hybrid security be improved?

Hybrid work makes security measures more complex and increases the number of targets for attacks — making it even more difficult to protect. There is no way to change the shift towards the more flexible and convenient hybrid work model, so we have no choice but to strengthen our defense measures and monitoring systems.

Monitoring — an important security measure. According to Sapphire cyber security monitoring is the process of continuously assessing a company’s network to spot potential security risks and ensure secure data transfers. Being aware of dangers enables you to act before they occur.

Cyber monitoring gives you immediate access to illegal updates or suspicious activity on your network. Most companies hire IT pros to anticipate potential security risks and a wide range of data breaches.

Have you got an IT pro on your side?

With Rito-Technologies we can help set up a rigid IT security system with monitoring for your peace of mind.

We are an experienced IT partner that can help you maximise your business output through IT security with Windows 365, together with Microsoft Zero Trust. We enable our clients to optimise efficiencies with their IT Strategic Planning, which is guaranteed to increase your accessibility, productivity, and levels of communication with the right level of technology for business and potential customers.

With our free IT assessment, we can help you establish how you currently use IT in your business and the best IT solution for you. We can also identify areas for improvement as well as fill the gaps to present further opportunities for growth with an IT roadmap.

For more information about our IT assessment to help improve your company’s cyber security, get in touch with us at info@rito-tech.co.za or call us on 010 213 7016 and we will gladly assist you.

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How can SharePoint improve your company’s collaboration?

by RITO Technologies | Sep 21, 2023 | New Normal

How can SharePoint improve your company’s collaboration?

Are you still organising, sharing, and editing your company files on a clunky, outdated legacy system? Or are you tired of emailing documents back and forth to get approvals? If so, your team is not reaping the real benefits of being more productive with SharePoint.

What is SharePoint?

According to Microsoft, SharePoint is cloud-based service, hosted by Microsoft, for businesses of all sizes. Instead of installing and deploying SharePoint Server on-premises, any business can subscribe to a Microsoft 365 plan or to the standalone SharePoint Online service. Your employees can create sites to share documents and information with colleagues, partners, and customers.

SharePoint is a cloud-based solution that allows business users to share documents and manage projects. It enables authorised users to open, review, edit, and share documents worldwide.

How can SharePoint improve your companies collaboration

But what does this really mean? SharePoint is a content management platform that encourages collaboration among teams, regardless of where they are in the world. It allows you to manage all your corporate, create websites and company intranets to keep your users informed on what’s happening, create business processes to automate some of your more mundane tasks and build customised apps that can help your teams become more productive.

Consider SharePoint your own content management system that can revolutionise how your organisation communicates, collaborates, and operates.

What are the key benefits of SharePoint?

There are a number of benefits that SharePoint has to offer your company, but we have only unpacked some of the key benefits to you and your team:

1) Improved data management: Give access to data more efficiently, now employees can save data in a shared file that is accessible to anyone, whether they are sitting alongside you or at home.

2) Regulatory compliance and cyber security: If you only allow authorised users to access data, SharePoint allows users to specify security settings that comply with their specific compliance regulations at every checkpoint. You can also set storage and auditing policies and actions to take when business records expire. This helps your organisation maintain compliance, all while controlling and managing business-critical information effectively.

3) Increased productivity: Stop sending your employees down a rabbit hole to find a document, instead consolidate onto the SharePoint platform and organise each MS SharePoint site to include only the folders and subfolders you need.

4) Improved internal communications: SharePoint allows its users to create an intranet where they, their collaborators, and even freelance clients can work securely on a file or document. A centralised admin will control access so that each user can seamlessly open, edit, and save files.

5) Seamless integration: Not only can SharePoint online be accessed from any device, and allow you to collaborate with other team members, but SharePoint also integrates with Microsoft 365. By taking advantage of SharePoint’s ability to integrate with Microsoft 365, you can use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or other products right from within SharePoint online, or from other collaboration tools, like Microsoft Teams, Video, Stream, OneDrive.

SharePoint gives you access to building and managing your company today and in the future, with employees at the office and working remotely. It allows your team to stay organised and always connected in one unified place.

What is the difference between SharePoint and OneDrive?

While both SharePoint and OneDrive are Microsoft products that allow for document storage, they serve different purposes and have distinctive features. OneDrive is an online folder system for file storage, but SharePoint includes other features such as collaboration, CMS, and more.

OneDrive is designed for individual use, with each user having their own personal storage space. It is perfect for storing personal documents or files that aren’t meant to be shared with others.

SharePoint, on the other hand, is designed for collaboration. It allows for creating sites and sub-sites within an organisation where files can be stored, organised, and shared.

Is SharePoint difficult to use?

It was believed to be slow and difficult to use, but the platform has transformed immensely. The platform is more user-friendly, faster, mobile-responsive, and aligns with what users are used to on the web. Users no longer need to struggle with slow load speeds and unreasonable limits. SharePoint is now better integrated with other Office 365 services, such as Teams and MS Flow, making it an integral part of digital transformation and improved collaboration.

Stay organised and connected in one place with SharePoint & Rito-Technologies

With Rito-Technologies we can help you and your team set up Microsoft 365 and SharePoint to improve your companies collaboration.

We are an experienced IT partner that can help you maximise your business output through Microsoft 365 and SharePoint. We enable our clients to optimise efficiencies with their IT Strategic Planning, which is guaranteed to increase your accessibility, productivity, and levels of communication with the right level of technology for business and potential customers.

With our free IT assessment, we can help you establish how you currently use IT in your business and the best IT solution for you. We can also identify areas for improvement as well as fill the gaps to present further opportunities for growth with an IT roadmap.

For more information about our IT assessment to help improve your company’s collaboration, get in touch with us at info@rito-tech.co.za or call us on 010 213 7016 and we will gladly assist you.

Want to keep in touch?

If you’ve enjoyed reading this blog, then sign up to receive our monthly blogs. We promise that we won’t share your email address with other business or parties and keep your details safe. You can choose to unsubscribe at any time.

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How the POPI Act impacts business?

by RITO Technologies | Aug 24, 2023 | New Normal

How the POPI Act impacts business?

South Africa’s comprehensive Protection of Personal Information (POPI) Act is now in effect. It is one of the world’s most sweeping regulations around personal information and carries hefty fines for businesses that break the law. In short, the POPI Act outlines how businesses, websites and government departments can process the personal information of their customers or citizens.

What is the POPI Act?

The POPI Act is a comprehensive privacy law that is mandatory for all businesses within the private and public sector that process personal information in South Africa, according to Masthead. It seeks to protect and regulate the processing of personal information, falling into the broader Constitutional right to privacy.

It is critical that businesses establish and implement appropriate and reasonable technical and organisational security measures, and POPI related policies and procedures to maintain the confidentiality and integrity of personal information.

Data collection and utilisation is quickly becoming the foundation of organisational activities, and thus its management is gaining importance as time passes. Instacom says it is estimated that the Experian data leak alone affected twenty-four million South Africans and around 800,000 enterprises.

How to become POPIA compliant if you are not already?

This is a 10-point checklist to ensure you are POPIA compliant:

1)     Formalise your POPI Act compliance project
2)     Appoint an information officer within your organisation
3)     Perform a gap analysis versus the POPI Act
4)     Analyse what and how personal information is processed
5)     Implement POPI Act compliance policies that are enforceable
6)     Review and update your website
7)     Create (or update) your PAIA (Promotion of Access to Information Act) manual
8)     Implement POPIA compliant Personal Information (PI) management processes to develop reasonable and appropriate measures to ensure ongoing compliance
9)     Train stakeholders about their roles in POPI Act
10) Make the POPI Act compliance ‘business-as-usual’

This Act obviously holds significant implications for all businesses, in particular those that deal with personal information, such as banks, insurance companies, healthcare, schools, and online stores. Failure to comply with the laws can result in hefty penalties; fines up to R10-million and/or up to 10 years in jail. This is why it is vital for companies to be aware of the Act and ensure that they follow the regulations properly.

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The benefits of POPIA compliance for business

Complying with the POPI Act can bring several benefits for South African businesses, including enhanced data security, improved customer trust and loyalty, and reduced legal and financial risks. POPIA compliance can also help businesses avoid reputational damage resulting from data breaches and ensure they are prepared for future changes in data protection regulations.

But one of the biggest benefits, it will instil a culture of data security and data protection, making the protection of personal information within your business or organisation, your “usual way” of going about your tasks. Change in processes is sometimes difficult to achieve when staff insist on doing things the way they have always done, but the risk of a data breach and the possible flood of negative media that usually follow should inspire the management teams of businesses and organisations to action.

Protect your data, protect your customer – protect your business

With Rito-Technologies we can help you and your team set up the required security to help protect your data, your customer, and your business.

We are an experienced IT partner that can help you maximise your business output through a well-thought-out data security solution. They enable their clients to optimise efficiencies with their IT Strategic Planning, which is guaranteed to increase your accessibility, productivity, and levels of communication with the right level of technology for business and potential customers.

With our free IT assessment, we can help you establish how you currently use IT in your business and data security solution is best suited to you. We can also identify areas for improvement as well as fill the gaps to present further opportunities for growth with an IT roadmap.

For more information about our IT assessment to help protect your business, get in touch with us at info@rito-tech.co.za or call us on 010 213 7016 and we will gladly assist you.

Want to keep in touch?

If you’ve enjoyed reading this blog, then sign up to receive our monthly blogs. We promise that we won’t share your email address with other business or parties and keep your details safe. You can choose to unsubscribe at any time.

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