Back to Basics

by | Sep 22, 2021 | New Normal

Back to basics with IT support

IT is imperative in the modern business environment, but not everyone has basic IT support. Whether from lack of availability or less capital to invest, some organisations lose out when it comes to a dedicated IT support team, whether it is on-site or remote support.

Why IT Support is Essential

Cybersecurity threats continue to grow. A significant increase in the number of reported incidents has occurred since March of this year. Hackers believe more vulnerabilities are exposed as people move from a secure office network to a remote location without adequate security.

Downtime is also costly, but with properly monitored systems, equipment failures can be identified and replaced before they fail and or if they do fail, your data or information is securely backed up.

Finding the right IT service and support provider can go a long way to protecting your digital assets and helping your bottom line. Knowing that your system is being monitored can bring you peace of mind.

 Book a free assessment to see if you are ready to outsource your IT support?

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But when do you outsource?

If any of these look familiar to you, then it is time to start outsourcing your IT support:

  • You’ve noticed a decrease in company efficiency
  • Security problems are higher in frequency and are difficult to resolve
  • Your bottom line is getting hurt from the various problems your business is encountering
  • You don’t have enough IT staff to cover all issues, and your experts are handling small problems
  • Customer support is not resolving problems fast enough or at all
  • You don’t have an effective recovery plan in case of lost data
  • You don’t have the financial resources to invest in new cybersecurity infrastructure, which is hampering company performance

The advantages to outsourcing

  1. Cost Savings and Control
    One of the most surprising benefits to IT outsourcing is that it can actually save you money! In-house IT teams can be very expensive to hire and train and may not be used efficiently, as the IT workload can be quite variable. Outsourcing your IT to a managed service provider gives you the support you need when you need it, and you only pay for the services you use. Ultimately, this can save your business money and help you budget more effectively.
  1. Increased Efficiency
    A managed service provider knows how to help your business run more efficiently. By helping you redesign workflows, automate tasks, and upgrade equipment, you can have state-of-the-art technology to help you run more efficiently and keep up with your peers and competitors.
  1. Experts and Experience
    An in-house IT team only sees the problems that have already arisen in your business. When you use IT outsourcing, you are hiring experts that see a wide variety of IT problems every day.
    This means when a new problem arises, they already know how to fix it for you quickly and at lower costs. The IT professionals at a managed service provider are constantly undergoing training in the latest technology to provide you the best service available.
  1. Support your Business Goals
    Your company has limited resources. When you are forced to spend time and energy making IT decisions on complex systems, you are being taken away from the goals of your business. IT outsourcing allows you to focus on what you want for your business, while your managed service provider supplies the IT support you need to get it.
  1. Security Enhancements
    Cyber security is an extremely important topic. Your network has vulnerabilities you must protect against. IT outsourcing allows you to tap into the extensive knowledge of experts trained in this topic to provide you with security solutions that will work for your business. Your managed service provider can help keep your software and security up to date for your protection.
  1. Maintain Compliance
    Today, many industries have compliance standards that must be met. Without additional support, it can be easy to fall out of compliance, which can cost your business significantly. IT outsourcing lets you focus on doing the work, while your managed service provider helps you implement strategies to maintain compliance for your industry regulations.
  1. Be Competitive
    If you have a small- or medium-sized business, you simply do not have the same range of resources that larger corporations enjoy. However, IT outsourcing lets you have the same level of expertise, equipment, and support as these larger companies. This allows you to keep up with the bigger companies, while providing the excellent customer experience your clients expect.

Book a free assessment to see if you are ready to outsource your IT support?

Book a free assessment

To be prepared takes a clear action plan, backed by a good IT strategy. 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 IT support solutions, please get in touch with us at info@rito-tech.co.za and we will gladly assist you.

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Cybersecurity continues to progress

Cybersecurity continues to progress

by | Aug 23, 2021 | New Normal

Cybersecurity continues to progress

Cybersecurity:

the practice of protecting critical systems and sensitive information from digital attacks from inside or outside an organisation, continues to progress at the same rate as other technologies because of the constant emergence of new threats. 

Malicious hackers attempting to gain unauthorised access to data would not give up quickly, and they will continue to find ways to avoid even the most stringent protection measures.

Scaling up your security

Cyber-attacks are increasing in frequency, sophistication, and impact, with perpetrators continually refining their efforts to compromise systems, networks, and information. 

Many companies need security management as a service because if your organisation gets breached, the losses you’ll incur go beyond money. Indeed, you can recover financially, but it’s harder to recover from the reputational loss. Since 60% of small companies that suffer attacks end up collapsing within six months, you can’t afford to ignore cybersecurity.

Likewise, clients will only consider your products and services if the security of the data they share with you is guaranteed.

Book a free assessment

The different types of threats to be aware of:

  1. Malware: The term “malware” refers to malicious software variants—such as worms, viruses, Trojans, and spyware—that provide unauthorised access or cause damage to a computer. Malware attacks are increasingly “fileless” and designed to get around familiar detection methods, such as antivirus tools, that scan for malicious file attachments.
  2. Ransomware: A type of malware that locks down files, data, or systems, and threatens to erase or destroy the data – or make private or sensitive data to the public – unless a ransom is paid to the cybercriminals who launched the attack. Recent ransomware attacks have targeted state and local governments, which are easier to breach than organisations and under pressure to pay ransoms to restore applications and websites on which citizens rely.
  3. Phishing / social engineering: Phishing is a form of social engineering that tricks users into providing their sensitive information. In phishing scams, emails or text messages appear to be from a legitimate company asking for sensitive information, such as credit card data or login information.
  4. Insider threats: Current or former employees, business partners, contractors, or anyone who has had access to systems or networks in the past can be considered an insider threat if they abuse their access permissions. Insider threats can be invisible to traditional security solutions like firewalls and intrusion detection systems, which focus on external threats.
  5. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks: A DDoS attack attempts to crash a server, website, or network by overloading it with traffic, usually from multiple coordinated systems. DDoS attacks overwhelm enterprise networks via the simple network management protocol (SNMP), used for modems, printers, switches, routers, and servers.
Book a free assessment

To be prepared takes a clear action plan, backed by a good IT strategy. 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 cyber security planning, please get in touch with us at info@rito-tech.co.za and we will gladly assist you.

If you enjoyed reading this blog and would like to receive future blogs, please register here now.

How safe is your back-up?

How safe is your back-up?

by | Jul 29, 2021 | New Normal

How safe is your back-up?

Computers use drives to store your data.

The constant reading and writing of data will eventually lead to drive failure, due to mechanical failure or drive degradation, usually without warning. 

There are also other situations which may result in data loss, such as power failures, system or file corruption, viruses, ransomware, or malware attacks. It is therefore important to store a copy of your data somewhere else – as a safety net or form of redundancy.

5 Benefits why you need a back-up:

1. Client Relationship: Saved information improves client relationship management, which leads to increased marketing and sales. Additionally, saved client information builds trust and value of a company.

2. Archiving: Backed up information streamlines the development of archives. Archived files lead to comparative studies of the past and present to devise a more effective plan.

3. Competitive Gain: Saved company data can be a competitive advantage because there are many businesses that fail backup important information.

4. Improved Productivity: With existing backed up files, companies improve productivity by reducing wasted time.

5. No Wasted Time: Data backup reduces ‘wasted time’ by preventing repetitions. Thus, employees do not have to rewrite reports.

Where should your back-up data go?

There are a number of choices to consider based on the data that is being back up, including the size of the backups, setup complexity, portability and security requirements, budget, and whether it must be an on-site or offsite backup.

1. External hard drives– One of the most common storage mediums, external drives, are easy to setup, relatively cheap, provide multiple storage size options, are portable and are usually large enough to store a lot of data. But also have the risk of being damaged or stolen.

2. USB flash drives–They are good for transporting data between locations efficiently. However, they are also prone to being lost or stolen, have a low storage capacity, and certain higher-end models are more expensive.

3. Disc media (CD/DVD-Rom)– Burnable disc media is a dying storage medium, although there are still some people who use them. They are cheap, portable, and can be used for offsite storage. However, they have limited storage capacity, a short shelf life and are considerably slower than hard/flash drives.

4. Cloud Backup– Storing your data in the cloud is the latest trend in backup technology. Data stored on cloud services are always accessible from any internet-connected device. Cloud storage is offsite, so it keeps your data safe from disasters.

5. FTP/FTPS/SFTP– Like cloud storage, FTP is an offsite storage solution and may be a solid and reliable option to consider if available.

Data backups are among the most important infrastructure components in any organisation because they help guard against data loss. Backups provide a way of restoring deleted files or recovering a file when it is accidentally overwritten.

To be prepared takes a clear action plan, backed by a good IT strategy.

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 back-up solutions, please get in touch with us at info@rito-tech.co.za and we will gladly assist you.

If you enjoyed reading this blog and would like to receive future blogs, please register here now.

Home office security

by | Jun 23, 2021 | New Normal

Home Office Security

As remote working is on the rise again, it does make the home office more vulnerable. Even though there are many ways to prevent cyberattacks, from using multifactor authentication to encrypting your data, it is key that the relevant ‘best practices’ are considered for both the employer and employee.

Best practices for the employees

1.       Implement multifactor authentication

Multifactor authentication grants access to the device and all software after the employee provides more than one form of identification. 

2.       Use strong passwords

Physical devices aren’t your only concern. If a hacker tries to access any sensitive accounts, you want to make it as difficult as possible for them to log in. Using a password manager is a great precaution, as it ensures you are only using strong passwords, like those with special characters, numbers, upper and lowercase letters, etc.

3.       Invest in antivirus software

Your employer may provide a recommended application for a company-issued device, but if you use your personal laptop for work, you need to keep your system protected.

4.       Don’t allow family members to use your work devices

The computer you work on is only for you, it’s not the family computer. So, it is not advisable you allow your children to access your computer to play games on or watch movies.

5.       Follow company policies

Your company likely has clear policies for accessing the company network outside the office. Report any suspicious behaviour to IT immediately.

6.       Use a centralised, company-approved storage solution

This becomes especially important when you’re saving and backing up files. You should store all your work data in a secure location that’s both approved by and accessible to your company, like a cloud-based storage option.

Best practices for the employers 

  1. Improve employee security awareness through internal communication and training.
  2. Inform employees about the incident handling procedures and ensure their cooperation, as the risk is shifted outside the company.
  3. Require that employees use a non-stored password to connect to the network, especially for VPN access.
  4. Limit program/file access to only those areas that are absolutely needed by that employee.
  5. Reserve the right to terminate employee access at any moment.
  6. Provide services for remote file storage and other tasks; don’t rely on individuals to use their personal programs and accounts to store your company’s data.

Leading the company in these difficult times requires a clear action plan, backed by a good IT strategy. 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 cyber security planning, please get in touch with us at info@rito-tech.co.za and we will gladly assist you.

If you enjoyed reading this blog and would like to receive future blogs, please register here now.