MSPNetworks Blog

How often do you find yourself stressing out about who has access to which data or internal resources on your company network? What about who has access to open the front door of your office or who has access to important physical resources within your building? Ensuring the security of your business’ assets is critical, and access control tools can help your company ensure that only authorized individuals have access to specific parts of your organization’s infrastructure, be it physical or digital.

What is Access Control?

Access control is, at its core, a way to restrict access to specific resources within your company based on user or role. It generally involves authorization of some sort and demands that the user verify their identity before being granted access to said resources. Think about it like asking the network for permission before being allowed onto it; once the network or infrastructure has confirmed the identity of the individual, they will have access to the resources.

Access control can be broken up into two groups: digital or cyber access control and physical access control. We’ll go over some of the benefits for both types of access control and how they can help your business keep itself safe.

Cyber Access Control

Your business undoubtedly has data on its infrastructure that should only be accessed by specific individuals and no one else. This might include sensitive employee data, applications or resources, financial records, and so on. You should be limiting access to important information like this specifically because the fewer people who have access to it, the less likely it will be compromised. Through access control tools, you can control which employees have access to specific data, applications, or resources on your network, based on their role within your organization.

Physical Access Control

Sometimes you want to keep certain users out of specific parts of your office. This is where physical access control comes into play. Physical access control might involve key cards, code-guarded doors, and even biometric scanners, with the intention of securing various parts of your office. One example of how you might use it is if you have sensitive records stored in a specific part of your office. You might keep that door locked, only accessible to specific individuals within your organization. Another example might be an access gate open only to employees of your business.

Get Started Today

MSPNetworks knows how complex it can be to implement new security solutions, especially if they require a certain level of management and maintenance, like access control systems do. We want to help your business take advantage of these solutions in a way that minimizes the additional duties and responsibilities of your organization. Through MSPNetworks, you can implement, manage, and maintain these systems without dedicating your internal resources to them; instead, you can outsource the responsibility to us! Our technicians are more than happy to assist you each step of the way.

To learn more, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

Data security isn’t the easiest thing in the world to plan for, especially if your organization doesn’t have any dedicated security professionals on-hand. While protecting your data with traditional methods, like passwords, firewalls, and antivirus, is important, what measures are you taking to make sure a thief or hacker isn’t just walking into your office and making off with your technology?

While smartphones and tablets can help businesses quite a bit, they can also be quite detrimental to their success. If you can get past the issues related to employees bringing their own devices to the workplace, then you’ll be able to save a considerable amount of time and resources on device procurement, but you certainly want to make sure you have a mobile device management policy put in place first.

Mobile Device Management in a Nutshell
Mobile Device Management, or MDM, allows your employees to use their mobile devices for work purposes, but without the many risks associated with doing so. It does this by using encryption, giving an administrator control over who accesses what information based on pre-established roles and permissions. This basically gives your employees the freedom to use their devices for work purposes, minus the frustration that it causes for you. This keeps your data as secure as possible while maintaining employee freedoms. Businesses that have a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy generally take advantage of MDM as part of it.

What MDM Allows
MDM allows for several benefits that are great for businesses looking to save money and keep their devices secure:

• Cost Effectiveness: The fewer devices you have to purchase for your employees, the more you’ll save in procurement. If you go the route of BYOD, an MDM can alleviate some of your concerns regarding this.
• Management Capabilities: MDM gives your business the ability to oversee the security of any employee device, even remotely. This can help to make sure that a device doesn’t bring a threat home to the network unknowingly. It also gives your administrators the ability to make sure work-related applications are installed and configured properly. Admins also have the power to block any distrust worthy apps or users, as well as remotely wipe any lost BYOD devices to keep them from being used to access company data.
• Improved Compliance: Some industries have specific standards that must be met in order to avoid repercussions or comeuppance. MDM solutions are all about maintaining compliance with these standards. This gives businesses an advantage if they ever encounter a data breach.

To learn more about how MSPNetworks can help you with MDM, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

Wireless Internet access for a user’s devices isn’t just a luxury these days--it’s expected. If the Wi-Fi drops out for any reason at all, chaos strikes, rendering any ability to stream content or access the Internet a moot point. This is particularly the case for businesses that have technology solutions reliant on wireless access. How can you make sure your wireless network is as strong and reliable as possible?

A More Flexible Workplace
Take a moment to reflect on the devices used by your business. If it’s like more modern offices, you have employees using mobile devices or laptops more often than you see them using their desktop workstations. Employees simply like to have their options open in the office, and a strong wireless connection helps to make this possible. If you give your organization’s employees the ability to get work done on their own terms, you can empower them to be more productive with their time in the workplace.

Uptime is Maximized
Losing an Internet signal isn’t just annoying--it can be a major detriment to your organization’s success. Any situation when your business isn’t functioning as it’s supposed to be can be considered downtime, and it can be a major setback for any organization hoping to improve their bottom line. Think about it this way: if your business’ employees can’t work because the Internet is down, and they are still in the office waiting for it to return, then you’re paying them to do nothing--not exactly the most effective use of your operational funds. Ensuring a strong connection can reduce this risk considerably.

Distance from the Router Won’t Matter (As Much)
Sometimes an office is so big that it needs multiple wireless routers to ensure all employees have access to the network. Therefore, a solid connection can go a long way toward minimizing the influence that your office’s setup has on your employees’ Internet connection. There are issues that can get in the way and cause interference, but if your connection is strong thanks to a solid wireless router, you won’t have to worry as much about it.

To find out how MSPNetworks can help your business maintain a steady wireless connection, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

There is always going to be user error in the workplace. Even the best workers make mistakes sometimes. You naturally want to reduce these occurrences as often as possible, but for the purposes of training and whatnot, you want to assume the worst: that any worker, even the most dedicated veteran, could potentially make a business-ending mistake. Thankfully, there are ways you can make sure this doesn’t happen for your business.

Here are three tips for reducing human error in the workplace.

Provide Proper Training
Surprisingly enough, if you train your employees properly, you won’t have to worry about them making mistakes; at least, not as much as you would under untrained circumstances. You should take care to properly outline all of your processes in a way that’s easy to understand, including both intensive and routine tasks, as well as having an established workflow for reporting issues or identifying security problems with spam or phishing emails.

Limit User Permissions
Not all users will need the same permissions on their devices. For example, an IT administrator might need admin permissions, but the average user won’t. The same can be said for access to specific data on your network. You should partition off certain information to only those departments that might need it so you can avoid an access issue with other employees. Basically, the fewer permissions a user has on their device or network, the less harm can come of it in the event a hacker manages to sneak their way in.

Use Your Collective Workforce to “Crowdsource” for Quality
We’re sure you’ve heard the phrase “two heads are better than one,” and you’ll be interested to hear that the same phrase can be applied to the workplace. If you have a large project that could use an extra pair of eyes, why not ask your coworkers for a quick glance? It might help putting out a project with glaring errors that you might not notice because you’ve been staring at it for a few weeks straight. You can think of this process as beta testing in a way, as you can determine potential problems with a product before it is actually released to the public. This can prevent a loss of profit from a product or service that’s not ready to be released can bring if it’s thrown out into the world too soon.

If your business wants to cut out the dangers of human error in the workplace, MSPNetworks can help. To learn more, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

It can be easy, with all the threats covered in the news, to assume that the biggest dangers to your business all come from the outside. This is a dangerous mistake, as there are plenty of vulnerabilities that originate from within your organization, making it easier for outside threats to come in, if not being bigger threats in and of themselves. Below, we’ll review some of the biggest, mostly internal dangers that your business may face.

Internal Fraud
You may be closer to some scammers than you would have originally thought. It unfortunately isn’t that uncommon for the employees of a business to steal from it, whether its finances or invaluable data. While you will want to be able to trust your employees, as you should, you also need to be realistic and accept that you may inadvertently hire a few bad eggs. This reality means that you need to have measures in place to keep data inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t need it through access control and other solutions.

Excessive Access
On a similar note, your endpoints themselves should be secured against threats, as these devices could easily leave your business vulnerable if no security measures are put in place. Whether an employee leaves their phone on the counter when they pick up their lunch, or someone sneaks into the office and accesses an unattended workstation, your endpoints themselves need a defense of their own to protect your data.

Insecure Applications
If your business is anything like most, you rely on a variety of applications in order to keep it in operation from day-to-day. While these pieces of software are crucial to your productivity, applications developed by third parties or used by a cloud provider may not be as secure as you would prefer. You need to be selective as you settle on solutions to leverage, or you’ll risk your data being compromised.

Human Error and Mismanagement
Finally, we come to one of the biggest issues that any business has: the fact that it has people working for it. Human error and insufficient management of your IT can create some of the most serious issues and enable more to take root. Without an experienced resource to help protect your network, it is left susceptible to threats. On top of this, there is a long history of simple mistakes leading to IT catastrophes to consider as well. While some errors will ultimately be unavoidable, you should impress upon your employees how important it truly is to focus on their work and review everything they do for mistakes.

With a combination of the right solutions and some old-fashioned vigilance, you can help to keep your business safe and secure against the many threats out there. MSPNetworks can assist you - call (516) 403-9001 to learn about what we can do for you.

For the modern small business owner, there are situations that you are forced to deal with that are frustrating; but, in the course of doing business would be considered normal. Then there are other situations that arise where, every step of the way, the figurative floor falls out from under your feet and you are forced to react quickly. Some of these circumstances can be pretty spooky for your business. This Halloween, we’ve decided to outline three scary circumstances your business may have to deal with, and how to keep your cool.

The Walking, Talking Dead
Unfortunately, employees sometimes do things that force a business owner or manager to terminate his/her employment contract. Other employees leave if they have problems with management or find better opportunities elsewhere. Unfortunately for the business, a clean break may not be possible, and a disgruntled former employee can make things extremely difficult for your business.

One way that a former employee can virtually haunt your business is through the use of social media. If it was a rough break, a former employee can slander your business on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as social media designed for employer reviews like LinkedIn and the anonymous review site, Glassdoor. This may be nothing more than a hindrance, and typically no one is going to pay a solitary source much mind, but if multiple complaints of the same nature start popping up on social media, you might spook the high-end talent out of considering working with your business.

Residing Evil
Another way former employees can hurt your business, is if you let them. When they leave, you have to remember to ensure that any account authorization they had access to is deleted. There have been cases where former employees will make their way onto their former company’s infrastructure or network and corrupt things, either manually or with the help of malware.

Typically, those who would go ahead and effectively hack their former employers’ systems, know what they are looking for, and use this access to make it more difficult for a company’s business to run efficiently. As long as your IT administrators have a plan on how to remove former users and do so immediately after the employee is let go, this may not be much of an issue.

Some former employees have deliberately built in a way into a network away from the procedural protocols outlined by IT administrators. In these cases, a full network audit is necessary to ensure that any trace of the worker is removed promptly. Any other result keeps the potential for jaded former employees to do some pretty disgusting things to your company’s network.

Trick or Treating
While some former employees want to take it out on their former employer, some former employees will want to steal company data, client data, or intellectual property. In fact, in one study done by security experts Symantec, data showed that nearly half of all fired employees had kept some sort of confidential corporate information. While this may not be a massive deal, 40 percent of them planned on using that data at a new job.

While organizations may not be able to completely avoid this from happening, there are some courses of action that can be taken to ensure that this data isn’t used against their own company. Make every employee sign, and enforce, a non-compete agreement, while also utilizing access control systems to ensure the people who don’t need certain information, don’t have access to said information. Giving people fewer chances to make off with data is a great way to keep people from taking it in the first place.

Business can be scary sometimes, and the last thing you need is for your bottom line to be hacked and slashed because of your former employees. At MSPNetworks, we can help you protect your data and network from all manners of threats; and; help make sure that former employees don’t haunt you long after their gone. To learn exactly how we can help you, call us today at (516) 403-9001.