Managed Service Provider Blog Articles and Best Practices

Email is a core component to many businesses. With 124.5 billion business emails being sent and received each day, that doesn’t seem to be in danger of ending. Are the emails that are coming and going from your business secure? That may be another story, altogether. In order to keep your email security at a premium, we have outlined the following tips:

Using Filters
Filters make a lot of things easier to manage and easier to interact with, but since your employees have to stay on top of their company email, having some pretty easy-to-use solutions is important. Spam-blocking can go a long way toward reducing the amount of unimportant emails each employee sees, and a dedicated antivirus software can keep malware and other nefarious entities off of your network.

Be Smarter with Your Email
No spam filter or antivirus will do it all. In order to achieve the best results with securing your email, users have to be well-versed in the best practices of email management. The most important qualification any person can make when trying to secure their personal email from hackers is to ensure that they have the knowledge of what a phishing email might look like; and to make sure that the business’ network security is up to snuff.

Here are few tips to keep your email secure.

• Know what a legitimate email looks like. For every email sent from a vendor or partner, there are two sent that are there to trick end-users.
• If you aren’t going to take the time to encrypt your email, don’t put any potentially sensitive information within the email. This goes for heath, financial, or personal information.
• The less people who have your email address, the more secure your email is going to be. Teach your employees to not give out their email addresses if they can help it.
• The email solution needs to be secured behind solid passwords, and/or biometrics. Two-factor authentication can also be a good solution to secure an email against intrusion.

End Your Session
There are circumstances that people can’t control, so if you absolutely have to use a publicly-accessible device to access your email, you have to make certain that you log out of the email client and device you access your email on. After you log out, you’ll want to clear the cache. Many browsers and operating systems today want to save your password for user convenience. Better to use a password manager than allow the most public points of your workstation to save your credentials.

MSPNetworks can help you set up an email security policy that will work to ensure that your employees are trained, and you have the solutions you need to keep any sensitive emails away from prying eyes. Call us today at (516) 403-9001 to learn more.

What are your chances of being hacked, or targeted by some kind of cyberattack? I hate to tell you this, but they’re probably a lot higher than you might think.

For instance, despite almost 90 percent of small business owners believing they’re safe, about half of all small businesses will suffer from a catastrophic cyber-attack.

Are you at risk of being part of the unfortunate half?

Fortunately, there is a lot that you can do to help reduce the chances that a cyberattack will successfully target you. This is a really good thing - not only will a hack damage your relationships with everyone involved with your business, half of the businesses that are attacked close up shop within six months.

I’ve seen it happen far too often to businesses that just weren’t prepared.

Here, I’ve compiled a few tips to help you improve the basics of your cybersecurity, reducing your risk of a successful attack:

• Updates - We know how annoying those update notifications can be, but it is important to remember that the vast majority of them are meant to improve security in one way, shape, or form. Therefore, you should prioritize these updates whenever possible. It may prevent an attack from victimizing you.
• Involve Your Employees - The unfortunate reality is that your employees can be the biggest vulnerability your business has. Properly educating them in cybersecurity best practices and holding them to these standards will help reduce the chances that one of them will inadvertently let in a threat. Training them in various security best practices and explaining why certain requirements are in place will help to motivate them to participate for the company’s benefit.
• Limit Access - On the other side of the coin, the less an employee has access to, the fewer chances there are that one of them leaves you vulnerable in some way. The same can be said of your clients - regardless of how much someone is trusted, you shouldn’t allow them privileges beyond their role. Whether its role-specific resources, data, or other information, employees should be given individual login credentials to make assigning privileges easier. Your business Wi-Fi should also remain separate from the Wi-Fi made available to clients.
• Backup, Backup, and Backup Again - If, despite all your preparations, you are still infiltrated, you want to have an extra copy of all of your important data somewhere else, safe and sound. This backup copy would ideally be stored offsite and securely encrypted.

As it happens, MSPNetworks is able to help you out with all of these measures, and many more.

If you want some added help with these cybersecurity basics, or want to do more to protect your operations, you can always lean on us. MSPNetworks is committed to ensuring that your technology allows your business to operate better, improved security being a major part of that goal. Reach out by calling us at (516) 403-9001.