Growth is exciting. More clients. More staff. More revenue. More opportunity.

But growth also puts pressure on something many businesses overlook:

The business world is always buzzing about which collaboration platform is the best. There certainly are quite a lot of options to choose from. But one particularly useful solution stands out: Microsoft Teams. And it’s included totally free with Microsoft365 or Office365.

Microsoft Teams is a persistent chat-based collaboration platform complete with document sharing, online meetings, and many more extremely useful features for business communications. Having an excellent team space is key to being able to make creative decisions and communicate with one another. Shared workspace software makes this much easier to achieve, especially if a particular team is based in a very large company, has many remote employees, or is made up of a significant amount of team members.

Let’s look at some of the features

Teams and channels. Teams are made up of channels, which are conversation boards between teammates.

Conversations within channels and teams. All team members can view and add to different conversations in the General channel and can use an @ function to invite other members to different conversations.

A chat function. The basic chat function is commonly found within most collaboration apps and can take place between teams, groups, and individuals.

Document storage in SharePoint. Every team who uses Microsoft Teams will have a site in SharePoint Online, which will contain a default document library folder. All files shared across all conversations will automatically save to this folder. Permissions and security options can also be customised for sensitive information.

Online video calling and screen sharing. Enjoy seamless and fast video calls to employees within your business or clients outside your business. A good video call feature is great to have on a collaboration platform. One can also enjoy simple and fast desktop sharing for technical assistance and multi-user real-time collaboration.

Online meetings. This feature can help enhance your communications, company-wide meetings, and even training with an online meetings function that can host up to 10,000 users. Online meetings can include anyone outside or inside a business. This feature also includes a scheduling aid, a note-taking app, file uploading, and in-meeting chat messaging.

Audio conferencing. This is a feature you won’t find in many collaboration platforms. With audio conferencing, anyone can join an online meeting via phone. With a dial-in number that spans hundreds of cities, even users that are on the go can participate with no internet required. Note this requires additional licensing.

Our final thoughts, what benefits does Teams have to offer?

1.      Teams streamlines work and saves time: As Microsoft’s “hub for teamwork”, Microsoft Teams brings together chat, calls, meetings, Microsoft 365 apps, and third-party tools in one centralised location.

2.      Teams hosts more effective video meetings: Videoconferencing has become a mainstay of life during the pandemic, and improved video meetings are one of the many benefits of Microsoft Teams for distributed work.

3.      Teams helps you collaborate seamlessly: Leveraging Microsoft Teams collaboration capabilities enables you to move beyond transactional messages and meetings and focus on the flow of work.

4.      Teams makes conversations and connections more meaningful: People in a distributed workforce still crave human connection. A host of new Microsoft Teams features make interactions more natural, engaging, and fun.

5.      Teams keeps everyone informed: Now more than ever, it’s vital for businesses to keep employees informed and on the same page—wherever they work. Integrated Teams apps help you communicate more effectively with employees.

With the most recent attack on Virgin Active, it is important to ask the question: How secure is your business?

In most instances, you think you are safer than you are, because cybercriminals are forever changing, but your technologies remain the same! Rather ask yourself, when last did you conduct a risk or cyber assessment on your business?

With cyber security, companies do not have to worry about unauthorised users accessing their network or data. It helps them protect both their employees and their customers. 

When it comes to your business security, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Most likely the trusty old firewall. In the event of a successful cyberattack, most victimised organisations will raise the question: “Why wasn’t our firewall able to protect us?”

Are firewalls enough?

Unfortunately, security threats are constantly evolving and are designed to circumvent common and basic security tools, such as firewalls. As a result of The Internet of Things (IoT) and increase in remote working as a result of the digital age and the most recent COVID-19 pandemic, nearly any smart device from phones, laptops, printers, tablets and televisions can be connected to the business network – creating an access point for cyber criminals.

Your firewall is pretty good at protecting your office network. After all, that’s what it was designed to do. But what happens when an employee accesses their email or files from their phone? What about when they connect to the WiFi at a restaurant? Your network security is only as strong as its weakest link. You could have the strongest, most expensive security system on your laptop, but it won’t do you any good if an attacker sets up a fake WiFi hotspot and intercepts all the data.

Firewalls are primarily used to prevent attacks originating from outside the system. What if a threat makes it past the firewall or originates from the network itself?

Firewalls are also extremely limited in their capacity to prevent phishing, scams, ransomware and much more in addition to just typical malware. Some of these rely on tricking a user into taking a desired action like surrendering confidential information or disabling a firewall or antivirus. Unfortunately, firewalls can’t stop human errors or fix poor administrative practices and security policies. Firewalls need to be consistently updated. New threats arise every day and if firewalls aren’t updated, they may not protect you from the latest threat.

Traditional network security, like firewalls doesn’t extend to the mobile-first, multi-device reality that we live in today. Massive hikes in web traffic, constantly evolving threats and other dangers are not easily detected. Firewalls are a reactive method as you can only protect devices after threats have been detected.

For more information about our IT Strategic Planning or our cyber security planning, please get in touch with us at info@rito-tech.co.za and we will gladly assist you.

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A good hosting partner is essential so your brand can offer a quality service to the public.

Hosting can be used for many applications, such as systems, virtual stores, blogs, and websites, with advantages ranging from better performance to greater security.

The advantages of good hosting include

Better site performance: With high-quality hosting, loading speeds will no longer be an issue which will also ensure a better customer experience (CX) in making a decision on your website.

Exceptional technical support: If you have been providing services or products from a website, you already know the importance of offering customer support. The hosting company also knows that. If you don’t have the technical skills, your provider will be like a member of your technical team.

Improved website security: A good host will take preventative measures in order to limit risk of privacy violations, provided through firewalls and other electronic barriers between your website and those attempting to access your website with malicious intent.

Customer Service: When your website goes down, it becomes an inevitability that you will be forced to get to know the customer service team of your hosting platform, but the difference between good and bad hosts becomes how quickly the issue is resolved.

Reliability: Your website is the first point of access to your customers, and in this sense, you want to provide a good first impression. People don’t notice when your website is good, but they surely recognize when it is bad. If your website is frequently down, has been hacked, or proves to be less than user-friendly, they will likely take their business to a competitor.

Search engine rankings & SEO: If your website is down often when search engines are trying to visit and analyse it, then your ranking will be badly affected. Alongside the downtime affects, it is believed that a slow site can also harm your rank on search engines. So, it is in your best interest to invest in professional website hosting platforms in order to ensure you get accurate and the best possible search engine rankings.

The more complex your websites, the more important it is to have a competent and reliable web host who can support your evolving online business. In many instances, the best web hosting solution is not the cheapest, but your small investment in a better web host can pay big dividends when you need immediate support. When shopping for the best web host for your websites, try contacting their support departments at odd hours and see what kinds of responses you get. 

If you’re not familiar with it, web hosting can seem overwhelming, with a number of different companies seemingly offering the ‘same’ thing. But what it all really boils down to is simple: what you need from your website, and what the uptime looks like. If a web host can’t handle these basic requirements, you need to find one that can!

In today’s ‘instant-gratification’ world of the internet, clients don’t want to experience websites that are simply too slow for them or even worse, a website that is down, because you simply wont get another chance with that prospect client. Rito-Technologies is an IT business partner who maximises business output through technology. They enable their clients to be secure 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.

For more information about our IT Strategic Planning or our website hosting packages, please get in touch with us at info@rito-tech.co.za and we will gladly assist you.

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